A Trip to the Moon

What happens in the thirty tableaux

At a meeting of the Astronomers' Club, Professor Barbenfouillis proposes an expedition; after a noisy dispute — telescopes become stools, an umbrella becomes a weapon of debate — five colleagues agree to go. Workers cast a hollow, bullet-shaped capsule; a chorus line in sailor suits loads it into a colossal cannon; the shot fires. Then the landing, which Méliès shows twice: first symbolically, the Moon's face swelling toward the audience until the capsule puts out its eye, and then again, matter-of-factly, on the lunar plain. Continuity mattered less than pleasure — cinema was already learning that an event could repeat from a new angle because each image says something different.

The astronomers watch the Earth rise, sleep under a snowfall, and descend into a crater of giant mushrooms, where they meet the Selenites — acrobats who burst into smoke when struck with an umbrella. Captured, hauled before the lunar king, the explorers fight free, tip their capsule off a cliff, and fall home into the sea. A parade follows: medals, a statue of Barbenfouillis, and a captive Selenite exhibited to the crowd.

Which is the film's sly second face. The explorers arrive uninvited, attack the first inhabitants they meet, and return to be celebrated — caricatures of European conquest from a director who had drawn political cartoons. The ending plays as slapstick and reads, a century on, as satire: a dream of discovery that is also a joke about empire.

How the tricks were done

The machinery is visible everywhere, and the visibility is the charm. Selenites explode by substitution splice — stop the camera, swap the acrobat for a puff of smoke, resume. The Moon approaches not because the heavy camera moved but because the performer playing the Moon was pulled toward it on a concealed ramp. Around these camera tricks stands a complete theater: painted flats, trapdoors, pyrotechnics, costumes, and stage machinery, photographed from the honest position of a spectator in the stalls.

The film also corrects the myth of the solitary magician it helped create. Méliès was the organizing imagination — director, designer, performer, editor, distributor — but the fantasy was manufactured by camera operators Théophile Michault and Lucien Tainguy, by dancers and acrobats, by scene painters and costume workers and, for the color prints, by a workshop of professional colorists. The auteur, before the word existed, ran a factory of enchantment.

Verne, Wells, and the collage

Méliès later named Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel as inspirations, and the cannon-launched projectile is pure Verne. The underground lunar kingdom owes at least as much to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, published the year before; Offenbach's 1875 stage féerie Le Voyage dans la Lune and a generation of fairground Moon attractions had already made lunar travel a popular entertainment. The film adapts none of them faithfully. It is a collage of everything the nineteenth century had imagined about the Moon, reassembled by a conjurer who cared less about science than about what a trick could make an audience feel.

Painted by hand

The film was photographed in black and white, but Méliès sold deluxe prints in color — painted frame by frame in the Paris workshop of Élisabeth Thuillier and her daughter Marie-Berthe, where teams of women applied aniline dyes with brushes, often one color per worker, through thousands of frames. The result was not color photography but painting applied to photography: the lunar world in yellows, blues, pinks, and greens, each print a manufactured art object. The hero image above is one of those frames — the Moon's wound in actual red.

A success he could not keep

A Trip to the Moon was a worldwide hit, and in the United States a largely unpaid one: Edison's agents and rivals like Lubin duplicated prints and sold copies as their own, fortunes that never reached Montreuil. Méliès answered by sending his brother Gaston to open an American branch of Star Film in 1903 — an early lesson in how much faster an image crosses borders than the ownership of it. The Moon with the capsule in its eye became, in effect, cinema's first meme: endlessly copied, detached from its source, more famous than most of the people who made it.

The industry that eventually outgrew the magician belonged to the integrated studios — Pathé, and Gaumont, where Louis Feuillade's serials, Les Vampires above all, ruled the wartime screens that Méliès's théâtre-fantasy never reached.

By 1913 Star Film was finished. In 1923, bankrupt, Méliès burned his stock of negatives in the Montreuil garden.

Ruin at Montparnasse

Then the strangest scene in his filmography, unstaged: the wizard of Montreuil spent his last working years selling toys and sweets from a small stand in the concourse of the Gare Montparnasse. A journalist recognized him there in the late 1920s; the rediscovery led to a gala tribute at the Salle Pleyel in 1929, the Légion d'honneur in 1931 — pinned on by Louis Lumière, who had once told him film had no future — and a retirement flat at last. He died in 1938 and lies in Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where our walking route passes his grave.

The Moon's eye, forever

A hand-colored print — believed lost for most of a century — surfaced in Barcelona in 1993 in a state close to solid decay. Restorers separated and digitized 13,375 image fragments over the better part of two decades, and the color version premiered at Cannes in 2011 with a new score by the French band Air, who expanded it into an album the following year. The film that invented cinematic fantasy now circulates in the version its richest first audiences actually saw: a dream with the paint still wet.

The images never needed the restoration to survive. Queen wove Méliès footage through the 1995 video for Heaven for Everyone; a year later the Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight, Tonight rebuilt his whole visual language — painted skies, umbrella battles, a rescue ship named the S.S. Méliès — and swept the MTV Video Music Awards; Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) put the toy stand, the burned negatives, and the glass studio itself before a new generation, with the Moon's eye as its emblem. Cinema's handmade-enchantment lineage runs straight from Montreuil to Jean Cocteau — whose Beauty and the Beast worked its miracles the same way, in the camera, by hand — and on to every effects film since.

The screen not as a window, but as a box of tricks.