A Film Canon

George Méliès' two greatest shorts - A Trip To The Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904) - reinterpret the language of magical vaudeville as a series of innovative cinematic techniques (superimposition, dissolves, stop-cut editing, hand-tinting), as if attempting to fulfil a theatrical potential constrained by the physical confines of the theatre itself; or, alternatively, to transform the entire universe into a single, cosmic stage. Hence their panoramic artificiality, which finds expression in Méliès' sophisticated narrative contrivances, but more memorably in his his mechanical, topographical and cosmological elaborations, which temper the quasi-scientific spirit of Jules Verne with a more vaudevillian humour, taken to its logical conclusion in The Eclipse Of The Sun And The Moon (1907), in which the titular event is treated as a kind of sexual consummation. Committed to this palpably flat proliferation, Méliès strategically replaces Lumière and Hepworth's movements towards the camera with a more vertical frisson, epitomised by those moments at which characters and machines plummet out of the sky (usually into the sea, or a precipice), or reservoirs of fire, steam, and water burst up in explosive geysers, both of which transform the organic body into a fetishistic-mechanical entity, or at least an entity that can be affected with the same predictable immediacy as a machine - as when The Impossible Journey's explorers are frozen and defrosted in a mere matter of seconds.