A Trip to the Moon: Méliès and the First Genre Image

A capsule hits the moon in the eye. The moon has a face, the face is annoyed, and the capsule is stuck in it like a thumb in a cake.

That shot is a hundred and twenty-four years old, it lasts a few seconds, and it is probably the most reproduced image in the history of cinema that is not a person. It has been a band’s logo, a museum poster, a Scorsese film’s emotional climax, a tattoo, and a shorthand for “movies” so complete that people who have never seen a silent film can identify it instantly. Le Voyage dans la Lune is fourteen minutes long. It is where genre cinema starts.

The temptation with the very old films is reverence — you watch them the way you walk through a cathedral, respectfully and without opinions. Georges Méliès does not need that. His film is a comedy about idiots.

The magician’s grammar

The essential fact about Méliès is that he was not a photographer or a journalist or an engineer. He was a stage magician. He owned the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, he had been performing illusions there for years, and when he saw the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1895 he understood immediately what none of the engineers did: this device is a magic trick that can be repeated identically, forever.

Everything in A Trip to the Moon follows from that. Méliès built a glass-roofed studio at Montreuil — daylight through the roof, a proscenium, painted flats, trapdoors, machinery — which is to say he built a theatre and pointed a camera at it. The film is staged in thirty tableaux, each one a locked-off frontal composition where the action plays out left to right like a variety act. There is no cutting inside a scene. There is no camera movement to speak of. Every effect is achieved in-camera.

The techniques are magician’s techniques translated. The substitution splice — stop the camera, change the thing, start again — is a stage vanish. Multiple exposure is a stage double. The dissolve is a scene change with the curtain half-down. When the Selenites are struck and burst into a puff of smoke, that is precisely how a magician makes an assistant disappear, and it is funny for the same reason: the abruptness is the joke.

Méliès plays Professor Barbenfouillis himself, and he plays him as a pompous fool. The astronomers wear wizard robes and squabble. They are fired at the moon out of a cannon by a chorus line of women in sailor suits. They arrive, they annoy the locals, they hit them with umbrellas, they run away. This is not the awed contemplation of space that later sci-fi would supply. It is a music-hall sketch about the French Academy of Sciences being useless in a new location.

The shot itself

The moon-eye image is worth taking apart, because how it was made explains why it lands.

Méliès needed the moon to approach the camera. The equipment of 1902 offered no zoom and no practical dolly for the effect he wanted. So he did it as a stage move: the moon face was mounted and drawn toward the lens on a wheeled platform, growing in the frame while the camera sat still. The “camera move” is a set move. It is theatre solving a cinematographic problem, and the slight lurch of the approach — the physical wobble of a big object being pulled across a floor — is precisely what gives the shot its dreamlike wrongness.

Then the strike, and the cut. Méliès puts the impact on a splice. One frame the capsule is arriving, the next the moon’s face has the thing embedded in its eye and is wincing. The gag is a magician’s timing gag: the reveal happens in the instant you blink. And crucially he holds on the aftermath. The moon is left sitting there with a rocket in its face, being irritated, for long enough for you to laugh.

That is the whole invention. Méliès worked out that a fantastic image is funnier and stranger and more durable if you give the audience time to look at it after the trick. Every effects film since is either doing that or failing to.

What happened to him

The story is unbearable and it is essential to the film.

A Trip to the Moon was an enormous international success, and Méliès saw almost none of the money. Prints were duped and distributed across America by operators who paid him nothing — Edison’s organisation among them — and there was no meaningful mechanism to stop it. Méliès’s business model was selling prints; a business built on selling prints collapses when anyone with a lab can copy them.

He kept making films — hundreds of them — and the industry moved past him. The tableau grammar he had perfected was replaced by editing, close-ups, and the moving camera, and Méliès’s theatre-in-a-box became a period style within a decade. He went bankrupt. He is reported to have burned a great many of his own negatives. By the 1920s the man who invented the genre image was selling toys and sweets from a stall in the Montparnasse railway station in Paris, and the people buying from him had no idea.

He was rediscovered late — journalists found him, there was a gala, there was a Légion d’honneur — and he died in 1938 with the rediscovery barely underway. Scorsese made Hugo about exactly this, and the reason that film works is that the facts do not need embellishing.

The colour came back ninety years later

Here is the part that still astonishes me. A Trip to the Moon existed in a hand-coloured version — Méliès sold tinted prints, painted frame by frame by a workshop of women under Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris. Hundreds of frames a day, by hand, with brushes. That version was considered lost for most of the twentieth century.

In 1993 a hand-coloured print turned up in Spain and was given to the Filmoteca de Catalunya. It was a solid block of decomposed nitrate — effectively a hockey puck. The restoration took years and involved separating the frames from each other one at a time, and the result premiered at Cannes in 2011 with a new score by the French band Air.

It is a different film in colour. The tinting is not naturalistic and was never trying to be — it is theatrical colour, applied like stage lighting, and it turns the Selenites’ world into something genuinely hallucinatory. The connection to what Bava and Argento would do with saturated unreal colour sixty years later is not a stretch. It is the same instinct: colour as an emotional statement rather than a record.

The real descendants

Everyone says Metropolis, and Metropolis is real — Lang’s film is the other foundational text, and its relationship to Méliès is the relationship of an architect to a magician. Lang builds a world; Méliès performs one.

The direct descendant is the cannon. Méliès took his rocket from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, where a projectile is fired at the moon out of an enormous gun, and that specific piece of engineering nonsense goes straight through cinema for decades. It reappears, played entirely straight and built as a monument, in Things to Come in 1936, where H.G. Wells and William Cameron Menzies fire two young people at the moon from a Space Gun and mean every second of it. Méliès laughed at the cannon. Wells saluted it. The image is the same image.

The wider inheritance is the silent canon’s whole lesson: that cinema’s fantastic register was fully formed before anyone worked out how to cut a conversation.

The honest case against it

It is fourteen minutes of proscenium. If you come to it expecting drama, there is none — the astronomers have no interiority, the Selenites are a chorus, and the narrative is a sequence of arrivals. The film’s pleasures are entirely those of watching a very good stage act preserved.

And the colonial joke has not aged into anything comfortable. The astronomers land, are met by the inhabitants, and beat them to death with umbrellas before dragging one home as a trophy. Méliès is satirising French scientific self-importance and the film is plainly on the Selenites’ side, and it is still a film in which Europeans arrive somewhere and hit everyone. The satire and the reflex are in the same frames.

Where to find it

The Flicker Alley and Lobster Films restorations are the way in, and the hand-coloured version is the one to watch — it is a genuinely different experience and it is the version Méliès sold. Fourteen minutes. Watch it with the Air score once and with a piano once. It costs you an evening’s attention and it recalibrates what you think early cinema was.

The verdict: A Trip to the Moon is the first film that understood the audience wants to see an impossible thing and then keep looking at it. Everything genre cinema has done since is a footnote to that discovery, and Méliès died with a sweet stall.

Spoilers below

The astronomers reach the moon, and the moon is populated, and the encounter goes exactly as badly as European expeditions historically did. The Selenites are acrobats — Méliès hired performers from the Folies Bergère — and they move with a genuine physical strangeness that no amount of costume could fake. When struck, they detonate into smoke, and the film treats this as slapstick.

The capture and the escape are pure theatre. The astronomers are taken before the Selenite king, Barbenfouillis grabs him and dashes him to the ground, and he explodes. The escape is a chase back to the capsule and then the single most magician-brained gag in the film: they get home by tipping the capsule off the edge of the moon and letting it fall to Earth, with one Selenite clinging to it. Gravity as a plot device, played as a stunt.

The return is a splashdown, a rescue, and then a parade. And the parade is the joke Méliès has been building to for fourteen minutes: the men who achieved nothing, understood nothing and murdered several people are given a statue and a marching band. The captured Selenite is displayed. The film ends on the professor being honoured, with the alien on a leash beside him.

That final image is what makes the film more than a curiosity. Méliès looked at the culture of scientific heroism in 1902 — a culture at the absolute peak of its confidence — and closed his film on a monument to a fool. The cardboard moon is why we remember it. The statue is why it is good.