Georges Méliès

La Lune à un mètre, 1898, 3m13s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 160-162

An astronomer is writing notes at his desk. A devil appears in a puff of smoke and taunts him, but the astronomer ignores him. A woman with a crescent-moon tiara appears and banishes the devil before disappearing herself. Oblivious to all this, the astronomer gets up and draws a geometrically precise globe on his blackboard, complete with a moon in the top left corner. The moon grows a face and hair and descends to join the globe, which sprouts arms and legs. Annoyed, the astronomer dashes the blackboard to the ground. He picks up a telescope and tries to look through it at the moon, but it turns into a rolling pin, which pokes him in the eye. He angrily tosses it aside and returns to his desk, placing his head in his hands. The desk vanishes, and he topples over onto the ground. He looks through his large telescope and sees a gigantic face in the moon, which promptly invades his study and swallows the telescope and one of the astronomer’s chairs. He tries to retrieve his property, but is rebuffed. The moon emits a puff of smoke, knocking the astronomer to the ground. He picks up a parasol to shield himself, but it is torn to shreds. Two small, identical children emerge from its mouth, and the astronomer promptly hurls them back in. He then tries to hit the moon with a broom, but it retreats to a point beyond the end of the astronomer’s balcony. The astronomer tries to throw a chair, his notebook and a table at the moon, but they all vanish at the crucial moment. Suddenly, the moon becomes a crescent, supporting a woman in a bridal veil. She descends onto the astronomer’s balcony and removes the veil. He tries to hug her, but she shoots up in the air. Another woman appears on the crescent. The astronomer gets up to greet her, and falls through a trapdoor into a room where he is confronted by a suit of armour. He hits this with a broom, and is transported inside the moon’s mouth. The moon swallows him whole and spits out various limbs. The devil reappears, followed in quick succession by the moon-goddess, who banishes him and stuffs the limbs back into the moon’s mouth. As she does so, the astronomer reappears in his chair, bit by bit. The astronomer wakes up in his observatory, heaves a sigh of relief that it was only a dream, and returns to his desk.

At over three minutes, The Astronomer’s Dream is three times longer than a typical early Méliès short, and has duly been given three entries in his Star Film catalogue (presumably this meant he could charge triple the fee). It begins as a virtual remake of A Nightmare (Le Cauchemar, 1896), but it’s conceived on a far more elaborate scale.

The nightmare here is being suffered by an astronomer (dressed, rather charmingly, as a wizard complete with pointed hat and long white beard), who is first taunted by a devil and then by a moon that’s a very considerable advance on the cardboard cut-out in the earlier film. It’s also rather more threatening, as its grotesquely distended mouth chews up anything within range, be it objects, children or adults - and it also spits out severed limbs in a Grand Guignol moment reminiscent of the same year’s The Adventures of William Tell (Guillaume Tell et le clown, 1898).

But the most significant advance made by the film is that it develops a more or less continuous narrative across three minutes, making it the clearest precursor yet to Méliès’ far more elaborate fantasies of the early 1900s. The astronomer’s dream runs the gamut from battles between devils and angels, being terrorised by a vast moon, and seduced by a female figure initially seen reclining on the crescent as though practising for the DreamWorks logo a century early.

In terms of special effects, Méliès is still heavily reliant on the jump cut, but he also concocts some live animation (the blackboard with its moving diagrams) and his mechanical props, especially the man in the moon, are conceived on a greater scale than before. The set designs, too, use perspective to create a strong sense of three-dimensional space, with the moon visible in three planes: the far distance, just beyond the balcony, and in extreme close-up.

Although there’s continuous chemical blotching throughout, the untinted source print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is impressively sharp - you can clearly make out every star on the astronomer’s hat and gown. Donald Sosin’s score blends piano with occasional percussion, becoming increasingly frenzied as the moon increases in menace.

Links

• BFI Film and TV Database entry.
• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review - part one/part two (Rotten Tomatoes forum).