Le Voyage dans la Lune

Georges Méliès, 1902 · Gallery 501 · Floor 5

So… a bunch of astronomers climb into a giant bullet and get fired out of a cannon. They land on the moon. Have a nap. Start hitting the locals with umbrellas. Get captured. Kill the king. Then escape by tipping their capsule off the edge of the moon. Fall back to Earth. Into the ocean. This is A Trip to the Moon. MoMA calls it the first science-fiction film. And the guy who made it? A magician named Georges Méliès. So, one day, Georges goes to see the Lumières’ new machine. The way he tells it, there’s a photograph of a town square up on the screen. Then, unexpectedly, a horse in the photograph starts moving. By the end, he’s offering ten thousand francs for the machine. They won’t sell. So… he builds a glass studio in his garden. Basically a greenhouse with a stage in it. And he starts doing his magic on film. Anyway, watch for the moon coming toward you. That’s actually a man sitting in a chair, covered up to the neck in black velvet. They’re pulling him toward the camera. And those moon creatures are acrobats from the Folies Bergère. One of them gets whacked with an umbrella. Puff of smoke. Gone. Really, they just stop the camera and let the acrobat walk out of the shot. Start filming again, join the two bits of film together, and he’s vanished. And that’s a big reason they call him the father of special effects. Now, the guy with the big white beard, running the whole expedition? That’s Méliès. And the moon? The face in the velvet, with a capsule in its eye? That’s him too.

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