If You Believe They Put A Man on the Moon

There is an early, experimental, and once-slightly-long-lost film that you may be more familiar with than you realize. The film is called Le Voyage dans la lune, or A Trip to the Moon by Georges Meliès from 1902. It's a melodramatic but heartfelt imagining of launching a manned rocket to the moon. The film is heavily influenced by contemporary science fiction by Jules Verne and HG Wells. It follows the journey from conception to building the rocket and ship, launching it, and landing on the moon. Various anthropomorphized stars and planets appear. They encounter and fight aliens and make their escape back to earth.

The special effects are very impressive for the time period. It is not the first science fiction or fantasy film, but it's the best from this era. Meliès was particularly inventive in the use of special effects and made use of multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves and hand-inked color. The iconic image from Voyage dans la lune is the man in the moon being hit in the eye with a spaceship.

Meliès made hundreds of short films, mainly to show the experimental possibilities of various effects. Much of his work was destroyed and recycled and is lost today. The original version had a final scene of a celebratory parade back on earth, but this was lost for almost 100 years. A print of the film was discovered in 2002 in a barn in France. It contained the full film and was also completely hand-colored. Meliès wanted to release his film in America, but Edison’s team made illegal copies and distributed it themselves. Meliès eventually went bankrupt and exited the film business.

If the film or the style looks somewhat familiar, the Smashing Pumpkins based their 1996 music video “Tonight, Tonight” on this film. You can see the direct reference in both plot and style. The production ran into difficulty because James Cameron was filming Titanic at the same time and had bought up nearly every turn-of-the-century costume and prop in LA. EMI won't allow video embedding, so here is a link to the video.