My Trip to the MOON

On the night of September 27, 2015 I was in total awe looking up at the sky towards our Moon as it experienced a full lunar eclipse. I laid flat on the ground on my porch and gazed up as the Moon was covered in a red hue called "The Blood Moon". I timed the totality of the eclipse to the sounds of Pink Floyd's song "Dark Side of the Moon" playing on my head phones.

Georges Méliès 1861-1938 (Photo courtesy Britannica.com

I started to think  of all the films that featured the moon and my mind ran across the man who started it all, the great French film maker Georges Méliès. When films first appeared in the late 1800's and early 1900's they were of mundane things like a train entering a station, workers leaving a factory, a wall being broken down.

Méliès who was a professional magician and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris saw these films and was inspired to make his own motion pictures. Méliès revolutionize the cinema, he introduced lavish sets, multiple actors and camera action sequences such stop motion, slow motion, dissolves, fade-outs, superimposition, and double exposures. 

Most importantly Méliès told a story in his film and between 1899 to 1912 he made more than 400 films.  In 1902 he directed "Le Voyage dans la lune" or  “A Trip to the Moon”) which featured a scientific expedition that journeys from the Earth to the Moon and back again. It broke so much new ground in movie making history and is regarded as a true treasure of human accomplishment. Sadly Méliès films were largely forgotten for more than a decade after he stopped making them and he was reduced to working as a toy maker in a kiosk in Paris by the 1920's.

However before he died in 1938, Méliès was re-discovered by a new generation of audiences and a retrospective of his films made waves in Paris in 1929. He was given an apartment to live in by the French government and was even inducted in the French Legion of Honour. You can draw a direct line from every science fiction movie ever made to Méliès' films and he is regarded among the greatest geniuses of cinema that ever lived.

If you want to see "Le Voyage dans la lune" or  “A Trip to the Moon” in colour (for you modern folk) click on the link above.

Check out this music video from the rock band Smashing Pumpkins for their 1996 song 'Tonight, Tonight". It was inspired by Méliès' movie and it was through this video that I first learned of him. Do look out for the boat at the end, it is named SS Méliès . The video is directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris who also directed 'Little Miss Sunshine" and many other great music videos.

In 1998 there was an HBO mini-series called "From the Earth  to the Moon" that featured stories about the NASA expeditions to the moon. Tom Hanks was one of the producers of that series and he directed the last episode which he also appeared in. In that episode Hanks played an assistant to Georges Méliès as he directed and produced Le Voyage dans la lune in 1902. Do check out this video, Hanks' acting is impeccable, his appreciation of Méliès's genius is wonderful to experience and a true connection is made between Méliès and the future explorations of the moon.

The greatest tribute however to Georges Méliès is Martin Scorsese's 2011 film "Hugo". Check out these videos and revisit that wonderful film that tells the story of Méliès who was struggling at the time in poverty but who was then newly re-discovered by a whole new audience in 1929. 

It has been more than a hundred years since the release of "Le Voyage dans la lune" or  “A Trip to the Moon” but every time I look up at the Moon I see the dreams of Georges Méliès staring back at me even when the Moon turns red.