Analysis
Some historians suggest that although A Trip to the Moon was among the most technically innovative films up until that time, it still displays a primitive understanding of narrative film technique. American film scholar Ken Dancyger writes:
no more than a series of amusing shots, each a scene unto itself. The shots tell a story, but not in the manner to which we are accustomed. It was not until the work of American Edwin S. Porter that editing became more purposeful.
Porter was inspired partially "by the length and quality of Méliès's work".
Although most of the editing in A Trip to the Moon is purely functional, there is one unusual choice: when the astronomers land on the lunar surface, the "same event is shown twice, and very differently". The first time it is shown crashing into the eye of the Man in the Moon; the second time it is shown landing on the Moon's flat terrain. The concept of showing an action twice in different ways was experimented with again by Porter in his film Life of an American Fireman, released roughly a year after A Trip to the Moon.
Some have claimed that the film was one of the earliest examples of pataphysical film, while stating that the film aims to "show the illogicality of logical thinking". Others still have remarked that the director, Georges Méliès, aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque". This is seen as an inherent part of the film's plot: the story pokes fun at the scientists and at science in general, in that upon traveling to the Moon, the astronomers find that the face of the Moon is, in fact, the face of a man, and that it is populated by little green men.
Read more about this topic: A Trip To The Moon
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