The Extraordinary Voyage (2011), directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange, 3.5 stars
With the critical and
box office success of “The Artist” and “Hugo” in 2011, one a silent film and
the other a fictional account of silent film pioneer George Melies, there is currently a growing interest in the overlooked and underrated
early years of cinema--at least temporarily. As I write this, it’s April 2012, and the release of “The Extraordinary Voyage,” a documentary on the
painstaking restoration of a hand-colored version of Melies’ 1902 film, “Voyage
dans la Lune” (aka “A Trip to the Moon”), couldn’t have been better timed.
The restoration began
in 2001, a few years after the rediscovery of a nearly 100 year old reel of film
containing Melies’ work. Unfortunately, the nitrate
print had solidified on the spool, so a chemical bath was used to facilitate separation of the celluloid in layers. Frames were delicately removed
a few at a time, but even so, many of them were damaged before they could be subsequently
hand-scanned onto a computer. Each frame
took about two minutes each to process, so if my math is correct and the film
ran at a typical 24 frames per second, the time to digitally reproduce one
second of film was 48 minutes at the very least. The actual
time taken to scan the film in its entirety was 14 months.
So poor was the quality of the
print that it sat for nearly 10 years until computer technology improved
sufficiently to allow frames from the best extant black and white print to be
suitably inserted and then digitally matched for color.
George Melies made approximately 500
films in all, and then he burned them in a fit of pique later in life after interest in them waned. Fortunately, prints of
300 or so have been discovered through the years, so much of the innovative work
of this magician turned film pioneer and special effects wizard is with us
still. And now, joining their ranks is a
digitally restored version of Melies’ original hand-colored work, containing one of the most well-known images in all of film history: a spaceship lodged in the eye of the man in
the moon.
This tribute to Melies and
the restoration of “A Voyage to the Moon” is a well-deserved homage to an ingenious man
whose legacy will last as long as moving images continue to entertain and delight us. Both the documentary and the restored film are well worth a look.
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