Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Contents: Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] (1902), Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] (1902), The Astronomer’s Dream (1898), The Eclipse (1907) and The Extraordinary Voyage (2011).

This most-famous of all Georges Méliès’ films, features a flight of fantasy trip to the moon and back, with a team of inquisitive scientists and a rabble of lobster-clawed moon men.

This repackaged and rereleased Blu-ray Disc / DVD edition of the original 2012 Flicker Alley dual-format limited edition noted below has been mastered from a conflated digital restoration of a hand-colored 35mm nitrate print, with severely-damaged and missing frames transferred from a black & white 35mm print of higher quality and digitally tinted for color continuity.

It had been thought that no original hand-colored copies of A Trip to the Moon had survived until a sole nitrate print was recovered in Spain in the mid-1990s. The surviving color print was thought to be too fragile to transfer or photochemically copy for restoration, but in 2010 Lobster Films, Paris, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage utilized new digital technologies to transfer, reassemble and restore the 13,375 frames that comprise the restoration version of the film.

Not entirely a straight rerelease of the 2012 edition, the hand-colored film is now accompanied by three optional original music scores: the first performed by Jeff Mills, the second performed by musical group Dorian Pimpernel, the third an improvised piano score by Serge Bromberg. A fourth option adds narration by Bromberg to the piano score, originally written by Méliès.

Also presented is a black and white version of the film transferred from a fine-grain duplicate copied from a 35mm nitrate print held by the Méliès family. This version of the film is presented with three optional music scores: an orchestral score composed and conducted by Robert Israel (with spoken narration in English, from the French narrative written by Méliès), a piano score performed by Frederick Hodges, and the Hodges score with spoken dialogue performed by actors as presented in the USA in 1903.

This home video edtion is supplemented with presentations of an early Méliès film, The Astronomer’s Dream (1898), and a late Méliès film, The Eclipse (1907) [misidentified on the packaging as 1904], both with astronomic themes; a video interview with composers/musicians, Air (12 minutes); and the documentary The Extraordinary Voyage (2011), directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange. The documentary includes interviews with contemporary French filmmakers Costa Gavras, Michel Gondry, Michel Hazanavicius and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and comments by other filmmakers Terry Gilliam and Tom Hanks.

While not all of the films presented in the set have been remastered in high-definition, we recommend this reissued home video edition of A Trip to the Moon.

USA: Click logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc / Region 1 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com.
Canada: Click logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc / Region 1 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.ca.
This Region A Blu-ray Disc / Region 1 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

This Blu-ray Disc / DVD edition is the original release of the 2018 Flicker Alley edition noted above and is of identical visual and audio quality. The main feature is this hand-colored version of the film, which is accompanied by an original music score composed and performed by Air (Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel).

Also presented is a black and white version of the film transferred from a fine-grain duplicate copied from a 35mm nitrate print held by the Méliès family. This version of the film is presented with three optional music scores: an orchestral score composed and conducted by Robert Israel (with spoken narration in English, from the French narrative written by Méliès), a piano score performed by Frederick Hodges, and the Hodges score with spoken dialogue performed by actors as presented in the USA in 1903.

Packaged in a limited-edition SteelBook case, this home video edtion contains the same supplemental material as the rerelease edition noted above and is now out-of-print and commanding premium resale prices, so we recommend the 2018 rerelease edition of A Trip to the Moon that is noted above.

USA: Click logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc / Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com.

Other FRENCH FILMS of the silent era available on home video.