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| Director: Georges Méliès Length: 15:36 minutes |
Georges Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon” is one of the most
famous movies ever made, not just from the silent era but of all time. Somehow I think I’ve known about this movie since
before I even knew that silent films were ever a thing—maybe it was a Jules
Verne documentary I watched as a kid or something. The point is, everybody knows "Trip to the Moon". It doesn’t matter if you know nothing about
silent movies and have no idea who D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, or Buster
Keaton are, everybody knows the image of the Moon getting shot in the
eye. And if you don’t, shame on you!
Méliès stars as an eccentric astronomer (who IMdB tells me
is named “Professor Barbenfouillis”) who tries to convince a posse of stuffy
scientists (dressed like wizards) of the feasibility of his plan for traveling
to the Moon: build the world’s largest
cannon, and fire a shell at it loaded with passengers. By Denis, it’s so crazy it just might work! He wins them over, and they’re all loaded up
and shot to the Moon.
It’s not until they crash land on the Moon, though, that things
really start to get weird. Have you ever
seen that Looney Tunes short, “Dough for the Do-Do” a.k.a. “Porky in Wackyland”? It's kinda like that, in how unadulteratedly bonkers it is. The sky changes from the Earth rising to
several scenes of space stuff while the scientists doze away. They wake up when it starts snowing, venture
into a cave where the Professor’s umbrella turns into a giant mushroom, and are
met by prancing moonlings.
These guys would be the worst emissaries for humanity ever,
by the way. For example, when the merry band of protagonists encounter their first moonling-- the very first contact with extraterrestrial life-- their first reaction is to whack it with their canes. The moonlings don’t take kindly to this, and reinforcements come and
capture the Professor and his gang, bringing him before the King of the
Moonlings. And the first thing Prof.
Barbenfouillis does when they meet the King, is to run up to the throne, grab him, and throw him onto the ground. Maybe it's a French thing.
They finally escape from the moonlings, and return to Earth by falling
off the Moon. Yes, they fall from the Moon back to Earth. Admit it, you would have never thought of
that.
The frame in this one is back to being cluttered, like it
was in “Joan of Arc”, but fortunately the color-tinting is back as well. If some scenes of “Joan of Arc” resembled a
medieval woodcut, then the opening to “A Trip to the Moon”—featuring the
interior of the astronomical society or wherever it was—reminded me of one of
those lithographs showing Copernicus’ or Brahe’s laboratory. Impossible to say what visual aesthetic
influenced the lunar scenes, though... except maybe a fever dream.
The version I watched was from a color-tinted copy recovered
in 1993, which they spent carefully restoring from 1999 to 2010. Eleven years spent to restore a
fifteen-minute film... that work must have been maddeningly meticulous. I’m glad I’m just finding out about this a
couple years after it was restored, so that I don’t have to wait, and when you
can watch the whole thing on Youtube. This movie really is kind of awesome
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