The spectacle of the moon conquest: how visual culture shaped Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune and its anti-imperialist satire

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is well-established that Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon inspired Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune. At the same time, though, the film’s written sources cannot fully account for its iconographic, aesthetic, and semantic stratification. For this reason, the survey will include a set of still neglected or underestimated references of this pioneering work in motion picture art, especially its visual antecedents. More precisely, elaborating on Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault’s notion of ‘cinema of attractions’, the central argument is that visual culture and pictorial tradition, together with non-traditional theatre paradigms, concurred to determine Méliès’ unique cinematic spectacle at least as much as its literary models. These considerations are equally valid for the satirical content of the film. In fact, written, visual, and spectacular sources are combined in what David Sandner describes as Méliès’ ‘imperial farce’ which critically engaged with the nineteenth-century French colonial aspirations and their ideological and cultural background. Based on these assumptions, this paper aims to explore the thematic and iconographic premises of Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune, relating them with nineteenth-century imperial culture, as well as to its critical revision within post-colonial studies. Lastly, the analysis is focused on the protagonists’ double role, that of the scientist-explorer since, as I will demonstrate, their parodical depiction retains a primary role in structuring the film’s anti-imperialist satire.