Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/780285
14 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 7 on dvd The two foundations, which also carried out the music part of this project, approached Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel to compose an original modern soundtrack to accompany the film. Packaged in a limited edition SteelBook™ case, this publication also features The Extraordinary Voyage, a fascinating new documentary, directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange, which chronicles the journey of A Trip to the Moon from the fantastical Méliès production in 1902 to the astonishing rediscovery of the nitrate print in color in 1993, to the premiere of the new restoration on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. The documentary includes interviews with contemporary filmmakers, including Costa-Gavras, Michel Gondry, Michel Hazanavicius and Jean- Pierre Jeunet on Méliès' enduring significance to cinema. A Trip to the Moon combined "spectacle, sensation and technical wizardry to create a cosmic fantasy that was an international sensation." It was profoundly influential on later filmmakers, bringing creativity to the cinematic medium and offering fantasy for pure entertainment, a rare goal in film at the time. In addition, Méliès' innovative editing and special effects techniques were widely imitated and became important elements of the medium. The film also spurred on the development of cinematic science fiction and fantasy by demonstrating that scientific themes worked on the screen and that reality could be transformed by the camera. In a 1940 interview, Edwin S. Porter said that it was by seeing A Trip to the Moon and other Méliès films that he "came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story might draw the customers back to the theatres, and set to work in this direction." Similarly, D.W. Griffith said simply of Méliès: "I owe him everything." Since these American directors are widely credited with developing modern film narrative technique, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht once summed up Méliès' importance to film history by commenting that Méliès "profoundly influenced both Porter and Griffith and through them the whole course of American film-making." It remains Méliès's most famous film as well as a classic example of early cinema, with the image of the capsule stuck in the Man in the Moon's eye particularly well-known. The film has been evoked in other creative works many times, ranging from Segundo de Chomón's Above and right: Two production stills from 1902. They are, of course, black and white, but the film restoration is in its original tinted form. continued

