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Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." Edited by Matthew Solomon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).
This anthology of essays devoted to Georges Méliès's 1902 motion picture sensation Le Voyage dans la Lune makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed.
That may be the volume's chief value. On the other hand, the essays do not tell us all that much we did not already know about the man's work; key essays by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Thierry Lefebvre and André Gaureault are not new.
Perhaps a fantastical idea in 1902, the original tale of a voyage to the moon as a "nowhere land" appears to have been True History, the work of a second-century Syrian author writing in Greek, Lucian of Samosata.
In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Was the illustrated firecrackershaped rocket approaching the faraway red planet featured in the first installment the inspiration for the Méliès space ship?
Responding to the reality of a range of prints in black and white and color tints, and of different lengths, Paolo Cherchi Usai urges that we treat each print as an entity unto itself and not seek definitiveness. And Richard Abel tells us that as a consequence of a range of dubious - though by no means unique - practices,manymembers of the film's large original American audience had no idea of the identity of its French creator, associating it with the Edison studio.
The...