A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) is a French silent short directed by Georges Méliès — watch online on iFILM. Made in Paris in roughly three months, this fifteen-minute film sends a team of astronomers to the lunar surface in a hollow shell fired from an enormous cannon, invented well before rocket science existed.

Once on the Moon, the explorers are captured by Selenites — Méliès's fantastical lunar creatures, played by acrobats — then escape, tumble off the lunar edge, and plunge back to Earth. Méliès himself played the lead professor; appearing in front of his own camera was standard practice for his theatrical company, Star Film.

The film was the first to use stop-trick substitutions, hand-painted color frames, and built theatrical sets as storytelling tools rather than simple documentation. The shot of the rocket embedding itself in the Moon's eye remains one of the most replicated images in the history of moving pictures. More than 120 years on, it still holds the screen. Watch the first science fiction film in cinema history, A Trip to the Moon (1902), online on iFILM.