Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902)

I can’t just keep putting “….” For silent films; quotes are strictly for talkies from now on!

This might be the first of a few entries, too. I’ve recently discovered the excellent Cane Toad Warrior blog, and had one of those “duh” moments. Last week I paid the princely sum of £1.35 each, plus postage, for two silent films (Frankenstein (1910) and The Man Who Laughs, which will be reviewed soon). It didn’t occur to me that loads of silent films are in the public domain and therefore easily accessible on YouTube. Yep. That’s how much of a dunderhead I am.

So tonight, on my cheapo night in and having little else to do, I plan to watch a few short early silent films and review them on here. I’ll stop once I’ve had too much beer, but hopefully I’ll get a few in and pad out the number of films I’ve reviewed with short silents. I’ll probably keep doing this at odd moments, too- it’s rather easier to make time for a fifteen minute short than for a full two hour movie.

So, somewhat inevitably, tonight’s first film, and possibly the first ever science fiction film, is the most well-known of these early silents from the splendid Georges Méliès, and it’s so, so wonderful. I’ll just pause for a moment to make the obligatory reference to the video for the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight, and we can actually start to talk about the film.

Back when I reviewed Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, the first silent I covered for this blog, I commented on how the static camera and the fact that everything is in mid-shot give the effect of watching a stage with a camera pointed at it. A film, at this early point, is therefore different from theatre not in any fundamental sense but only in that the level of spectacle is much greater. Any attempt at “realism“ therefore makes as little sense as it would on the stage.

And that’s why what we probably shouldn’t call “special effects” works so beautifully in this film. The use of matte paintings to denote anything either fantastical or in the background is so frequent that the film comes across as a cross between live action and a rather basic kind of cartoon. The roofs of houses, the telescope at the back of a lecture hall, even a very turn-of-the-century industrial scene with gloriously belching chimneys- all of these are made possible by the delightfully cheeky use of blatant matte paintings. This gives the film a real sense of whimsy and playfulness.

All this gets ratcheted up even further once we get to the moon. The rocket (fired out of a cannon, a la Jules Verne) lands in the eye of the Man in the Moon, and there’s a wonderful scene with dancers playing the stars and planets. The aliens can just be zapped with umbrellas(!) and the rocket takes off to return to Earth by, er, falling off a cliff. It’s all such fun.

There are a few interesting things to note, too. The Tricolour at the lauch scene makes it clear that the first nation to reach the Moon is, naturally, France. The clothes worn be everyone, and the obsession with headgear, looks far more “period” to modern eyes than anything from after the First World War.  And the film does at least manage to be “scientific” in the small detail of having the rocket eventually land in the sea.