A Trip to the Moon 1902

The story

At a meeting of the Astronomy Club, Professor Barbenfouillis proposes a trip to the Moon. After some shouting, five of his colleagues agree to go with him. A capsule shaped like a bullet is built and a giant cannon is cast. A chorus line of sailor girls loads the capsule and fires it. The Moon, which has a face, sees it coming too late and takes it in the eye.

On the Moon the travellers watch the Earth rise and lie down to sleep under a sky of stars with faces, with Saturn leaning out of his ring and the goddess Phoebe on her crescent. Snow wakes them. In a cave of giant mushrooms they meet the Selenites, the Moon's inhabitants, who burst in a puff of smoke when struck with an umbrella. Captured and dragged before the Selenite king, the professor picks the king up and throws him down. Another puff of smoke.

They run for the capsule. Barbenfouillis pulls it off the edge of a cliff by a rope and it falls, with one Selenite clinging to it, all the way to the sea on Earth. A ship tows it home. The film ends with a parade and a statue of the professor, an ending that was missing from the best-known print for most of the twentieth century.

Where it came from

Asked years later, Méliès named Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon: that is where the cannon comes from. The historian Georges Sadoul argued that the second half, with its underground Moon people, comes from H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, published the year before. And Paris had already seen a comic Moon voyage with a cannon, a lunar king and snow: Jacques Offenbach's stage spectacular Le voyage dans la Lune, of 1875. Like Offenbach's show, the film does not take any of it seriously.

A magician's film

Méliès was a conjuror before he was a film-maker. From 1888 he ran the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the home of stage magic in Paris. In 1897 he built a studio with glass walls in his garden at Montreuil, to the measurements of his theatre's stage, and he worked it like a theatre: painted scenery, trapdoors, winches. The camera sits where the audience would, and never moves. Each scene is a tableau watched from one seat in the stalls.

His great trick was the stop trick. Stop the camera, change something, start it again, then trim the join so the cut cannot be seen. In 1907 Méliès wrote that he had found it by accident, when his camera jammed while he was filming in the Place de l'Opéra: on the screen, an omnibus turned into a hearse and men into women. Some historians think it more likely that he learned it from an 1895 Edison film in which Mary, Queen of Scots is swapped for a dummy just before the axe falls. Either way he made it his own. It is how the Selenites vanish, and how the capsule arrives in the Moon's eye.

That shot looks as if the camera flies towards the Moon. It did not. By most accounts the Moon is Méliès himself, wrapped to the neck in black velvet, sitting on a chair that was hauled up a ramp towards a fixed camera. The splashdown was done with a second exposure, an aquarium with tadpoles in it and a cardboard cut-out of the capsule.

There was no colour film in 1902. Colour prints were painted by hand, frame by frame, in the Paris workshop of Élisabeth Thuillier, which employed more than two hundred women. A coloured print cost 1,000 francs against 560 for black and white.

Pirates, and what became of Méliès

The film was a hit around the world, and Méliès saw very little of the American money. A print reached the Edison company through one of its cameramen, and copies were on American screens by October 1902. By 1904 Edison, Lubin and Selig were all selling the film as if it were theirs. Méliès sent his brother Gaston to New York, where a Star Film office opened in 1903 to sell prints directly and register the copyrights.

Piracy hurt him but it did not finish him. That came later, as his kind of film went out of fashion and the debts mounted. Méliès made more than 500 films between 1896 and 1912, and in 1923 the Montreuil studio was sold to pay what he owed. Somewhere between 250 and 300 of the films survive. The story that he burned his negatives in despair is called a "persistent legend" by the Cinémathèque française, which thinks he more probably sold the film stock by weight.

In the late 1920s he was selling toys and sweets from a kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse, run with his wife, the actress Jehanne d'Alcy, when a film journalist recognised him. A gala in his honour followed in Paris in December 1929, and in 1931 he received the Légion d'honneur from the hands of Louis Lumière. He died in Paris on 21 January 1938.

The colour print

For most of the twentieth century the film was known only in black and white. In 1993 an anonymous donor gave the Filmoteca de Catalunya, in Barcelona, a batch of some 200 old films, and one of them was a hand-coloured Voyage dans la Lune. The reel had decayed into a solid block.

The French company Lobster Films acquired it in 1999 and spent years peeling it apart: 13,375 frames, separated one by one. The work was finished from 2010 in a Los Angeles laboratory, with the Groupama Gan and Technicolor film-heritage foundations, and the gaps were filled from a black-and-white print belonging to the Méliès family, coloured to match. The restoration was first shown at the Cannes film festival on 11 May 2011, with a new score by the French band Air.

Why it matters

It made the case for the story film. In 1902 most films ran a minute or two and showed one thing: a view, a gag, a trick. This one had thirty scenes, a plot and an ending. Edwin S. Porter, who directed The Great Train Robbery a year later, said Méliès' film had shown him that a story could bring an audience in.

It is where film science fiction starts. It is widely called the first science-fiction film. "One of the very first" is safer, since Méliès himself had made a very short film about an automaton in 1897, but nothing before it had this scale.

It showed that film could show the impossible. The Lumières pointed the camera at the world. Méliès built a world for the camera. The special-effects film starts here, with hidden cuts, double exposures and painted flats.

And it left an image. The Moon with a rocket in its eye is the picture that stands for early cinema. The Smashing Pumpkins restaged the voyage in their "Tonight, Tonight" video in 1996. Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) put Méliès at his station kiosk at the centre of its story, played by Ben Kingsley.