page_title: The Impossible Voyage
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: The Impossible Voyage / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawing by Besnier for L'Illustration (Vol. LXXX, No. 2075, 2 December 1882, page 1), showing scenes from the play Voyage à travers l'impossible. More information about this engraving here.
context_page_description: The Impossible Voyage, also known as An Impossible Voyage and Whirling the Worlds, is a 1904 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by Jules Verne's play Journey Through the Impossible, and modeled in style and format on Méliès's earlier, highly successful A Trip to the Moon, the film is a satire of scientific exploration in which a group of geographically minded tourists attempt a journey to the sun using various methods of transportation. The film was a significant international success at the time of its release, and has been well-received by film historians.
context_section_description: The original French title of the film, Le Voyage à travers l'impossible, comes from a stage spectacular of the same name, written in 1882 by Jules Verne. Méliès was probably inspired by memories of this play, but otherwise the film bears little connection to it; the plot structure appears to be inspired more closely by a previous Méliès hit, A Trip to the Moon.
  The Impossible Voyage was made during the summer of 1904. The film, running to 374 meters (about 20 minutes at silent-film projection speeds), was Méliès's longest to date, and cost about ₣37,500 (US$7,500) to make. In its staging and design, the film is symmetrical with A Trip to the Moon: while the astronomers' progress toward the moon in that film is consistently depicted as left-to-right motion, the Institute of Incoherent Geography's progress toward the sun in The Impossible Voyage is consistently right-to-left. While most of the film was shot inside Méliès's glass studio, the scene at the foot of the Jungfrau was filmed outdoors, in the garden of Méliès's property in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis. The factory set in the second scene recalls the Hall des Machines at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Techniques used for special effects include stage machinery (including scenery rolling horizontally and vertically), pyrotechnics, miniature effects, substitution splices, and dissolves.
caption: Engraving of the play Journey Through the Impossible, one of Méliès's inspirations
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