The Astronomer's Dream

Shot in 1898 as La Lune à un mètre and issued in American catalogs around 1900, this is Méliès converting a stage illusion he had performed at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1891 (Les Farces de la Lune) into three minutes of cinema. An astronomer (Méliès) dozes over his books; Satan appears; Phoebe, played by Jehanne d'Alcy, drives the devil off. Then the Moon itself arrives at one meter: a giant puppet face that swallows the telescope, spatters clowns from its mouth, and finally eats the astronomer, who is reassembled piece by piece. Stage machinery, pyrotechnics, and substitution splices do the work. Four years later Méliès would send a rocket into that same face. Here the Moon comes to him, the nightmare that made A Trip to the Moon possible.