Air's new trip to the moon
January 30, 2012 9:34 AM   Subscribe

“Even if you've never heard of Melies, you've probably seen the film's most famous shot: a moon with a human face, wincing at the spaceship that has just crashed into its eye.” A full-color restoration of Georges Melies’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) debuted this year at Cannes, with a new soundtrack by Air. Full article and preview clip (NPR)
posted by spitefulcrow (33 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Raise your hand if you only learned who Melies is thanks to Hugo, and now can't wait to see the restored film.
posted by Phire at 9:54 AM on January 30, 2012 [10 favorites]


oooooooo
posted by The Whelk at 10:04 AM on January 30, 2012


On yesterday's CBS Sunday Morning director Martin Scorsese talks about his admiration for Melies and how he portrayed him (played by Ben Kingsley) [video | 09:17]. in his recent Oscar-nominated film Hugo.
posted by ericb at 10:04 AM on January 30, 2012


I learned who Méliès was from The Smashing Pumpkins, although I don't like to admit it.
posted by pinky at 10:04 AM on January 30, 2012 [9 favorites]


I learned who Méliès from the amazing book that "Hugo" is based on, and can't recommend highly enough.
posted by jbickers at 10:07 AM on January 30, 2012


(who he was, that is)
posted by jbickers at 10:07 AM on January 30, 2012


BTW --As a nod to the automaton in the children's novel "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" (upon which the film is based) CBS Sunday Morning had a related piece [video | 05:42] on "the extraordinary world of automatons."
posted by ericb at 10:08 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]


I find the music to be a bit distracting, sorry Air.

But glad this is being rediscovered by so many now.
posted by superelastic at 10:10 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]


One full fourteen minute version (sans Air) available here
posted by IndigoJones at 10:13 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]


I thought that this movie was fairly well known, I remember reading about it back in the '70s although I never actually got to see more than stills from it until about ten years ago.
posted by octothorpe at 10:17 AM on January 30, 2012


Funny, I was just reading this morning how Thomas Edison pirated and stole the film to redistribute in the US, while at the same time attempting to maintain a monopoly over people he deemed to be pirates (who later founded Hollywood -- in order to get away from Edison's tight control over film distribution) and who now are in the same role that Edison was against modern day pirates, even though they were founded on piracy.

Rotten lot. All of 'em.

Here's the article (clearly biased, of course).
posted by symbioid at 10:18 AM on January 30, 2012 [5 favorites]


I thought that this movie was fairly well known, I remember reading about it back in the '70s although I never actually got to see more than stills from it until about ten years ago.

Yeah, I'm sure I'd seen clips when I was a kid... I didn't know the name of the director, but "moon guy with a rocket stuck in his face" is a pretty common meme.
posted by delmoi at 10:29 AM on January 30, 2012


Yeah Edison is a well-known dickbag.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:29 AM on January 30, 2012 [4 favorites]


It seems to me that films like this shouldn't be colorized. It's vandalism IMHO.

I remember hearing that someone had plans to colorize Casablanca, but gave it up after the resulting uproar. This ought to be the same way: those films were made in B/W, by directors who knew their trade and their tools and tuned their visuals for B/W.

Color isn't needed, and shouldn't be added.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:52 AM on January 30, 2012


Actually, the film reels of A Trip To the Moon were hand-painted by Méliès. This is a restoration of one of the prints which he had colored himself. It was not uncommon at the time for a director to hand-paint his shorts.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 10:57 AM on January 30, 2012 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I was going to say that I thought the tinting was period.

I'm really looking forward to the album and the restored version. I'm also really sad I missed the live soundtrack the Golden Hornet Project did of it when they showed it last month with Hugo.
posted by immlass at 10:59 AM on January 30, 2012


Well, I love Air and this movie, so I'm delighted by the whole lot.
posted by mykescipark at 11:04 AM on January 30, 2012



It was not uncommon at the time for a director to hand-paint his shorts.


How many times have we heard that alibi before!
 
posted by Herodios at 11:06 AM on January 30, 2012 [4 favorites]


Yet another reason to thank Mr. Shelton and is Art of the Motion Picture class wayyyyyy back in high school.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:08 AM on January 30, 2012


Raise your hand if you only learned who Melies is thanks to Hugo

Off by at least forty years. We used to see the ship-in-the-eye clip all the time at sf conventions and in tv documentaries (the networks used to be required to do a certain amount of edutainment) about early film, silent film, color in film, science fiction in film, history of 'special effects', early views about the moon, space, and space travel, thoughts about the future throughout history, etc. etc. etc.

Yes: sometimes attributed, but often not.

I bet I saw it a hundred times during the summer of 1969 alone.

Didn't know about the toy store in the train station, though (if that's even true).
 
posted by Herodios at 11:15 AM on January 30, 2012


Here's another comment to act as antidote to the Air-as-distraction assessment above:

There are moments in this short preview when the combination of action and music is fucking awesome.
posted by tapesonthefloor at 11:19 AM on January 30, 2012 [2 favorites]


Didn't know about the toy store in the train station, though (if that's even true).

I wondered the same thing after seeing Hugo. According to Wikipedia: "By the mid-1920s he was making a meager living as a candy and toy salesman at the Montparnasse station in Paris, with the assistance of funds collected by other filmmakers."
posted by marxchivist at 11:33 AM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]


The first time I saw more than 60 seconds of A Trip to the Moon was on Night Flight. They used Pink Floyd's Echoes as a soundtrack.
posted by The Deej at 11:35 AM on January 30, 2012 [4 favorites]


On a related note, anyone interested in Méliès and paying attention to the festival circuit this year would be well served to try and track down the recently produced French documentary The Extraordinary Voyage by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange (interview subjects on the influence of his films include Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry). Those in the pacific northwest may be excited to know that it's playing the Portland International Film Festival in February, with screenings on 2/10 and 2/11.
posted by trackofalljades at 11:41 AM on January 30, 2012


Méliès accidentally invented 3D film as well (from my old FPP).
posted by Paragon at 12:21 PM on January 30, 2012 [2 favorites]


The CBS Sunday Morning Scorsese clip (above) talks about his managing the train station shop, his hand-tinted films and discovery of 3D.
posted by ericb at 12:44 PM on January 30, 2012


Tom Hanks as Méliè was one of the great parts of HBO's excellent series From the Earth to the Moon.
posted by euphorb at 12:45 PM on January 30, 2012


They had horribly interlaced video rips in 1902?
posted by Sys Rq at 1:20 PM on January 30, 2012


It seems to me that films like this shouldn't be colorized. It's vandalism IMHO.

TFA: Modern audiences know Le Voyage as a black-and-white movie, but in fact, Melies hand-painted each frame of the film for special screenings. Those hand-painted reels were lost for decades; when they were discovered in Barcelona back in 1993, archivists began a years-long process of repairing the badly damaged film.

That sounds like it's less "colorization" and more "restoration". Is that still vandalism?
posted by spitefulcrow at 1:44 PM on January 30, 2012


Sometimes the choice is between restoration and losing it forever.
posted by borges at 2:30 PM on January 30, 2012 [1 favorite]


I don't get the point in turning it into a music video for Air. Why not just score it with something less likely to take center-stage.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 6:55 PM on January 30, 2012


This restoration took YEARS of painstaking work to complete, and the source material was so deteriorated I hesitate even to call it a restoration -- the process didn't seem that much different from CGI animation from scratch.

Anyway, I saw this last fall at an archivist symposium, and thought the Air soundtrack worked unexpectedly well. I highly recommend it if it comes to a theater near you. Hand-colored films are rare and such a pleasure to see!
posted by estherbester at 7:11 PM on January 30, 2012 [2 favorites]


I was first introduced to the film from the episode of 'Reading Rainbow' when LeVar visits the Library of Congress (one of my favorites of the series).

It was a total delight to me when I was a kid, and then a teenager (in the video for Smashing Pumpkins' 'Tonight, Tonight,' as linked up above). There's something so wonderfully whimsical and full of life about the film (brought across beautifully in Hugo's sequences showing the staging of Méliès' films in flashback) that one can't help but watch the thing wearing an enormous grin.

Looking forward with great anticipation to the restoration, and (hopefully) seeing it on the silver screen.
posted by junebug at 7:38 PM on January 30, 2012


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