Rent A Trip to the Moon (1902)

4.1 of 5 from 100 ratings
1h 18min
Rent A Trip to the Moon (aka Le voyage dans la lune / Le voyage extraordinaire /  A Trip to Mars) Online DVD & Blu-ray Rental
  • General info
  • Available formats
Synopsis:
Originally released in 1902, this legendary 16-minute film is widely considered to be one of the most important works in film history. Created just six years after the invention of cinema this is where narrative cinema truly began. George Melies' masterpiece features six members of the Astronomers' Club, fired into space by a giant cannon, on a strange and wonderful journey to the moon to meet its inhabitants. The colour version of A Trip to the Moon, hand-painted frame by frame, was considered lost for many years, until a print, in a desperate condition, was found in Spain in 1993.
It is this version which has been meticulously restored by Lobster Films, the Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage - one of the most sophisticated and expensive restorations in the history of cinema. The luminous resulting film is accompanied by a new original soundtrack by French duo AIR. Accompanying the film is an hour long documentary, The Extraordinary Voyage, detailing the restoration process and featuring words from esteemed directors such as Michel Gondry, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Costa-Gavras and Michel Hazanavicius.
Actors:
, Victor André, Bleuette Bernon, Brunnet, , Henri Delannoy, Delpierre, Farjaux, Kelm, François Lallement, Jules-Eugène Legris, , , , , Nicolas Ricordel, , , ,
Directors:
, ,
Producers:
Georges Méliès, Marianne Lère
Writers:
Georges Méliès, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Serge Bromberg, Eric Lange, Frédérique Moreau
Aka:
Le voyage dans la lune / Le voyage extraordinaire / A Trip to Mars
Studio:
PARK CIRCUS
Genres:
Action & Adventure, Classics, Comedy, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Collections:
A History of Films about Film: Part 2, A Brief History of Coronations on Screen, A Brief History of the Tradition of Quality, All the Twos: 1902-62, Films & TV by topic, Getting to Know :Tom Hanks, Getting to Know..., Giant Leap for Mankind: A History of Astronaut Films, A Brief History of Film..., Top 10 French-Language Remakes, Top Films
Countries:
France
BBFC:
Release Date:
26/11/2012
Run Time:
80 minutes
Languages:
English LPCM Stereo, French LPCM Stereo, Silent
Subtitles:
English
DVD Regions:
Region 2
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
Colour:
Colour
Bonus:
  • Documentary by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange: The Extraordinary Voyage (64 mins)
  • Image Gallery: A Trip to the Moon
  • Image Gallery: The Extraordinary Voyage
BBFC:
Release Date:
04/05/2021
Run Time:
78 minutes
Languages:
French Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles:
English
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Various
Colour:
Colour and B & W
BLU-RAY Regions:
B
Bonus:
  • Scores by Robert Israel, and a second score featuring actors voicing parts as originally screened in the US with an accompaniment by Frederick Hodges for the black and white version
  • Scores by Jeff Mills, Dorian Pimpernel, and Serge Bromberg for the colour version
  • The Innovations of Georges Melies - video essay by Jon Spira exploring 'A Trip to the Moon' and Melies' career
  • The Extraordinary Voyage - Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange's 2011 documentary on the film, its rediscovery and preservation for future generations, featuring interviews with Costa Gavras, Michel Gondry, Michel Hazanavicius, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  • Le Grand Melies (1952) - a short film directed by Georges Franju about the life and work of Melies 2020 re-release trailer

More like A Trip to the Moon

Reviews (1) of A Trip to the Moon

The Glasshouse Key - A Trip to the Moon review by CH

Spoiler Alert
16/02/2021

Lunar journeys are always more enjoyable on the screen than in reality. Who would want to spend long days in claustrophobic confinement only to get there, and find nothing except a good view of the Earth?

Sixty-six years before Neil Armstrong took that step, Georges Méliès accomplished the journey - there and back - in sixteen minutes. True, he had the help of hundreds, including a bevy of chorus girls.

A well-known stage performer with a sure-handed way of conjuring and sleight of hand, he saw the possibilities of adapting such vanishing-lady stunts to silent film. This was a matter of filming at eleven in the morning for a few hours while the sun was directly above his glass-roofed studio. Other hours were given to the building of sets.

And what sets they are! The spacecraft into which half-a-dozen men squeeze (among them, Méliès himself as the leading Professor) is launched through a huge cannon against a background of smoke as the chorus girls bid the intrepid team farewell and the vessel heads towards a beamingly yellow Moon.

All this had been inspired by Verne and Wells, and, naturally, there is trouble ahead.

None of this is derivative, however, for it is a creation all its own, heart-stoppingly so as the hunched-over, visibly-ribbed creatures fend off these colonisers.

To think that is but one of some six-hundred films Méliès made before the Great War (over half of them now lost) is all the more incredible when when one realises that some were shown in colour. That was a matter of two-hundred women colouring each frame of each print by hand (each woman specialised in a particular colour as they stood side by side in a barn-like premises for weeks at a time).

Such was changing society, especially with the advent of a War compounded by the invention of sound recording, that this was one of many films whose survival owed as much to luck as anything. Four times as long as the film itself is a documentary on the DVD which not only neatly summarises his life - with well-chosen scenes from other films - but shows the restoration process.

This took far longer than the creation of the film itself. By initial good fortune, a print of the coloured film was found in Span, brought back to France - and then came a gamble: the separation centimetre by centimetre of a reel which was close to coalescing into a useless acidic lump. Literally: knife-edge stuff. And it suddenly seems to belong itself to another era, for each revealed frame was copied and then stored upon one of those Macs which comprised a screen which sprang from what looked like an upturned pudding bowl.

There was not the technology to take the task any further at the beginning of this century: a counterpoint to all that had been done on the hoof in 1902. Come 2011 something had been done to improve software, and funding was now available to support a once-quixotic task (the French do not appear to have an equivalent of the word “geek” to which the documentary's sub-titlers have recourse). Things moved as swiftly as frame-by-frame work can do. The restoration is glorious. The film lives again.

Such was the dedication of the Mac-bound technicians that, in due course, they showed it a frame at a time on a large, silver screen so that they could check the colours' consistency. There was puzzlement at a silver streak in the edge of some frames: upon closer inspection, this was revealed to be an inadvertent creeping into the shot by a key which hung by the door of Méliès's studio over a century ago.

Neil Armstrong would surely agree that the return of this film is un grand pas.

1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.

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