A Trip to the Moon (1902)
A club of top-hatted astronomers fires itself to the Moon in a giant bullet, pokes the eye of the man in the Moon, tangles with a tribe of exploding lunar natives, and tumbles back to Earth as heroes. Méliès packs stage magic, hand-tinted spectacle and deadpan comedy into cinema's first science-fiction fantasy.
The film that taught movies to dream: a magician’s toy box aimed at the sky, still quoted every time a rocket leaves the frame.
Background
Georges Méliès, a stage magician turned filmmaker, made this film in his studio at Montreuil, near Paris, drawing on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. He played the leader of the astronomers, Professor Barbenfouillis. The film was hand-coloured frame by frame for some prints, and Méliès used stop-motion substitution splicing to make objects appear and vanish.
What to watch for
The most famous image is the capsule landing in the eye of the man in the moon. The film was widely pirated, and Méliès lost money on it in the United States, and he ended his career selling toys at a railway station. A colour print was found in Spain in 1993 and restored, with the result shown in 2011. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a tribute to Méliès. Watch for the theatrical sets and the sense of wonder; this is where cinema first showed it could take audiences to another world.
