If you hap­pen to vis­it the Ciné­math­èque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès locat­ed inside it. Ded­i­cat­ed to la Magie du ciné­ma, it con­tains arti­facts from through­out the his­to­ry of film-as-spec­ta­cle, which includes such pic­tures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Run­ner. Its focus on the evo­lu­tion of visu­al effects guar­an­tees a cer­tain promi­nence to sci­ence fic­tion, which, as a genre of “the sev­enth art,” has its ori­gins in France: specif­i­cal­ly, in the work of the muse­um’s name­sake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voy­age dans la lune) from 1902 we now rec­og­nize as the very first sci-fi movie.

Every­one has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the land­ing cap­sule crashed into the irri­tat­ed man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the ver­sion above, runs about fif­teen min­utes — you can bet­ter under­stand its impor­tance to the devel­op­ment of cin­e­ma.

For Méliès did­n’t pio­neer just a genre, but also a range of tech­niques that expand­ed the visu­al vocab­u­lary of his medi­um. Take the approach to the moon (played by the direc­tor him­self) imme­di­ate­ly before the land­ing, a kind of shot nev­er before seen in those days of prac­ti­cal­ly immo­bile movie cam­eras — and one that neces­si­tat­ed real tech­ni­cal inven­tive­ness to pull off.

What some­one watch­ing A Trip to the Moon in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels famil­iar than the ways in which it does­n’t. In an era when the­ater was still the dom­i­nant form of enter­tain­ment, Méliès adhered to the­atri­cal forms of stag­ing: he uses few cuts, and prac­ti­cal­ly no vari­ety in the cam­era angles. It would hard­ly seem worth not­ing that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that col­orized prints — labo­ri­ous­ly hand-paint­ed, frame by frame, on an assem­bly line — exist­ed even at the time of its orig­i­nal release; one such restored ver­sion appears just above.

In truth, Méliès opened up much deep­er pos­si­bil­i­ties for cin­e­ma than most of us acknowl­edge. As point­ed out in the A Mat­ter of Film video above, the motion pic­tures made before this amount­ed to exhibits of dai­ly life: impres­sive as tech­no­log­i­cal demon­stra­tions (and, so the leg­end goes, har­row­ing for the view­ers of 1896, who feared a train approach­ing onscreen would run them over), but noth­ing as nar­ra­tives. Like Méliès’ oth­er work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a sto­ry. It also proved some­thing more cen­tral to the medi­um’s pow­er: that it could tell that sto­ry in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years lat­er, even when the details of what hap­pens have long since lost their inter­est.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

Watch 194 Films by Georges Méliès, the Film­mak­er Who “Invent­ed Every­thing” (All in Chrono­log­i­cal Order)

The First Hor­ror Film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Drey­fus Affair, the Con­tro­ver­sial Film Cen­sored by the French Gov­ern­ment for 50 Years (1899)

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Pho­tos on this page cour­tesy of the Falk­lands Mar­itime Her­itage 

Few who hear the sto­ry of the Endurance could avoid reflect­ing on the apt­ness of the ship’s name. A year after set­ting out on the Impe­r­i­al Trans-Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drift­ing ice off Antarc­ti­ca. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton and his crew of 27 men wait­ed for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slow­ly crushed, and even­tu­al­ly had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the his­to­ry books is the sub-expe­di­tion made by Shack­le­ton and five oth­ers in search of help, which ensured the res­cue of every sin­gle man who’d been on the ship.

This har­row­ing jour­ney has, of course, inspired doc­u­men­taries, includ­ing this year’s Endurance from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, which debuted at the Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val last month and will come avail­able to stream on Dis­ney+ lat­er this fall. “The doc­u­men­tary incor­po­rates footage and pho­tos cap­tured dur­ing the expe­di­tion by Aus­tralian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Frank Hur­ley, who [in 1914] brought sev­er­al cam­eras along for the jour­ney,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Film­mak­ers have col­or-treat­ed Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to recre­ate crew mem­bers’ voic­es to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”

The fruits of an even more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D dig­i­tal mod­el “cre­at­ed from more than 25,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images cap­tured after the icon­ic ves­sel was dis­cov­ered in March 2022.”

As we not­ed at the time here on Open Cul­ture, the ship was found to be in remark­ably good con­di­tion after well over a cen­tu­ry spent two miles beneath the Wed­dell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on Novem­ber 21, 1915. Every­day items used by the crew — includ­ing din­ing plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able among the pro­tect­ed wreck­age.”

Endurance has, in oth­er words, endured. Its intact­ness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been mirac­u­lous­ly lift­ed out of the Wed­dell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improb­a­ble and impres­sive as Shack­le­ton and com­pa­ny’s sur­vival of its fate­ful first expe­di­tion. The degree of detail cap­tured by this new scan (not tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble back at the time of the last acclaimed doc­u­men­tary on this sub­ject), should make pos­si­ble fur­ther, even deep­er research into the sto­ry of the Endurance. But one ques­tion will remain unan­swer­able: would that sto­ry have res­onat­ed quite as long had the ship kept its orig­i­nal name, Polaris?

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

How an Ancient Roman Ship­wreck Could Explain the Uni­verse

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

Hear Ernest Shack­le­ton Speak About His Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in a Rare 1909 Record­ing

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.