How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902)

If you hap­pen to vis­it the Ciné­math­èque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès locat­ed inside it. Ded­i­cat­ed to la Magie du ciné­ma, it con­tains arti­facts from through­out the his­to­ry of film-as-spec­ta­cle, which includes such pic­tures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Run­ner. Its focus on the evo­lu­tion of visu­al effects guar­an­tees a cer­tain promi­nence to sci­ence fic­tion, which, as a genre of “the sev­enth art,” has its ori­gins in France: specif­i­cal­ly, in the work of the muse­um’s name­sake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voy­age dans la lune) from 1902 we now rec­og­nize as the very first sci-fi movie.

Every­one has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the land­ing cap­sule crashed into the irri­tat­ed man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the ver­sion above, runs about fif­teen min­utes — you can bet­ter under­stand its impor­tance to the devel­op­ment of cin­e­ma.

For Méliès did­n’t pio­neer just a genre, but also a range of tech­niques that expand­ed the visu­al vocab­u­lary of his medi­um. Take the approach to the moon (played by the direc­tor him­self) imme­di­ate­ly before the land­ing, a kind of shot nev­er before seen in those days of prac­ti­cal­ly immo­bile movie cam­eras — and one that neces­si­tat­ed real tech­ni­cal inven­tive­ness to pull off.

What some­one watch­ing A Trip to the Moon in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels famil­iar than the ways in which it does­n’t. In an era when the­ater was still the dom­i­nant form of enter­tain­ment, Méliès adhered to the­atri­cal forms of stag­ing: he uses few cuts, and prac­ti­cal­ly no vari­ety in the cam­era angles. It would hard­ly seem worth not­ing that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that col­orized prints — labo­ri­ous­ly hand-paint­ed, frame by frame, on an assem­bly line — exist­ed even at the time of its orig­i­nal release; one such restored ver­sion appears just above.

In truth, Méliès opened up much deep­er pos­si­bil­i­ties for cin­e­ma than most of us acknowl­edge. As point­ed out in the A Mat­ter of Film video above, the motion pic­tures made before this amount­ed to exhibits of dai­ly life: impres­sive as tech­no­log­i­cal demon­stra­tions (and, so the leg­end goes, har­row­ing for the view­ers of 1896, who feared a train approach­ing onscreen would run them over), but noth­ing as nar­ra­tives. Like Méliès’ oth­er work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a sto­ry. It also proved some­thing more cen­tral to the medi­um’s pow­er: that it could tell that sto­ry in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years lat­er, even when the details of what hap­pens have long since lost their inter­est.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

Watch 194 Films by Georges Méliès, the Film­mak­er Who “Invent­ed Every­thing” (All in Chrono­log­i­cal Order)

The First Hor­ror Film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Drey­fus Affair, the Con­tro­ver­sial Film Cen­sored by the French Gov­ern­ment for 50 Years (1899)

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.