Alongside modern heavyweight Woody Allen and the premiere of  Midnight In Paris, French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès has also wowed audiences at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — despite having been dead for over 70 years. Méliès’ century-old classic, A Trip to the Moon [Le voyage dans la lune], was shown for the first time in colour on opening night at Cannes, thought to have been lost for decades but reappearing for modern audiences with a new perspective. A second screening was strongly attended, again accompanied by the new soundtrack from French duo Air.

Melies’ story of astronomers making the voyage to the moon is simple in its direction but complex with its use of what we now call special effects. It’s amazing to anyone who watches it just how ahead of his time Méliès was with his work. 109 years later and we finally get to see a new take on this genius piece of cinema thanks to a painstaking restoration by the team of Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. The only colour print now known to be in existence was found in Barcelona in 1993 and eventually made it home to France. Nitrate prints were peeled off and unrolled in a task that took two years to extract the images’ fragments. The film’s 16 minutes consisted of 13,375 frames – an epic effort. Even more frustrating would’ve been how they couldn’t do anything with them for eight years because the technology for proper restoration hadn’t been invented.

French electronic duo Air wrote and recorded the soundtrack to accompany the new version in 20 days. What they’ve manged to come up with in that time is a sound that gives an apocalyptic feel to an already eerie film, while the addition of colour also evokes unexpected emotions of uneasiness. Amazingly, this version was hand-coloured, frame by frame, in 1902 by Méliès — not during the restoration, as was repeatedly stressed. It remains mesmerising to a modern audience, not just because of its technical achievements but because of Méliès’ imagination with story and style. Cannes did well to show this as a classic in 2011; screening Le voyage dans la lune so soon after the restoration’s completion both satisfies the audience and fittingly pays homage to Georges Méliès on the 150^th anniversary of his birth.

For more of Katina’s coverage of the 2011 Cannes film festival, click here.

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