‘Best moving pictures I ever saw.’ Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès’s
A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema’s first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless film courses. In
Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, leading film scholars examine Méliès’s landmark film in detail, demonstrating its many crucial connecions to literature, popular culture, and visual culture of the time, as well as its long ‘afterlife’ in more recent films, television, and music videos. Together, these essays make clear that Méliès was not only a major filmmaker but also a key figure in the emergence of modern spectacle and the birth of the modern cinematic imagination, and by bringing interdisciplinary methodologies of early cinema studies to bear on
A Trip to the Moon, the contributors also open up much larger questions about aesthetics, media, and modernity.
In his introduction, Matthew Solomon traces the convoluted provenance of the film’s multiple versions and its key place in the historiography of cinema, and an appendix contains a useful dossier of primary-source documents that contextualize the film’s production, along with translations of two major articles written by Méliès himself.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Trip to the Movies: Georges Méliès, Filmmaker and Magician (1861–1938)
2. Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès
3. A Trip to the Moon: A Composite Film
4. First-Footing on the Moon: Méliès’s Debt to Verne and Wells and His Influence in Great Britain
5. “Distance Does Not Exist”: Méliès, le Cinéma, and the Moon
6. Shooting into Outer Space: Reframing Modern Vision
7. A Trip to the Moon as Féerie
8. A Trip to the Moon as an American Phenomenon
9. A Trip to the Fair; or, Moon-Walking in Space
10. The Stars Might Be Smiling: A Feminist Forage into a Famous Film
11. Impossible Voyages and Extraordinary Adventures in Early Science Fiction Cinema: From Robida to Méliès and Marcel Fabre
12. No One-Way Ticket to the Moon
Appendix
A Fantastical . . . Trip to the Moon
Georges Méliès, “Answer to Questionary [sic]”
Georges Méliès, “The Marvelous in the Cinema”
Georges Méliès, “The Importance of the Script’
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Matthew Solomon is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He is the author of
Disappearing Tricks: Silent Films, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century.
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