Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." (review)

This anthology of essays devoted to Georges Méliès's 1902 motion picture sensation Le Voyage dans la Lune makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed.

That may be the volume's chief value. On the other hand, the essays do not tell us all that much we did not already know about the man's work; key essays by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Thierry Lefebvre and André Gaureault are not new.

Perhaps a fantastical idea in 1902, the original tale of a voyage to the moon as a "nowhere land" appears to have been True History, the work of a second-century Syrian author writing in Greek, Lucian of Samosata.

In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Was the illustrated firecracker-shaped rocket approaching the faraway red planet featured in the first installment the inspiration for the Méliès space ship?

Responding to the reality of a range of prints in black and white and color tints, and of different lengths, Paolo Cherchi Usai urges that we treat each print as an entity unto itself and not seek definitiveness. And Richard Abel tells us that as a consequence of a range of dubious - though by no means unique - practices, many members of the film's large original American audience had no idea of the identity of its French creator, associating it with the Edison studio.

The invitation to pronounce on the famous movie granted contributors license to revisit an older question: what did Georges Méliès have to do with the emergence of the edited narrative? The answer: little if anything.

In a reversal of what had been a cliché of early cinema history, the Méliès opus is now regarded as pre-cinema. This is a point reinforced in part by the deliberately backward-looking perspective of many of the essays. The illusionism of the féerie - Méliès's evident debt to the litterateurs Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and to Jacques Offenbach's 1875 "fairy-opera" La Voyage dans la lune - are now regarded as having had virtually nothing to do with what cinema became.

Victoria Duckett offers a reading of Méliès's manipulation of female presence in Voyage that draws on Laura Mulvey's appropriation of Jacques Lacan's concept of the gaze. Having lost its one-time enormous audience, the gaze the film itself now attracts is the gaze of the specialist in aesthetic and historical contemplation examining a museum piece.

The essays conclude with a citation by Viva Paci of words from Georges Franju's hommage in Le Grand Méliès (1953): "... I think perhaps you understand now why without Georges Méliès this movie and many others could never have been made".

But in context this is a sentiment at odds with the anthology's larger unspoken hypothesis about the severe limits of the Frenchman's influence, no longer hailed as the great inspiration of Edwin Porter and D.W. Griffith.

Murray Pomerance finds in each of Voyage's scenes "a dreamlike condensation" of abstract distances, which makes a point not unrelated to Tom Gunning's now familiar claim that the work of Méliès represented a pre-narrative "cinema of attractions."

Seizing on the Gunning claim, André Gaudeault has proposed that we understand the Méliès moonshot as sui generis, i.e. as a species of kine-attractography rather than as a stage, however primitive, in the evolution of the edited narrative: "Our task is to convince ourselves that the fundamental point of rupture in film history was not the invention of the moving picture camera in the 1890s (the Kinetograph, the Cinematograph) but rather the constitution of the institution 'cinema' in the 1910s, an institution whose first principle was a systematic rejection of the ways and...