page_title: A Trip to the Moon
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: A Trip to the Moon / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: Frame from the only surviving hand-colored print of Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon, showing the commemorative statue seen in the final scene.
context_page_description: A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 French adventure short film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites, and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. It features an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers, led by Méliès himself in the main role of Professor Barbenfouillis, and is filmed in the overtly theatrical style for which Méliès became famous.
  The film was an internationally popular success on its release, and was extensively pirated by other studios, especially in the United States. Its unusual length, lavish production values, innovative special effects, and emphasis on storytelling were markedly influential on other film-makers and ultimately on the development of narrative film as a whole.
context_section_description: With its pioneering use of themes of scientific ambition and discovery, A Trip to the Moon is sometimes described as the first science fiction film. A Short History of Film argues that it codified "many of the basic generic situations that are still used in science fiction films today". However, several other genre designations are possible; Méliès himself advertised the film as a pièce à grand spectacle, a term referring to a type of spectacular Parisian stage extravaganza popularized by Jules Verne and Adolphe d'Ennery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Richard Abel describes the film as belonging to the féerie genre, as does Frank Kessler. It can also be described simply as a trick film, a catch-all term for the popular early film genre of innovative, special-effects-filled shorts—a genre Méliès himself had codified and popularized in his earlier works.
  A Trip to the Moon is highly satirical in tone, poking fun at nineteenth-century science by exaggerating it in the format of an adventure story. The film makes no pretense whatsoever to be scientifically plausible; the real waves in the splashdown scene are the only concession to realism. The film scholar Alison McMahan calls A Trip to the Moon one of the earliest examples of pataphysical film, saying it "aims to show the illogicality of logical thinking" with its satirically portrayed inept scientists, anthropomorphic moon face, and impossible transgressions of laws of physics. The film historian Richard Abel believes Méliès aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque". Similarly, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht described the film as a work "satirizing the pretensions of professors and scientific societies while simultaneously appealing to man's sense of wonder in the face of an unexplored universe."
  There is also a strong anti-imperialist vein in the film's satire. The film scholar Matthew Solomon notes that the last part of the film (the parade and commemoration sequence missing in some prints) is especially forceful in this regard. He argues that Méliès, who had previously worked as an anti-Boulangist political cartoonist, mocks imperialistic domination in the film by presenting his colonial conquerors as bumbling pedants who mercilessly attack the alien lifeforms they meet and return with a mistreated captive amid fanfares of self-congratulation. The statue of Barbenfouillis shown in the film's final shot even resembles the pompous, bullying colonialists in Méliès's political cartoons. The film scholar Elizabeth Ezra agrees that "Méliès mocks the pretensions of colonialist accounts of the conquest of one culture by another," and adds that "his film also thematizes social differentiation on the home front, as the hierarchical patterns on the moon are shown to bear a curious resemblance to those on earth."
caption: The statue of Barbenfouillis, seen here in a frame from the hand-colored print, may be intended to satirize colonialism.[68]
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