Georges Méliès

It was really interesting to watch Georges Méliès short film La Voyage dans la lune because I had studied his life in my French class in high school but had never seen any of his work before. What I got from the black and white film was a story of men dressed as wizards changing their wardrobe to disguise themselves as astronauts who go to the moon. The moon is a fantastic world with it's own race of people, and mystical properties where an umbrella can become a mushroom.
It's very important when analyzing the film to think of it in its historical context of 1902. Melies was considered at his time to be a magician of film in regards to his editing and narration styles. He played around with theatrical sets for his film and explored the moon as more like a new planet than how we know the surface to be like today. Melies seemed to incorporate a lot of different perspectives on the moon, like the man in the moon, the moon people, etc. and did not pay as much attention to the scientific aspects, like the lack of gravity or oxygen on the lunar surface. When viewing the film scene by scene, I first noticed that the movements seemed very staged and choreographed and mechanical, like the women who came onto the screen in a line and exited in a very inorganic fashion. Due to the nature of silent films, the gestures of the actors seem overdone in order to more clearly convey the message of the film. The situation becomes comical when the men at the meeting are throwing papers at each other and sitting up and down quickly to cause a lot of commotion. The men disrobe on screen to show more appropriate contemporary attire underneath, which seems unusual and must be done for emphasis because normally if it were a play, costume changes would be made behind the scenes, and in any other film, it would cut scenes into the next shot where the same actors were just wearing different clothing. This seems to me to signify a change in attitude. The workers to the left in the next scene are very intriguing due to their extremely repetitive motions. They look almost like wind-up toys, or at the very least, less than human. Melies seems to be setting up a strong comparison of the socially inept intellectuals and the hard-working laborers. Once shot off into space, we see the man in the moon who gets increasingly closer and has more of a human face. The editing at the time was fantastic, but the cut from one piece where the capsule is not visible, and then suddenly it is in the eye of the face and causing it pain. Next we see that the landing spot is not actually on an eyeball of the moon man and a comical sketch of many large people coming out of a smaller object is seen, much like several large clowns coming out of a very small car seen at a circus. Once all the men emerge from the capsule and stand in front of it, it mysteriously disappears. The snowing caused by celestial beings is also humorous and a display of Melies wizard-like applications of new editing skills as well as theatrical sets. The cavernous undergrounds of the moon appear to be like mushroom forests. The moon people do not follow the conventions of green alien people, and instead seem more primitive primate-ish, which may have been influenced by the scientific community's thoughts on the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, published in 1857. The moon inhabitants are destroyed in a puff of smoke that is very much like magician's disappearing acts. The capsule falls off the cliff of the moon and somehow lands in water on earth. The fallen moon person appears on earth with the "scientists" who are rewarded for their services. This seems to be Melies making fun of scientists who provide no contribution to society, and actually attacked the native race of people on the moon instead of attempting a peace treaty. It seems politically charged, especially for a comedic science fiction film.