SHOOTING FOR THE MOON
LE VOYAG E DANS LA LUNE (1902)
It’s the first great image of SF cinema: a gleaming projectile shot into the eye of a crater-faced Man in the Moon. Pioneering filmmaker and FX genius Georges Méliès capitalised on the fin de siècle craze for lunar landing tales with this immortal short, stealing from Jules Verne and HG Wells while using his experience as a stage illusionist to conjure some monoclepopping visuals – a pièce à grand spectacle, as he called it. Méliès’s Moon is a theatrical fantasia, where giant mushrooms sprout in caverns and the goddess Phoebe reclines on a crescent-shaped swing. Le Voyage Dans La Lune was a huge hit but a victim of its own popularity in the lawless days of early cinema: it was one of the first movies to be widely pirated (would you steal a rocketship?) and Spanish director Segundo de Chomón made an unlicensed shot-for-shot remake in 1908. Still, as Méliès knew, “It left an indelible trace because it was the first of its kind.”
MOON FACTS
