Screening with other coloured silent shorts and The Extraordinary Voyage
*Post-screening talk by Dr. Giovanna Fossati (In English)
Dir: Georges Méliès
Cast: Georges Méliès, Victor André, Bleuette Bernon
Just a few years after the invention of cinema, master filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès created the visually mesmerising A Trip to the Moon, his best remembered work and the world’s first ever sci-fi film, with magic tricks and film editing, processing, and hand colouring techniques. Six astronomers set off to the moon in a rocket created by themselves and met a range of strange inhabitants, with encounters in turn hair-raising and side-splitting. While Méliès made over 400 films in his career, most of them have been lost, including the colour version of A Trip to the Moon—until it was rediscovered among the collection of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. As the print was too fragile to undergo regular scanning, the fragments of 13,375 frames were captured via digital camera frame by frame over a period of 10 years, before the images were individually restored digitally, with missing parts coloured and colour graded referencing the black-and-white version. In The Extraordinary Voyage, directors Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange (Lobster Films) chronicle this restoration journey and interview recognised filmmakers on Méliès’ cinematic legacy.