Number of user reviews: 152
User score: 8.2
Here it is, the small-c canonical First Movie Ever, the first entry in every edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, the film everyone watches on their first day of their first college film class, the movie that is almost certainly the first film that will come to someone's mind if asked to name an "early film." One only has to look at its number of user votes to see how much A Trip to the Moon has been ensconced within the canon: over 30,000, almost an order of magnitude more than Roundhay Garden Scene's 3900, which was previously the highest total.
Oh, wait, I sad movie there a couple of sentences back, didn't I? Well, yes. You see, until now, I have been sticking mostly to the term film, not as some academic affectation, but because the previous films in the IMDB Canon were a prelude to the main event, more experiments or proofs-of-concepts than the developed narratives we associate with the word movie. That all changes today. A Trip to the Moon is a movie-ass movie.
There are several reasons that A Trip to the Moon has became the de facto beginning of film as we know it. First, it was exceptionally popular in its time, achieving wider distribution than any other comparable film--though, as histories usually point out, many of the prints were pirate copies for which Melies received no remuneration. Second, it is an early effects film; this is not a film where one needs to udnerstand the historical context to "get it". Films like Monkeyshines hold little interest other than the time and place in which they were made, the technology used to make them, the people involved; they are entirely paratext. Conversely, A Trip to the Moon stands on its own. While not the first self-sufficient entry of the IMDB Canon (that would be Cinderella, or perhaps Four Heads), A Trip is a much longer and more complex narrative than anything Melies (or, for that matter, anyone else) has done so far.
But maybe a more important factor than all of those is the fact that A Trip to the Moon is sci-fi. Genre has not been much discussed in this project so far (Cinderella and fantasy being the exception), owing to the dearth of narratives up to this point. But here, it feels especially relevant: A Trip is almost unanimously regarded as the first science fiction film, a genre that, in 2017, is more current and popular than it has ever been. A Trip to the Moon simply appeals more to the cultural imagination of 2017 than its contemporaries, such as, say, The Great Train Robbery, which is steeped in a Western frontier ideology that has since faded. That is not to say that the endurance of sci-fi is in any way "organic"; even ignoring its inextricable ties to the growth of industrial capitalism (hence the libertarian leanings of most sci-fi in its view of technology as inherently liberatory), the film business itself has become increasingly compatible with sci-fi as a form. In an increasingly globalized film market, the idea of looking away from Earth, and thus, not being tied down to its politics, is an attractive notion. But it is just that--a notion. There are no "apolitical" films so long as those films are made by human beings in concert with other human beings (and even a robot could only make a film as "apolitical" as its programming.) Sci-fi is of course well-acquainted with techno-fetishism, at its worst making technology into outright religion, promising to free humanity from its feeble limitations, to raise homo sapiens to godhood. And what better way to show humanity exceeding its limits than by showing them venturing from Earth altogether?
This idea of "humanity" as an undifferentiated mass, hurtling as a single unit toward the future, is, surprisingly, reflected in Melies' film. Unlike Four Heads or The India Rubber Head, A Trip to the Moon features not Melies the Genius, nor any other singular character; the protagonists are instead a group of unnamed Earthlings with no apparent motivations or biographies beyond being the subjects of space travel. They go to the moon, they kill some moon-men (again with the cartoonish murderous comedy that Melies was so fond of), and they go back to Earth. Where Melies' previous films focused on the individual, A Trip concerns itself with race. Ostensibly this is the human race we're talking about, but the astronauts' genocidal treatment of the moon-men--who resemble Native American stereotypes--feels not like a conflict between humans and aliens, but like a colonizer murdering their would-be subjects into submission. The moon-men may have chased the astronauts off for now, but while the humans can always come back to finish the slaughter, the natives can only sit and wait to be conquered. In that sense, the film is chauvinistic--presenting murder as fun adventure--without specifying chauvinism over anyone in particular, except non-humans, of course. Human supremacy over aliens is taken as a given in A Trip to the Moon, but this attitude opens up an uncomfortable discussion; when the aliens still look and act like humans, where does that leave the movie, ideologically? Is the human who acts like an alien then a subhuman who can be killed without mercy or guilt? If so (and frankly, even if not), A Trip to the Moon is the earliest cinematic example of sci-fi legitimizing reactionary nationalism under the guise of human universalism. Melies' ideology will strongly influence later films in the genre, even those made today.
Other connections: It's safe to say that A Trip to the Moon is one of the most influential films in history, from its technical tricks, to its narrative structure, to its sci-fi theme, to its stylized set design. It was also an early hand-colored film (the current source print being rediscovered in 1993.)
Other most-voted titles of 1902:
2. Gulliver's Travels (Georges Melies | 516 votes)
3. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edwin S. Porter | 510 votes)
4. Jack and the Beanstalk (George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter | 489 votes)
5. Fun in a Bakery Shop (Edwin S. Porter | 258 votes)
6. The Human Fly (Georges Melies | 235 votes)
7. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Ferdinand Zecca | 213 votes)
8. The Colonel's Shower Bath (Georges Melies | 211 votes)
9. The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelee and Destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique (Georges Melies | 208 votes)
10. Mephistopheles' School of Magic (Georges Melies | 208 votes)
IMDB lists 1,815 titles for the year altogether.
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