If you’ve ever taken a film class in college, maybe even high school, then you have surely heard of George Melies‘ 1902 silent film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage Dans le Lune). If you’ve never seen it, there’s going to be a chance to see a new, revamped version of it — in color and with a soundtrack by French electronic musicians Air once it premieres at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Even more fun: the decision to pursue this refurbishment seemed to have happened by accident.
Back in 1993, someone discovered a hand-tinted frame of the film in Barcelona and thought it might be worthwhile to colorize the entire thing. And in 1999, the process of digitizing every frame — 13,000 of them — began. Finally, over a decade later, we will get to see one of the earliest science fiction movies looking and sounding like new. And it looks like it’s set to open the festival, preceding Woody Allen‘s Midnight In Paris. t’s also going to be released on DVD — probably also featuring the original version — so more people will get to see it. So, as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”
The 14-minute short was shot in a studio Melies built in suburban Paris and tells the story of a bunch of eager travelers who build a capsule, have it fired out of a skyscraper-length cannon, and end up on the Moon, only to encounter a bunch of fliptastic aliens. (But no Transformers.) The story was based on Jules Verne‘s From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells‘ The First Men in the Moon. And you can watch it below:
(The Hollywood Reporter via io9)
