When Georges Mellies produced The Impossible Voyage, cinema was still in its infancy and the new medium was incubating in its pre-Nichelodean days. The French director was a pioneer in film, and he forged new ground in the construction of his sets and complex plots that helped popularize the celluloid art in its swaddling early years.
Voyage is a feast for the eyes, even for today's sophisticated audiences. The stunning, lavish sets transported viewers on a surreal trip of a madcap crew of elites who conquered land, sea and air. The over-the-top costumes of its participants and the multi-stage set-ups reflect an extreme imagination so unique during that period that early onlookers marveled in droves this most unusual journey. Mellies possessed the artistic talent to transfer his mind's visual creation onto his Paris studio set and hence, onto celluloid. Such leapfrogging from the standard actualities of his day and the simple narratives, mostly chase plots, has anticipated what CGI in today's films can only replicate.
The knocks on Voyage have been capably stated by others on this board. Melies' camera is static, taking the place of a sitting member of the audience as if watching a staged play. The camera never vears from a fixed position, neither panning nor tilting to follow the action. Mellies doesn't move his tripod closer to his actors, nor does he move it back to capture a wider, breathtaking view of the huge scope of this adventure. Hence, today's audiences would be somewhat bored, despite all the dazzling stage sets, by his static camera. Mellies never could quite understand the new camera movement techniques being introduced by his Brighton, English counterparts, nor the mobile camera of Edison's Edwin Porter's or Biograph's Wallace McCutcheon's outdoor action narratives. Throughout his movie career, Mellies kept his camera glued to his tripod, which was anchored to the floor--with the exception of 1903's Trip To The Moon, in which he did move the camera closer to the moon's face as a model space capsule crash landed on it.
However, Voyage, especially the color-painted frame-by-frame print, is well worth watching just to marvel at an artistic genius at work well over 100 years ago.
Voyage is a feast for the eyes, even for today's sophisticated audiences. The stunning, lavish sets transported viewers on a surreal trip of a madcap crew of elites who conquered land, sea and air. The over-the-top costumes of its participants and the multi-stage set-ups reflect an extreme imagination so unique during that period that early onlookers marveled in droves this most unusual journey. Mellies possessed the artistic talent to transfer his mind's visual creation onto his Paris studio set and hence, onto celluloid. Such leapfrogging from the standard actualities of his day and the simple narratives, mostly chase plots, has anticipated what CGI in today's films can only replicate.
The knocks on Voyage have been capably stated by others on this board. Melies' camera is static, taking the place of a sitting member of the audience as if watching a staged play. The camera never vears from a fixed position, neither panning nor tilting to follow the action. Mellies doesn't move his tripod closer to his actors, nor does he move it back to capture a wider, breathtaking view of the huge scope of this adventure. Hence, today's audiences would be somewhat bored, despite all the dazzling stage sets, by his static camera. Mellies never could quite understand the new camera movement techniques being introduced by his Brighton, English counterparts, nor the mobile camera of Edison's Edwin Porter's or Biograph's Wallace McCutcheon's outdoor action narratives. Throughout his movie career, Mellies kept his camera glued to his tripod, which was anchored to the floor--with the exception of 1903's Trip To The Moon, in which he did move the camera closer to the moon's face as a model space capsule crash landed on it.
However, Voyage, especially the color-painted frame-by-frame print, is well worth watching just to marvel at an artistic genius at work well over 100 years ago.