The Extraordinary Voyage (2011)

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.