A Trip to the Moon

If Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) is anything, and there is a bit of dispute about what it otherwise might be, it's a big-budget valentine to George Melies in the form of a history lesson-slash-docudrama aimed at the rest of us, implicitly admonishing us for forgetting about Melies, or even for never having experienced him at all. Cinema history is usually no match to the mighty forces of cinema present, and so Scorsese's love letter had a cinephile's true urgency to it, but actually he may not have needed to worry so much. Melies is very much alive and well in the film-lovers' universe; if you were to go shopping, you'd do best with Flicker Alley's comprehensive Flicker Alley box set George Melies: First Wizard of Cinema, but the more most and affordable Kino sampler The Magic of Melies and Facets' standard-bearing Melies the Magician may well meet your Melies needs. In France, Melies is an institution, and restoration of his films is a thriving mini-industry. Now, we can add to the pile a rare freak - Flicker Alley's new, steel-cased DVD-Blu-Ray combo presentation of the newly restored all-color edition of Melies's seminal film, the 1902 pathfinder A Trip to the Moon. First, let's settle some business and take a moment to consider the French pioneer as something other than a film-history staple and an oddity for scholars. It'd be something of a new tack to take in this country, regarding films that, being over a century old, reach right back to the form's infancy, movies' equivalent of cave-painting and hieroglyph-carving. But there's something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that transcends the films' role as mere evidence of historical development. For one thing, he was a master image-maker, and several of his iconic creations - most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye, from Trip - are undying cultural icons, familiar to the masses who aren't particularly aware of or even interested in the fact the movies were being made during the McKinley administration. It's become clear by now that Melies is more than just the stop-the-camera special-effects inventor and fin-de-siecle fantasist he's normally defined as having been - or, that those definitions are more resonant cultural ideas than we have usually presumed. Certainly, returning to the artesian source of every manifestation of cinematic mystery and sleight-of-hand has its own aesthetic buzz - the essential elan and spectacle nature of movies can be found in their prenatal form in Melies's short dreams, whether they be mere trickery or elaborate fairy tales, like The Impossible Voyage (1904), a 20-minute epic that uses up more visual imagination and hectic chaos than most features made in the next 40 years. There are no Melies masterpieces - he worked in the era before such a concept was even hatched. And it's true, as per the classic historical argument, that his films occupy a 2-D theatrical space in comparison with the early Edwin S. Porters and D. W. Griffiths. (The performances in Melies are far more expressive, amusing and, ironically, rich in conviction than any contemporaneous film, however.) But that's like dismissing Bosch because he wasn't Rembrandt. It could be said that as a pioneer Melies expanded the cinematic vocabulary by skipping over the third dimension and extending toward a fourth - a way of seeing that evoked the unseen and the impossible, a use of recorded light that smacked of the metaphysical. He elaborated on a space familiar to everyone then (the theater proscenium) and then, as if by magic, transformed it into the saw-it-with-our-own-eyes unreality of the ghostly and the subconscious. Not for nothing was Freud a youthful contemporary - but Melies never dared to suggest textual insight, making only comedies and always, always striving toward a life-embracingly irreverence, another advantage he had and still has over Porter and Griffith. But more than that, Melies's movies are beautiful to look at, the first triumphs of filmic design (and the most thoroughly conceived until German Expressionism.) Watching Melies is like seeing a secret, a lost and ancient universe of pretechnological inventions, nursery-rhyme caricature, painted landscapes, cartoon Victorian affluence, trains and ships and cars that are obviously just facades but into which characters climb anyway, moons and stars with human faces, human butterflies, outrageous cross-section views (Wes Anderson's debt remains unpaid), deceptive perspectives, movies within movies, relentless disappearances and reappearances, and so infinitely on. It's an arena of unfettered childlike-ness, a Seine of blissful unreality, as energetic and joyous as a playground, and comparable, as pop art, to the career-work of Maxfield Parrish, Chester Gould, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kirby, the Beatles and Hayao Miyazaki. Put that in your Cinema 101 DVD deck and smoke it. This new Trip all that and more - seething with vivid painterly color on every surface, it's palpable proof of a long-forgotten fact: that after a certain point in Melies's production (sometime around the turn of the century), all of his films were hand-colored, frame by frame, print by print. It was thought that none had survived Melies's famed 1923 bonfire of prints, ignited after his company was taken over by Pathe. But, as the accompanying documentary co-directed by Lobster Films' Serge Bromberg makes clear, one semi-decayed copy did arise, in the '90s, when it was then more or less put on ice until digital technology could catch up with its restorative requirements. The aspect of color is fascinating both in its origins and its contemporary guise: in Melies's day, the task of hand-coloring his films was farmed out to a factory of 300 patient women painters, each creating in effect a unique version of a particular film with each brushstroke. Today, as Bromberg's doc illustrates, the "restoration" is hardly that - the crumbling celluloid itself continues its dissolution somewhere, but only after being digitally captured, computer-synched up with other versions of the famous film, and then recolored with software that applies color only and exactly in the handmade patterns and style of the original colorist. (That is, in simulated digital brushstrokes.) Note that singular "colorist" - no one mentions it, but what we have now is a simulacra of a hand-colored version of A Trip to the Moon, not the hand-colored version of A Trip to the Moon, which of course never existed. It's almost as if Albrecht Durer had each of his prints individually hand-tinted, and only one survived, in a crystalline but not quite authentic form. We're not griping - thanks to digital technology, living tissue of our collective past lives again, and in a form no one has seen since before the Wright Brothers managed sustained flight. Run, don't walk. For more information about A Trip to the Moon in Color, visit Flicker Alley. by Michael Atkinson

The 1956 Best Oscar® winner Around the World in 80 Days begins with a montage of old silent film clips and a digest version of Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, filmed in 1902. The montage treats the fanciful French science fiction film as a quaint relic, not worth serious consideration in the years of Todd A-O and Cinerama. At that time Méliès' newest work was forty years old; by now most of it has gone largely unseen for a full century. Thanks to DVD, the French master's hundreds of painstaking short films, miniature marvels of art and special effects, are again readily viewable. Archivists Jeffery Masino and David Shepard's five-disc set Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) gathers over 170 of the French pioneer's films, many of them only a minute in length. Catalogued and organized for easy viewing, the collection is an invaluable record of the work of an underappreciated genius. Méliès is said to have been the first producer-director to construct a special studio for the making of films. As with the other film pioneers, his early work includes unadorned 'reality samples that simply celebrate the cinema's ability to capture moments in time. His first film Card Party is just a shot of some gentlemen playing cards, and runs all of sixty-seven seconds. Being an accomplished musician and music hall performer, Méliès, immediately began using his films as an extension of his stage act. Rather than record reality, he interpreted it in the form of magic tricks, jokes and exhibitions of special effects, turning the screen into a fantasyland with visuals that couldn't be replicated on any stage. Méliès' films proved that film audiences would accept stylized renderings of reality. The scenery backdrops, theatrical costumes and painted makeup fascinated storefront patrons of 1897, and his outlandish imagination of his visuals would soon give him the reputation of a maker of marvels -- the skeletal devil's coach in The Merry Frolics of Satan, the space cannon in A Trip to the Moon that fires its capsule into the Man in the Moon's eye. Some of his large-scale stage props required scores of puppeteer-operators. Méliès uses perspective tricks to make people into puppets or giants. The Man With the Rubber Head (1901) relies on one surefire gag: a man with an air bellows 'inflates' the hero's head, which grows to five times its size. Many of these special effects are pulled off with uncommon dexterity. A man tosses disembodied heads in a row on a table, and even now it's not immediately apparent how the trick is done. Through the magic of stop-motion, a Rajah's harem girl multiplies into seven, unfolding like a scroll. Méliès sometimes presents these miracles as simple tricks, but often they are part of a story about dreams, ghosts or the adventures of fantastic creatures. His male characters (often Méliès himself) prance about in tuxedos or period costumes, while his women appear as princesses and dazzling winged fairies. Many of the films in this set appear in original hand-tinted color, that makes the bat-wings of magical pixies all the more enchanting. The collection spreads the many films across five discs, with easily navigated menus. Inside the folding disc holder is a booklet printed on quality paper with a full index. Each entry includes the film's title in French and English, the year, the running time and whether the film is in B&W or color. It also includes the composer of the music score, by a noted group of composers: Eric Beheim, Brian Benison, Frederick Hodges, Robert Israel, Neal Kurz, Alexander Rannie, Rodney Sauer, Donald Sosin, Joseph Rinaudo and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The quality of the presentation varies a bit, as the films have been drawn from archival sources from around the world. The selection isn't just a collection of the holdings of one company; the package text says that the set contains nearly all of Méliès' surviving films. A number of the films have commentary tracks as well. The 'big' titles are all here. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the set contains The Conquest of the Pole (tinted, 31 min.), Tunneling the English Channel (15 min.), The Impossible Voyage (color, 21 min.), Gulliver's Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants (5 min.) and Baron Munchausen's Dream (11 min.). Also included are all nine episodes of Méliès' 1899 film about the Dreyfus affair -- eight one-minute episodes followed by a marathon 2-minute final chapter. As a special extra, the set begins with a tribute film from the legendary Georges Franju, 1953's Le grand Méliès. The B&W film is an affectionate meditation on the passing of cinema's first legendary showman, starring Méliès' son André as his own father. André Méliès is shown trying to buy a camera and then making his own, designing his studio and putting on a fairground exhibition of A Trip to the Moon to prove to exhibitors that it is worth his higher asking price. The half-hour film has the same slowed, gentle pace as Franju's later Judex, and uses similar titles. It begins with scenes of Méliès elderly widow in an empty room. We learn that most of the filmmaker's best work was immediately pirated all over the world, even by Edison! Méliès didn't return to show business after WW1 and instead opened a small toy and magic shop. The most endearing scene shows him entertaining two little kids with magic tricks. At one point he puts a handful of flowers to his face, and his head transforms into a full bouquet, like something out of a painting by Magritte. The surreal sight points straight to the Cocteau-influenced visuals in later Franju films: the bird-headed magician in Judex and the masked madwoman in Eyes Without a Face. Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) is a great entertainment and an invaluable research resource. Méliès' sense of fun and magic is very modern, and makes us feel as if the dawn of cinema happened just the day before yesterday. This title is currently unavailable. by Glenn Erickson