Méliès’s fifteen-minute lunar excursion is a stage magician’s show pointed at a camera, and it is still funny, still handsome and still full of ideas nobody had had before. It is also a row of painted backdrops filmed from the stalls, and it never pretends otherwise.
Georges Méliès was a stage magician before he was a film-maker, and A Trip to the Moon is a magic show that happens to have been photographed. It runs fifteen minutes. It takes a handful of ideas from Jules Verne, a scientific congress and a cannon large enough to reach the Moon, and treats them as an excuse for costumes, trapdoors and painted scenery. Our verdict is plain enough: it is still worth your quarter of an hour, and not only as a curiosity. It is a comedy, and it still gets its laughs.
Méliès wrote it, directed it, produced it, cut it, designed it and plays the lead, so there is nobody else to credit for the look of the thing and nobody else to blame. The design is the reason it survives. The astronomers’ hall has a telescope painted on the wall and a blackboard nobody uses. The shell is built on a rooftop above a Paris of smoking chimneys, and the cannon is so long the barrel runs off the edge of the set. The Moon itself is a face, and the face is Méliès’s own, and when the shell arrives it lands in his eye with cream running out of it. There is a hand-coloured version, painted frame by frame and restored in recent years, in which the astronomers’ gowns are green and red and the Moon’s surface is a sickly yellow, and it is the one to see.
Lucien Tainguy and Théophile Michault’s camera does not move. Every scene is a single wide shot, taken from roughly the seat you would have bought in the middle of the stalls, and the actors face front and wave their arms so the back row can follow. The one exception is the approach to the Moon, where the face swells toward us and the picture cuts to the shell stuck in its eye. We laughed out loud at that, after a hundred and twenty years and heaven knows how many reproductions, and we can say exactly why: the timing is right. Méliès holds the face just long enough for us to see the eye blink before he hits it.
His editing is a magician’s editing. He stops the camera, changes something on the stage, and starts again, so that between one frame and the next a thing becomes another thing or is simply gone. That is the whole of his method, and he uses it for surprises rather than for storytelling. There is no cutting between places, no close-up, no shot of anyone’s face nearer than the far end of a room. Barbenfouillis is a beard and a hat, and the other five astronomers are five more beards and hats. The congress scene runs on past its joke, and the launch, with its line of sailor-suited women pushing the shell into the breech, is staged as a parade because Méliès liked parades.
Once the travellers are on the Moon, we will describe very little. Phoebe (Bleuette Bernon) sits on a crescent, the stars have women’s faces (Jehanne d’Alcy is among them), and the Earth rises over the horizon in a painted flat that is prettier than it has any right to be. The Moon has residents, and the astronomers conduct themselves abroad about as well as Frenchmen of 1902 could be expected to, with umbrellas. The second half is a chase, and it is the part of the film that has been copied most and dated least.
The tagline calls it the first science fiction film, and we are not inclined to argue. What is more striking is how much of the genre’s furniture is already here: the committee that will not listen, the launch as public spectacle, the landing, the locals who are not pleased to see us. Later films would find better ways to shoot these things. Very few would find a funnier way to arrive.
It is a U certificate. Watch the colour version if you can find it, with a child if you have one to hand, and turn off the modern score by the band Air that some prints carry; a piano or silence suits the pointed hats better. Do not explain anything until it is over. They will have worked out the cannon before you have.
