In this multi-part essay, we explore the representations of the Moon in cinema before 1969. Starting with A trip to the Moon.

As soon as human were able to capture continuous photographs to form a moving image, they began to imagine their greatest fantasies transcribed onto a screen. It wasn’t long after the first views of the Lumière brothers in the 1890s that the camera emerged from a realistic context. Very quickly, the camera was used to place the spectator in an unknown, hostile or remote environment. As early as 1902, George Méliès transported the first spectators with A Trip to the Moon. Driven by the speeches and ambitions of Professor Barbanfoullis (played by Mélies) to propel men to the moon, scientists set about designing a projectile that would lead them to explore uncharted territory.

Contemporary events and the imaginary world of his childhood were the sources of Méliès’ stage productions. As early as 1899, he directed The Dreyfus Affair, and in 1902, The Coronation of King Edward VII. While Méliès used reality as a source for his works, the literary imagination of science-fiction novels provided the material for his fantasy films. When it came to A Trip to the Moon, this took shape with two authors Méliès used to visually nourish his tale: Jules Verne and H.G. Welles.

Jules Verne’s contribution to Méliès’ cinema is numerous, and can be seen in several of his works, such as The Impossible Voyage (1904) and Under the Seas (1907). It is often suggested that the books of Jules Verne were an integral part of the director’s youth and fascination with magic and supernatural tales. With the ability to bring his favorite novels and stories to life with a camera and his skills in special effects, Méliès multiplied references to Verne in his works. In A Trip to the Moon, the director reused the shell-shaped projectile design described in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 to send his scientists into orbit:

[Verne describing the shape of the projectile] To see it with its imposing forms and conical hat, one would have taken it for one of those thick pepper-pot turrets that medieval architects hung from the corners of fortified castles.[1]

An aesthetic that Méliès would use again two years later in The Impossible Voyage, in which scientists decide to take a train to the sun. Although the novel deviates from reality on several occasions, Jules Verne is keen to make his story scientifically plausible. Calculations of the acceleration needed to reach the Moon were close to the results of the first Apollo mission, even though the use of a cannon to launch the spaceship could not have produced such power.[2]

On the left, the scientists’ spaceship in Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), on the right, the spaceship imagined by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon (1865).

Left, The Impossible Voyage, Georges Méliès (1904), right, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne (1865).

Méliès’ vision of the Moon is a vision of spectacle, a representation manipulated to conform to a cinema still considered a fairground attraction. Méliès was a man of entertainment and illusion, of magic, and his films were more influenced by theatrical and circus codes than by scientific realism. Méliès’ characters themselves are not rooted in serious, dramatic characterization. From the very first images of the scientists at their conference, a chaotic, theatrical atmosphere reigns, as the professor attempts to explain the journey with diagrams and large hand movements, while the scientists continue to move in all directions. The group’s arrival on the Moon perpetuates these same characteristics. Fresh from their spaceship, the mood is one of discovery and excitement.

Méliès’s image of the Moon is also heavily imbued with references. This time, it is inspired by the writings of H. G. Welles and his 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. The land around the scientists is rocky, raw and arid, with large, spiky mountains rising all around, overhung by what appear to be clouds. Soon, as the group takes its first steps, an explosion sends them reeling. While Méliès plays with traps and other pyrotechnics to surprise viewers and create a comic spectacle, he also shows the Moon as a hostile, unpredictable terrain. The scientists’ journey continues as they discover fauna and flora of abnormal proportions beneath the Moon’s surface. The use of an unknown area of the Moon not visible to the naked eye from Earth serves as Méliès’ justification for making us believe in the possibility of life on the Moon. Brian Willems describes this use:

Because the moon is a well-known figure of desolation seen with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth, it is often necessary, in order to justify any form of strangeness, to remove it a little further from human understanding, by going underground.[3]

The scientists taking their first steps on the moon, A Trip to the Moon, George Meliès, 1902.

The nature found by the scientists and the professor, however, does not seem alien to Earth – quite the contrary. On their paths, they come across trees, flowers and mushrooms of disproportionate size. While it might be tempting to consider that Méliès’s imagination was rather limited here, it may be thought that depicting everyday floral elements in a gigantic version was a more effective and identifiable way of testifying to the extraordinary of these basements to an audience of 1902. The scene also introduces the presence of tribes on the Moon, moving about on all fours, forming a hybrid semi-human/animal creature. Equipped with antennae, spikes and bulging eyes, they represent the first encounter between our explorers and similar species. Once again, Méliès’ imagination uses that of Wells in the aesthetics of these things on the border between insect and human. The first two creatures give way to an army hunting our scientists. The expedition soon shifts from an exciting, even hysterical adventure to chaos and survival in order to get back to Earth. As our scientists are captured, the next shot introduces us to the Moon’s civilization. A human/insect people worshipping a king and living in what might be considered a castle.

The first encounter with lunar civilization, The First Men in the Moon, H.G Wells, 1901.

The giant vegetation around the scientists, A Trip to the Moon, George Meliès, 1902.

By 1902, technological advances in telescopes had made it possible to refute the hypothesis of life on the Moon. But the general public was more fascinated by the opposite case. In 1835, in the New York Sun newspaper, six articles purportedly written by Dr. Andrew Grant described astronomer John Herschel’s recent discoveries of life on the Moon, with accompanying illustrations. Announcing the discovery of creatures resembling bison or goats, the public’s attention shifted to the news that a people of half-man, half-bat creatures had built a temple on the moon. Articles in the New York Sun quickly spread around the world, only to be dismissed as a hoax a few weeks later. Dr. Andrew Grant’s writings were in fact those of New York Sun reporter Richard Locke. But although the truth has been re-established, the collective and scientific imagination remains convinced of life on the Moon, as evidenced by an article in The Young Astonomer in 1846: “It is the general opinion of astronomers that the Moon is inhabited.”[4]  As we entered the twentieth century, with the advent of gravity, belief in life on the Moon became rarer and rarer. As authors like Verne and Wells capitalized on an exotic vision of the Moon to offer adventure, the scientists seemed to cling to the smallest possibilities of life:

Wonderful as are our telescopes, they fail to show us any form of life on our satellite. Her giant trees, if she should have any, would dwindle away into insignificance, becoming as a twig or a blade of grass ; elephants and mastodons, were they browsing on her plains, would resolve themselves into beetles and grass-hoppers, lost to view in the infinity of distance which separates the observer from his object as he gazes at the moon. Even with all this, still life in some weird form may exist on the moon.[5]

The depiction of the various lunar animals published in the New York Sun journal in 1835.

After a quick battle with the king, our explorers manage to win their ship and return to Earth, where they are welcomed as heroes. Although Méliès’ film is primarily a spectacle rather than a theory, it attests to the major influences of literature and illustration on audiences and scientists alike. The imagination of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and the success of their works demonstrate the public’s fascination and desire to see the Moon as a mysterious satellite full of secrets. The scientific community too, despite the evidence provided by technological advances over the decades, still seemed to believe in the possibility. In the end, Méliès merely reproduced what Verne and Welles had described in their book years earlier, but he breathed new life into theories that were still very much part of the collective imagination at the time.

---

[1] VERNE Jules, De la Terre à la Lune, Voyages extraordinaires, 1865, p. 178.

[2] CHRISTIE Ian, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, State University of New York Press, 2011, pp. 70-71.

[3] WILLEMS Brian, Shooting the Moon, Zero Books, 2015, p. 19.

[4] John S.C. Abbott, The Young Astronomer, The Saxton and Miles, New York, 1846, p.44.

[5] Molton Ancrum Shuler, The Family Celestial, Broadway Publishing Company, 1915, pp. 34-35.