The Steven Jay Schneider-edited tome 1,001 Films To See Before You Die (Cassell Illustrated), featuring contributions from several of my favourite UK critics, has become a mainstay of the nation's bookshops and reference libraries in recent years; in this reader's opinion, it's among the most useful guides presently out there to the history and diversity of the cinema, as both a popular and an artistic form. I'm up to seeing just over 900 of the films selected for its study, giving me but a hundred more to go before I can finally rest in peace. In this new strand, I aim to discuss several of the films chosen, beginning with the very first selection - Georges Méliès' Le Voyage Dans La Lune/A Trip to the Moon. The following project is undertaken from the belief that to know where the cinema presently is, and to know where it's heading, we surely have to know where it came from.
If we consider France to be the womb of cinema - which may explain why that country has proven more protective of the movies over the years than most - then, at some formative point, some kind of cell(uloid) division must have taken place. The Lumières, in filming those workers leaving the factory, gave us embryonic realism, documentary and observation. But then there was Georges Méliès, the cine-conjuror who, with the Verne- and Wells-inspired 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, encouraged the cinema to reach for the stars, into the realms of fantasy, escape and action: if you feel inclined to thank anybody for Avatar, you should thank Méliès, its spiritual godfather (or fairy godmother) - not least because James Cameron's ego appears quite big enough already, thank you.
Professor Dullmuddle and his team of Incoherent Astronomers shoot their tin-can rocket onto (actually into) the face of the Moon, where gravity is no longer an issue, and everybody beds down with sheets, as though they were spending the night under Waterloo Bridge. The next day, the visitors get into scrapes with giant mushrooms and the local tribespeople (very Avatar); a punchline reveals one of these moondwellers even smuggled themselves back to Earth, setting up a strand of - usually ultra-bloody - horror sci-fi. What's still striking is the short's energy: even the the background players appear to express a glee merely at being on camera. (Compare their broad smiles and strutting to today's over-photographed performers, who sometimes seem to resent that the whole world has been granted the right to look at them.) Now we're almost as far away in time from the actual lunar landings as Méliès was at the time of this Trip's conception, it can be reclaimed as a dreamer's work, a fragment of then-unparalleled imagination - and one in the eye for anyone who ever said it was inconceivable.
Le Voyage Dans la Lune/A Trip to the Moon can be viewed online here.
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