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| Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), drawing by Georges Méliès’ |
At long last, I finally watched Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune—that marvelous 1902 fantasy in which a band of adventurous astronomers launch themselves toward the moon in a cannon-propelled capsule. In just thirteen minutes, the film carried me not only to the dawn of cinema but back to my own childhood, when my father would spool up his old reel-to-reel projector and cast black-and-white dreams onto a bedsheet pinned to the wall. Those flickering phantoms—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Land That Time Forgot, King Kong, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—were among my earliest and most cherished cinematic encounters with science fiction.
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| A scene from Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) |
Méliès’ masterpiece still holds the same spell. The fantastical Selenites—moon men who leap, dance, and vanish in curls of smoke—feel like creatures lifted from classical mythology or medieval bestiaries. He creates a universe where the improbable is welcomed, where curiosity is heroic, and where the heavens are an open invitation rather than a limit.
For anyone who wants to remember a time when art was playful, inventive, and unafraid of its own whimsy, Méliès’ lunar voyage remains a small but radiant treasure.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, December 3rd, Feast of St. Francis Xavier