A Trip to the Moon revisited

In 1896, Georges Méliès revolutionized the film industry with the first special effects. The Northwest Film Center will present The Extraordinary Voyage—a 2011 documentary by directors Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange on Méliès’ career and his greatest masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon—on Sunday, July 8.

“[Méliès] was the first to see cinema as entertainment,” says Costa-Gavras, president of the Cinémathèque Français, in the documentary. “A man of the theater, he adapted cinema to the theater and the demands of theatrical showmanship.”

Born in 1861 to a wealthy shoemaker, a fascination with the theatrical magic show steered Méliès down the path of the filmmaker.

“The films of Méliès mark the invention of special effects. Today they seem simple and all, but they were the first to have that,” says film director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. “Méliès was a magician, so he knew conjuring tricks. He used them on camera.”

The documentary provides Méliès’ own words for his discovery of trick film photography from an interview in 1937.

“It was due to the camera jamming at the Opera while I was filming a street scene,” Méliès says. “The camera suddenly stopped. By the time I got it working the traffic had moved on. Splicing the scene later, I was surprised to see the boulevard omnibus suddenly change into a hearse with the family right behind it.”

Inspired by Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Around the Moon as well as H.G. Wells’ The First Man in the Moon, Méliès made the first known science fiction film in history, A Trip to the Moon, in 1902.

The plot of the film begins at the Institute of Incoherent Geography. Méliès plays Professor Barbenfouillis and proposes a trip to the moon. The astronauts load themselves into a rocket and blast out of an enormous cannon straight toward the lunar surface.

A face appears on the moon as the camera zooms closer. Suddenly, the rocket embeds itself in the moon’s right eye. The scene is one of the most iconic and beloved in film history.

“Méliès and his voyage to the moon was the first draft of the Apollo space program,” says actor Tom Hanks. “How do we do it? Well, he built a big cannon, we built a big rocket. Those are about the only differences.”

Regardless, the film has not aged well. The special effects are primitive, the cinematography crude—distractingly so. But there is some charm in this simplicity. According to Bromberg, Méliès spent his mornings constructing and painting sets by hand to prepare for shooting, which took place only from late morning to early afternoon, when the sun shined on set.

A Trip to the Moon won critical acclaim in its time. Unfortunately, competition with similar films from rival companies overshadowed its release. Sales of pirated copies in the U.S. further dampened its success.

Segundo de Chomón, from the Pathé film studio, produced Excursion to the Moon as a 1908 remake of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. Colorists meticulously hand painted each frame of film before the invention of the three-color system in the 1950s.

Despite his then-revolutionary methods, Méliès fell behind the changing times and closed his studio in 1912. The documentary shows how the first trip to the South Pole, the invention of the airplane and the beginning of World War I led the film industry toward greater realism and eventually the first cartoons.

Méliès fell into debt after the war and protested the lack of appreciation for his work by burning many of his films. “I think it was a kind of suicide through his films,” Costa-Gavras says. “There are artists who have burned their work, burned paintings. But this was inexplicable.”

Méliès retired as sound displaced silent films. Still, the relative brevity of his career stands in sharp contrast to his enduring legacy. The documentary closes with the Apollo 11 lunar landing—30 years after Méliès’ death.

In the documentary, Lange begins the quest to restore A Trip to the Moon in color, 100 years after its production. He unrolls the brittle, decaying film and goes through a process as tedious as its initial making.

“You can’t start like this if you don’t have faith,” Lange says. “When you spend entire nights doing something which everybody says cannot be done, you cannot start looking for a rationale; it’s crazy, it’s madness, and that’s what is so nice.”

With the help of Tom Burton, director of technicolor, Lange and his team victoriously fought the decay of ages and restored A Trip to the Moon to the eyes of moviegoers everywhere, a glorious end to a 20-year project.