A Trip to the Moon (1902), George Méliès / The Extraordinary Voyage (2011), Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange

George Méliès (1861-1938), a contemporary of Auguste and Louis Lumière,

created the first international hit in motion picture history in 1902.
For this film, he conceived an outlandish scenario,
that man would travel to the moon...

With the mind of a practiced magician, Méliès was quick to pick up on the visual tricks he could play with a camera. In only his first year of experimenting with film in 1896, he used stop motion and substitution to produce special effects in which images vanished or duplicated from one frame to the next. This technique can be seen in his early work such as The Four Troublesome Heads (1898):

His choreographed antics transferred theatrics to silent film, making Méliès the father of cinematic showmanship.

As the process of early filmmaking required natural light, Méliès built a studio of glass in Montreuil-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. He hand painted his sets, dressed actors and actresses in fanciful costume, and filmed from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., when there was enough daylight.

It was in this studio in 1902 where Méliès created A Trip to the Moon, 16 minutes of fantasy film in which Professor Barbenfouillis, head of the Institute of Incoherent Astronomy, decides that his crew will voyage to the moon in a craft resembling a giant bullet.

Inspired by two novels, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901), A Trip to the Moon was by far the most imaginative film production to date. Méliès followed a new trend and had all 13,375 black and white frames hand painted in color. Bright colors added even more zest to the already charming tale.

Two of the most strikingly vibrant images are while the crew is on the moon, encountering plant and extraterrestrial life (left), and when the vessel descends into the ocean upon its return to Earth (right).

Although A Trip to the Moon achieved worldwide renown, the film was extensively pirated and plagiarized in America, and Méliès received insufficient recognition for his masterpiece. To prevent further piracy of his work, Méliès opened the Star Film Agency in New York City in 1903. A Trip to the Moon, however, would turn out to be his most acclaimed film, and his efforts were too late.

Méliès continued to produce films, but his style eventually became outdated. He reached an ultimate low in 1923 when he burned 500 of his own film negatives, and suddenly the majority of his work had vanished.

Over time, it's easier to forget about someone, no matter how innovative, when little remains to spark the memories. A color version of A Trip to the Moon was thought to be lost forever. Then, in 1993, a copy was found in Barcelona. The nitrate film sock was considerably decomposed, but filmmaker and restoration expert Serge Bromberg was dedicated to carefully unraveling it and photographing each individual frame.

Eight years went by before technology would permit further restoration of the colored images. In 2010, the restoration project was finally launched at Technicolor Los Angeles. Frames from a black and white version were used for reference and as replacements for any partially or completely damaged colored frames. With the help of digital color replication, Méliès' enchanting excursion was reincarnated in color and debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011.

Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange chronicle Méliès' career and the pursuit to restore A Trip to the Moon in the documentary An Extraordinary Voyage. Granting new life to Méliès' work a century after its creation is indeed extraordinary, when the vibrant motion picture was thought to be lost forever. A new soundtrack by the French band Air accompanies the restored version.