George Melies directed, acted, devised accessories and costumes, painted sets, wrote the script, photographed and produced the film. Melies can be seen as an auteur through his unique attention to escapism and narrative and his use of magical special effects. He also could be seen as the first person to use continuity editing. Basically I shall focus on the mise-en-scene and film language that makes Voyage Dans Le Lune a film produced by an auteur.
A Trip To The Moon (as translated into English) was originally a Jules Verne story, but the stage magician Melies turned it into a cinematic fairytale after being inspired by the work of the Lumiere Bros., using his own magical talent. It was not his first film, but it is his most famous film.
Louis Lumiere saw the cinema as essentially a recording device for snapshots of reality. Melies's capital was his imagination, but for this film he drew on the influence of Jules Verne and H.G Wells. Sadly he was forced to give up film production in 1912 to make way for the commercial rivals that had been degrading him since the novelty of his films wore off. In 1915 he was made to turn his studio, "Star" studio, back into a stage-theatre. After his fame disintegrated it was not all negative, the French have always seen cinema as art and in the late 1920s Melies' work was taken more seriously concerning the context of its time and unique genre-style. As a consequence of this, George Melies was awarded the Legion of Honour and lived in an apartment, rent-free, until he died in 1938.
In 1896, Melies was filming a banal street scene when his camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to fix. When he watched the tape back he realised that it made a wonderful effect and played with the concept of time and space. This 'accident' led to the creation of some of the film industry's first-evers. Melies created the first ever double exposure in La Caverne maudite (1898), the first ever split-screen shot with performers acting opposite themselves in Un Homme de tete (1898) and the first ever dissolve in Cendrillon (1899). These effects laid the foundations for thousands of special effects in blockbuster movies of today. Another 'first ever' Melies created was perhaps the first ever mildly blue movie with Apres Le Bal, in which a lady is seen undressing after a ball, for a sand bath given to her by her maid. Therefore, George Melies had a great influence on the language of early cinema. This development was motivated by changing times, changing technologies, and changing social knowledge of life. The audience evolved with Melies for a while, then carried on evolving, not with Melies' fantasy, but with more expensive, corporate film companies.
A key point to add here would be that, as 1950s French Theorist Buzin noted, the long take and lack of camera movement gives a sense of the camera as a casual 'observer' and therefore gives a sense of realism, like Lumiere's 'men leaving a factory'. Therefore, in this film there was a heavy reliance on the use of straight cuts and more importantly mise-en-scene to create meaning, due to the fact that film language in the classic narrative style had not developed. However, Melies was the first to use continuity editing and jump cuts as special effects, which had not been adopted before. As well as this he used other techniques such as the 'Fade To Black' (transition or closure), 'Lap Dissolve', and a fade out superimposed with a fade up of a new image. These techniques were not long unique however, and soon became conventions in the film industry all over the world.
The special effects above are important as these were the techniques used in the production of Voyage Dans Le Lune. Even people who are not familiar with cinema would recognise the commonly recreated image of the moon grimacing with a rocket stuck in its right eye. This 'moon' actually had a person's face in the centre, in keeping with the age-old myth of the man in the moon. For a film audience in a 1902 cinema, Lumieres' film of a train entering a tunnel was frightening – this image must have been even worse for them. This moon image has actually become like an icon, representative of early cinema. Le Voyage Dans Le Lune is a captivating sci-fi fairytale that proved very popular with all audience members.
The clip I analyzed lasted three minutes and was from when the astronomers first descended into the interior of the moon crater to when the crashed rocket fell off the edge of the moon.
To start with there is a crude early 'close-up' of the grimacing moon. The audience reaction will be that of shock and surrealism, for they have never seen the moon like this before, and now they can. Because they are not familiar with how films are made they could mistake this for being the actual moon –which is a frightening thought. Then it jumps to the astronomers entering the crater. The shot is just of the set and the actors walk onto the scene stage right. I say 'stage right' because it is more like a play than a film – static camera, melodrama, music and a narrator by the film when it is being viewed. Any movement is done by the actors, not the camera. The camera remains static throughout the whole clip and does not tilt in any direction, or pan, or track, therefore it is like a stand-in for the audience watching a play. The set is simple and exaggerated with giant mushrooms in vivid colours. Of course these colours could not be deciphered on the black and white film, but it adds to the contrast of the colours with them being so different. In this scene (the grotto) a mushroom grows and an evil creature is jabbed with an umbrella before turning into a cloud of smoke. For this effect, all actors would have frozen still and the character Melies had jabbed would have left the set. Then a small and simple pyrotechnic would have been placed where the actor playing the creature was stood and set off as the camera rolls again – giving the illusion that the creature had disappeared into thin air. These special effects are what made Melies famous, his original profession as magician playing a large part of his fame. The camera cuts and goes to a scene that already has actors on the picture. In this scene the humans are brought onto the scene by moon people who have previously captured them. One of the astronauts (the President – Melies) makes a jump at the King and grabs him from his throne before throwing him to the ground and watching him too turn into a cloud of smoke, accompanied with atmospheric music. When the President approached the throne it was clear that a cut had been made while all actors paused, the King left the scene and a dummy look-a-like was put in his place because there is a slight jump as the President grabs the 'King' and throws him to the floor. Also the King suddenly looked artificial, but only to an audience member from the 21st Century. In 1902 this would have looked very realistic, which I shall expand on shortly.
After the King has been killed the astronauts run off the left side and the next scene is the astronauts running on from the right, this shows signs of early continuity editing – logical thought in time and space. Moon people chase the astronauts and, yet again, the President jabs one of them with his umbrella before running off left as well. This is surreal, and yet a quaint use of arsenal. The next scene, again, is shot by a static camera and all the humans get into their rocket except for the president, who is left outside the shell. To propel it back to Earth, he climbs down a rope that is hanging from the spaceship and due his weight gives the rocket enough impetus to fall from the edge of the moon. Just before it falls completely the president jumps onto the back and falls with it as we are left with a small group of moon people knelt on the floor watching it go, obvious from their actions that they are angry. This marked the end of my three minute clip. The whole of the clip, and indeed the whole of the film, having been filmed with a camera that was totally static and not near to the action – adding more to the 'play' effect and not the 'realism' effect. As technology advanced though, lighter camera's were invented, enabling more agility and scope for innovative techniques through camera movement. This was long after 1902 though, and so 'A Trip To The Moon' had no closer camera shots, no change in angle, and very basic camera work. Alternatively, for its era, A Trip To The Moon was innovative, imaginative, original and now, a classic.
Graham Turner said in, 'Film as Social Practice' (1988), that the most important thing Melies did was free the cinema of the notion that Real time equals Reel time. By this, he suggested that the audience could then interpret an edit to represent a passage of time or movement of space, therefore making the camera less of an observer of a play and more of a prop to portray meaning, time and space. 'Continuity Editing' was now a term used, begun by Melies, and the camera was a more important feature of cinema.
Because there is no speaking, the narrative is expressed by atmospheric music, and melodramatic actions. The costumes were designed by Melies and needed to be over-exaggerated to portray the characterisation of each individual to obtain an accurate reading. Therefore the characters that are supposed to be 'bad' (Selenites) are wearing dark, skin-tight costumes so they look like serpenty/animalistic creatures. They carry spears and leap around the set on all fours and sometimes on their legs, but stooped. Their facial expressions make them obviously look like 'bad' characters. The creatures are lower down than the humans and so their status is lower – making them weaker than the humans. The astronomers, however, wear upper-class day clothes of the era, and have umbrellas with them – not oxygen tanks or space suits, which could be seen as representative of society's knowledge of the Moon at this time, or merely a way of Melies to express his surreal perception of space and how it does not have to be all about science, but fantasy and 'Science-Fiction'. Melies plays the character of the President and the other astronauts are all upper class so it also represents that the only people who could actually go to the moon would have to be very rich, but it adds to the escapism and fantasy again because all classes of people can fantasise that they too are not only on the moon, but wearing the clothes the astronauts are wearing also.
The colours of the astronauts costumes are all crème and white – symbolic of 'good'. So in these early days of cinema the paradigm 'good Vs evil' may be present, or maybe this could be seen as a reflection of the Victorian view of colonialism. In the scene where the astronauts are led to the king of the Moon, they are led in by a small army of creatures. These creatures are wearing uniforms so the audience read this as meaning that it is an important place, with a ranking system. Unlike the Selenites, these creatures stand up strong and are as tall as the humans – more confrontational in status. The King is on a throne higher up than the rest of the people in this scene so it is obvious that he is the King, by his status and his Royal looking costume.
The sets are all very fantastical and detailed, however, as I have already covered, due to its age and the context with which it was made, the quality of the film prevents the set (and the actors) from being very clear. Regarding colours, because of the film being in black and white it was important that the colour shades and tones were defined by the costumes being either dark or bright. This fits in with the characters of the film because there are good characters and bad characters and so this fits in with the paradigm 'Good Vs Evil'. Therefore this is an early example of representation through mise-en-scene and the use of stereotypes in media. The use of characters within the story are used to identify with and this, combined with how Melies was influenced by iconography of sci-fi films, led to the dynamic paradigm of 'Alien Vs Human' which is present throughout.
A topic I touched upon earlier was the realism of the film. Although to a modern society it appears very unrealistic and rather crude, to an early cinema audience member the film could have not only been realistic, but quite scary too. Astronomical knowledge was limited to the lower and middle class, and even lots of the upper-class and so if they were watching people on the moon – why would they not believe it could really happen? What bothers me most though is the amount of violent implications that seem to go unnoticed. In the year 2000 violence is common on television, even before the watershed - it is almost expected. To a cinema audience who had never really seen much of films before other then observational cinema such as workers leaving a factory, or the comic man watering his garden, the jabbing of the moon people with umbrellas could have been quite offending. Although it is handled in a sci-fi genre style of them turning into smoke and there really being no graphic realistic violence, the implications of somebody stabbing another with an umbrella still remain. No real censorship existed until the annual reports of the National Council Of Public Morals in 1916, and that was in Britain.
Voyage Dans Le Lune, the film, lasted 14 minutes. Voyage Dans Le Lune, the legacy, will last a life-time.