MC Yearly Consensus - Pre 1920

[Spinal]

Submit your five favorite films from these years and in a week I will give you a top ten. IMDb dates will be used.

The point system is as follows

1st Place-5 points
2nd Place-4 points
3rd Place-3.5 points
4th Place-3 points
5th Place-2.5 points

There will be no restrictions on short films. A minimum of three films must be listed. You may edit your post freely up until the time that the voting is closed, which will be in about a week. I will give at least 24 hours warning before tallying votes.

You may begin now.

IMDB Power Search (http://www.imdb.com/list)

[Spinal]

We have already covered 1920. All films in this thread must be 1919 or earlier.

[Grouchy]

1. Voyage to the Moon
2. Birth of a Nation
3. Broken Blossoms
4. Shoulder Arms
5. The New York Hat

[Philosophe_rouge]

1. One A.M.
2. The Birth of a Nation
3. Alice in Wonderland (1906)
4. Le Voyage dans la lune
5. Gertie the Dinosaur

[Melville]

1. Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSp2ej2S00)
2. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQwUqgO4Bw)
3. The Cameraman's Revenge (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIC0Sb6pLvI)
4. Voyage to the Moon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbGd_240ynk&feature=related)

[soitgoes...]

1. The Cameraman's Revenge (Wladyslaw Starewicz)
2. Bumping into Broadway (Hal Roach)
3. A Dog's Life (Charles Chaplin)
4. Sir Arne's Treasure (Mauritz Stiller)
5. The Bell Boy (Roscoe Arbuckle)

HM's
Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith)
Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin)
Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay)
The Golden Beetle (Segundo de Chomón)
A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès)
The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter)
Going to Bed Under Difficulties (Georges Méliès)

I've seen a ton of early shorts, but when it comes to feature length films I haven't seen a whole lot.

[Mysterious Dude]

1. Broken Blossoms
2. Le Voyage dans la lune
3. Intolerance
4. J'accuse!
5. The Blue Bird

1912
1. The Land Beyond the Sunet
2. The Musketeers of Pig Alley
3. The Invaders
4. An Unseen Enemy
5. From the Manger to the Cross

1913
1. The last Days of Pompeii
2. Atlantis
3. The Yaqui Cur
4. Twilight of a Woman's Soul
5. The Student of Prague

1914
1. Cabiria
2. The Squaw Man
3. Tillie's Punctured Romance

1915
1. Regeneration
2. The Birth of a Nation
3. The Cheat
4. Carmen
5. A Fool There Was

1916
1. Intolerance
2. Hell's Hinges
3. Gretchen the Greenhorn
4. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
5. Snow White

1917
1. The Dying Swan
2. Joan the Woman

1918
1. The Blue Bird
2. The Sinking of the Lusitania
3. Hearts of the World
4. The Whispering Chorus
5. The Outlaw and His Wife

1919
1. Broken Blossoms
2. J'accuse!
3. Sir Arne's Treasure
4. The Dragon Painter
5. The Delicious Little Devil
6. Back to God's Country
7. Victory
8. Daddy-Long-Legs
9. South
10. The Spiders, Part 1

[Boner M]

1. The Sentimental Bloke
2. Broken Blossoms
3. A Trip to the Moon

I fail at this era.

[Derek]

1. Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)
2. Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919)
3. The Golden Beetle (Segundo de Chamón, 1907)
4. A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1914)
5. The Great Train Robbery (Siegmund Lubin, 1904)

[Ezee E]

I've seen a lot of short films, but just don't remember some of the titles.

1. Birth of a Nation
2. The Golden Beetle
3. A Trip to the Moon
4. The Immigrant
5. Intolerance

Removed Blue Bird

[Lazlo]

1. A Trip to the Moon
2. The Great Train Robbery
3. The Birth of a Nation
4. Broken Blossoms

[Raiders]

1. Les Vampires (Feuillade, 1914)
2. Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 1919)
3. A Trip to the Moon (Melies, 1902)
4. Regeneration (Walsh, 1915)
5. The Cameraman's Revenge (Starewicz, 1912)

[Raiders]

It disturbs me that I'm the only one so far to vote for Feuillade's serial. Seriously.

[monolith94]

1. Regeneration
2. The Blue Bird
3. Victory
4. Cabiria
5. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

deserving of mention:

Za schastem (For Happiness)
Young Romance

[Russ]

1. The Cameraman's Revenge
2. A Dog's Life
3. A Trip to the Moon
4. Bumping into Broadway
5. Gertie the Dinosaur

[origami_mustache]

1. A Trip To The Moon
2. Intolerance
3. The Cameraman's Revenge
4. Cabiria
5. Broken Blossoms

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

1. The ? Motorist (R.W. Paul)
2. L'Inferno aka Dante's Inferno (a bunch of I-talians)
3. The Strength and Agility of Insects (Percy Smith) > pure bliss.
4. A Cameraman's Revenge
5. The Merry Frolicks of Satan (Melies) > 16 mins of the greatest special effects ever!
-----------------------

HM: a film by Segundo de Chomon that I can't remeber the name of, some Lumiere actualities shot by Gabriel Veyre as well.........

[baby doll]

1. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)
2. Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916)
3. Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913-14)
4. Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
5. Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)

[B-side]

1. The Immigrant (Chaplin, 1917)
2. The Adventurer (Chaplin, 1917)
3. Laughing Gas (Chaplin, 1914)

I fail big time at this era.

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

anything besides the 5 or 6 staples for early cinema has no chance in this poll. There will be a lot of ties at the bottom of the top10...

[Spinal]

1. The Golden Beetle
2. The Great Train Robbery
3. Voyage to the Moon
4. The Dancing Pig
5. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

[B-side]

anything besides the 5 or 6 staples for early cinema has no chance in this poll. There will be a lot of ties at the bottom of the top10...

It's true. Chaplin fans should give the shorts I listed a shot. At least give The Immigrant and The Adventurer a shot. Both are really great.

[Ezee E]

I forgot about The Immigrant. Edited.

[The Mike]

1. Frankenstein
2. A Trip to the Moon
3. Judith of Bethulia

[B-side]

I forgot about The Immigrant. Edited.

Boom! Rep for the Chaplin fan.:)

[Yxklyx]

1. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (Christy Cabanne & John Emerson)
2. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith)
3. The Blue Bird (Maurice Tourneur)
4. The Cameraman's Revenge (Wladyslaw Starewicz)
5. The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille)

6. Blind Husbands (Erich von Stroheim)
7. Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith)
8. Victory (Maurice Tourneur)
9. Stella Maris (Marshall Neilan)
10. The Merry Jail (Ernst Lubitsch)

[MadMan]

I can actually post a list for this era thanks to a film class I took freshmen year. Cool.

1. Shoulder Arms(1918)
2. Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl(1919)
3. A Trip to the Moon(1902)

And I have seen The Great Train Robbery, but I don't really care for it all that much.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. A Trip to the Moon
2. The Great Train Robbery
3. Broken Blossoms

[Spinal]

Last day.

[Spinal]

I'm sick, so I will offer 10 rep points to the first person to volunteer to complete this. You must use the same formatting that we have used in previous threads. Please do not cut corners. Films should have at least ten points. Films that have less than ten points may be OK if they were mentioned by at least three people. If there are not ten films that meet these requirements, please list a Top 9 or Top 8, etc.

[Yxklyx]

I've got a top ten - coming soon...

[Yxklyx]

#10 (tie)

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/LesVampires.jpg

Les Vampires

Director: Louis Feuillade

Year 1915

Country: France

"Louis Feuillade’s extraordinary ten-part silent serial of 1916, running just under eight hours, is one of the supreme delights of film–an account of the exploits of an all-powerful group of criminals called the Vampire Gang, headed by the infamous Irma Vep (Musidora), whose name is incidentally an anagram for “vampire.” Filmed mainly in Paris locations, Feuillade’s masterpiece combines documentary with fantasy to create a dense world of multiple disguises, secret passageways, poison rings, and evil master plots that assumes an awesome cumulative power: the everyday world of the French bourgeoisie, personified by the hapless sleuth hero, during the height of World War I is imbued with an unseen terror that no amount of virtuous detection can ever efface entirely. (Significantly, as in many of Feuillade’s other serials, the villains are a good deal more fascinating than the relatively square hero, although a comic undertaker and the leader of a rival gang are periodically on hand to help him out.) Because none of Feuillade’s complete serials is available in the U.S., this special screening helps to fill an enormous gap in our sense of film history. One of the most prolific directors who ever lived, Feuillade is today arguably a good deal more entertaining than Griffith, and unquestionably much more modern: his mastery of deep-focus mise en scene is astonishing, and its influence on Fritz Lang as well as Luis Bunuel and other Surrealists remains one of his major legacies. For the past 20-odd years, this serial has received only a few screenings in the U.S., in prints that were missing all of the film’s intertitles; now that the Cinematheque Francaise has recently restored the film in toto, it is possible to appreciate the full glory of this hallucinatory work for the first time since the teens. Ordinarily, after giving a film four stars, I wouldn’t consider it necessary to make it a Critic’s Choice as well; but this is such an unprecedented event for Chicago that I can’t recommend it too highly."

- Jonathan Rosenbaum

[Yxklyx]

#10 (tie)

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/TheBlueBird.jpg

The Blue Bird

Director: Maurice Tourneur

Year 1918

Country: USA

"While most of the plays and novels of Maurice Maeterlinck have proved virtually impossible to film, the author's allegorical fantasy The Blue Bird has been translated to the screen no fewer than three times. The first version, directed by Maurice Tourneur and designed by Tourneur's favorite art director Ben Carre, was arguably the most visually impressive of the three (though the 1940 version, starring Shirley Temple), ran a close second. The story is the familiar one about two mittel-European youngers, Tyltyl (Robin MacDougall) and Mytyl (Tula Belle), who, unhappy with their present lots in life, embark upon a search for the Bluebird of Happiness. In the course of their odyssey, the children pay extended visits to the "Palace of Joy and Delights" and "The Land of the Unborn," with a quick stop-over at the graves of their briefly resurrected grandparents. Learning an important Life Lesson at every turn, the kids discover what they should have known at the beginning: That the Bluebird of Happiness was in their own backyard all the time. A brilliant collage of genuine exterior scenes and splendiferous studio-designed sets, The Blue Bird may have seemed a bit "stagey" at times (indeed, it sometimes looked exactly like the stage play from which it was derived), but in terms of sheer beauty and entertainment value, the film could not be faulted. Some historians consider the film to be the best of Maurice Tourneur's surviving silent films, surpassing even his 1922 masterpiece The Last of the Mohicans."

- Hal Erickson

[dreamdead]

I've wanted to get to Les Vampires ever since I saw Maggie Cheung in a catsuit in Irma Vep. Not the most academic of reasons, but it's the reason that will make me see the former film at some point.

[Yxklyx]

#8

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/TheGoldenBeetle.jpg

Le Scarabée d'or

Director: Segundo de Chomón

Year 1907

Country: France

"A conjurer with white beard and turban moves about in front of a building with an elaborate facade. He spies a golden beetle, about the size of a human infant, leaning against the wall. He snatches it up, conjures a fire, and tosses the beetle in. It escapes the fire in the form of a fairy, her six wings beating as she rises above the flames. The fairy, to the conjurer's consternation, has magical powers of her own. A fountain appears, first spraying water; then, things heat up for the turbaned villain."

- jhailey@hotmail.com

[Yxklyx]

#7

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/TheMysteryOfTheLeapingFish.jpg

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

Director: Christy Cabanne & John Emerson

Year 1916

Country: USA

"This legendary comedy short is crude and ramshackle but lives up to its reputation for unorthodox content. Fairbanks, with his air of commotion and excitability, often seemed to be under the influence of something or other - a thought which was presumably the genesis of this picture. He plays private eye Coke Ennyday, who is festooned with hypodermics, keeps a bowl of cocaine on his desk as big as Pacino's in Scarface, and whose preferred tipple is a compound of laudanum and prussic acid. Humour, 1916. It's Coke vs a gang of opium smugglers who bring the stuff ashore in rubber fish inflated by a teenage Bessie Love. Billed as 'Inane, the little fish blower', she parodies the cliché of the helpless waif with great exuberance."

- BBa from Time Out Film Guide

[Yxklyx]

#6

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/TheGreatTrainRobbery.jpg

The Great Train Robbery

Director: Edwin S. Porter

Year 1903

Country: USA

"One of the milestones in film history was the first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter - a former Thomas Edison cameraman. It was a primitive one-reeler action picture, about 10 minutes long, with 14-scenes, filmed in November 1903 - not in the western expanse of Wyoming but on the East Coast in various locales in New Jersey (at Edison's New York studio, at Essex County Park in New Jersey, and along the Lackawanna railroad).

The precursor to the western film genre was based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. The film's title was also the same as a popular contemporary stage melodrama. It was the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era, and established the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium.

The film was originally advertised as "a faithful duplication of the genuine 'Hold Ups' made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West." The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of George Leroy Parker's (Butch Cassidy) 'Hole in the Wall' gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.

The film used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. The film is intercut from the bandits beating up the telegraph operator (scene one) to the operator's daughter discovering her father (scene ten), to the operator's recruitment of a dance hall posse (scene eleven), to the bandits being pursued (scene twelve), and splitting up the booty and having a final shoot-out (scene thirteen). The film also employed the first pan shots (in scenes eight and nine), and the use of an ellipsis (in scene eleven). Rather than follow the telegraph operator to the dance, the film cut directly to the dance where the telegraph operator enters. It was also the first film in which gunshots forced someone to dance (in scene eleven) - an oft-repeated, cliched action in many westerns. And the spectacle of the fireman (replaced by a dummy with a jump cut in scene four) being thrown off the moving train was a first in screen history.

In the film's fourteen scenes, a narrative story with multiple plot lines was told - with elements that were copied repeatedly afterwards by future westerns - of a train holdup with six-shooters, a daring robbery accompanied by violence and death, a hastily-assembled posse's chase on horseback after the fleeing bandits, and the apprehension of the desperadoes after a showdown in the woods. The steam locomotive always provided a point of reference from different filming perspectives. The first cowboy star, Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson played several roles: a bandit, a wounded passenger, and a tenderfoot dancer. The remarkable film was greeted with the same kind of fanfare that Sam Peckinpah's violent The Wild Bunch (1969) received many years later."

- Tim Dirks

[Yxklyx]

#5

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/Intolerance.jpg

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

Director: D.W. Griffith

Year 1916

Country: USA

"David Wark Griffith was in many ways the first film director -- a master craftsman who invented modern film editing and camerawork and originated many (most?) of the cinematic devices used today. His silent epics are lavish, impressive spectacles. Griffith's films suffer less from the technical limitations of silent movies than from their ideology-addled screenplays and crudely rendered morals which are half-lost in confusing action and broad humor. In short, Griffith's films have pretty much the same flaws as a lot of Hollywood movies today.

Intolerance was Griffith's follow-up to The Birth of a Nation, the first important commercial motion picture. Nation cost $100,000 and made ten times that, and was praised by President Woodrow Wilson, among others. But the movie’s endorsements of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan received some criticism (go figure). Like so many egoistic auteurs after him, Griffith took the criticism badly while letting the praise go to his head. Griffith blew a Titanic budget (for the time) making Intolerance, a self-indulgent, confusing ten reels about man's inhumanity to his fellow man. If Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster (and the birth of the movie industry, in fact), Intolerance was the first Ishtar -- i.e., the first reminder that when it comes to making art or even entertaining the public, Hollywood doesn't have all the answers.

The film is a historical melodrama that splices together four separate stories that supposedly share a common theme. The plot that consumes the most screen time is the "modern" tale of two young lovers (Mae Marsh and Robert Herron) in a steel mill town tyrannized by the upper class. Intermixed with that is a strange story about a tomboy-turned-heroine (Constance Talmadge) who tries to stop the conquest of Babylon by the Persians, circa 500 B.C. The other two plots are afterthoughts: a confusing series of scenes set during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (Paris in the 1570s), and a sketchy but moving depiction of the life of Christ which does not get much screen time. In all of these stories, the powerful (rich people or priests) oppress the less powerful, so the unifying theme is sort of a cartoonish depiction of injustice, not really intolerance. The plots ultimately degenerate into exciting melodrama -- the end is a seat-hanger -- but still, for a movie about religious intolerance, there are too many preachy moments. Since there is no sound, of course, the morals are delivered in cryptic and pretentious on-screen messages. The public of 1916 obviously decided they didn't need any of it and stayed away. Intolerance was a huge flop.

Though Griffith’s career never recovered, Hollywood did, and for several decades it stayed grounded in solid entertainment values (and even made many suave and historically accurate epics, such as Gone With the Wind, that hold up today). But every “great” director since the 1960s (and many who aren’t that great) has made at least one bloated blockbuster that left audiences scratching their heads, and Intolerance pointed the way.

Surprisingly, as a visual spectacle this very old film stands up well. The number of men, women, children, livestock, trains, and chariots put in to stage the film's myriad crowd scenes, battles, millworkers' strikes, Babylonian bacchanals, etc. is mind-boggling. The sets are more elaborate than anything that would be attempted again by Hollywood until the 1960s. Even the most bored viewer will ask at times, "How the hell did Griffith do that?" And the next inevitable question is, "Why?"

The fast-paced final reel redeems the movie, even if the point is impossible to understand. And perhaps the best reason to watch Griffith's films is the opportunity to see where Hollywood came from and to see modern camera angles and devices used for the first time.

Warning: the newly released video version includes the dubbed organ music that accompanied the silent film, which modern audiences will find intolerable. Watch with the sound off."

- David Bezanson

[Yxklyx]

#4

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/BirthOfANation.jpg

The Birth of a Nation

Director: D.W. Griffith

Year 1915

Country: USA

"The most successful and artistically advanced film of its time, The Birth of a Nation has also sparked protests, riots, and divisiveness since its first release. The film tells the story of the Civil War and its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of two families. The Stonemans hail from the North, the Camerons from the South. When war breaks out, the Stonemans cast their lot with the Union, while the Camerons are loyal to Dixie. After the war, Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), distressed that his beloved south is now under the rule of blacks and carpetbaggers, organizes several like-minded Southerners into a secret vigilante group called the Ku Klux Klan. When Cameron's beloved younger sister Flora (Mae Marsh) leaps to her death rather than surrender to the lustful advances of renegade slave Gus (Walter Long), the Klan wages war on the new Northern-inspired government and ultimately restores "order" to the South. In the original prints, Griffith suggested that the black population be shipped to Liberia, citing Abraham Lincoln as the inspiration for this ethnic cleansing. Showings of Birth of a Nation were picketed and boycotted from the start, and as recently as 1995, Turner Classic Movies cancelled a showing of a restored print in the wake of the racial tensions around the O.J. Simpson trial verdict."

- Hal Erickson

[Yxklyx]

#3

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/TheCameramansRevenge.jpg

Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora

Director: Wladyslaw Starewicz

Year 1912

Country: Russia

"A jilted husband takes his revenge by filming his wife and her lover and showing the result at the local cinema. This was one of Starewicz' first animated films, and stars very realistic animated beetles."

- Michael Brooke

[Yxklyx]

#2

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/BrokenBlossoms.jpg

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl

Director: D.W. Griffith

Year 1919

Country: USA

"Though it was once considered one of director D.W. Griffith's ("The Birth of a Nation"/"Intolerance"/"Orphans of the Storm") more daring and better melodramas, today it's outdated, suffers from being overly emotional and too sentimental. It's based on a short story "The Chink and the Child" by Thomas Burke. To Griffith's credit, he's trying to make a positive statement about tolerance and the acceptance of non-controversial aspects of interracial love without raising too much the eyebrows of his many intolerant viewers.

The story is set in the London slum of Limehouse during WWI, where gentle opium smoking Chinese storekeeper Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) has left his native China and settled down in the London 'East End' dock area in order to practice his non-violent Buddhist ways and help the Westerner become more peaceful. He comes into contact with a frail, 15-year-old Cockney waif Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish, was 23 at the time and couldn't convince me she was a teenager), whose bigoted, brutish prize-fighting father Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp) regularly abuses her. She collapses in the doorway of Cheng's store after her father beats her for accidently stabbing his hand while serving a meal. In the film's most magical scene, the Chinese man offers the battered Lucy shelter from her beastly father, unconditional love and sprinkles an imaginary moondust on her hair as she cuddles up in bed. To avoid any complaints of miscegenation, the love between the two is kept innocent and pure. This simple holy love offered is something her father can't understand, and he's so enraged that he beats her more severely than ever. When the Chinese man learns of her new beating through a dubious-intentioned Chinese man known as Evil Eye, he comes to comfort her as she lies in her death bed. But the father returns and Cheng in self-defense kills him with his gun. When Lucy succumbs to the beating, Cheng takes his life with his knife.

Beaten throughout her life by her ignorant, drunken bully father, the beating only becomes fatal when the intolerant father is in such a rage because he hates all foreigners. But to call Griffith a progressive regarding racial matters, even though the film is progressive for its time, seems giving him a compliment he doesn't deserve. The main Chinese character, played by a white actor, is called either the "Yellow Man," "Chinaman" or "Chinky" by everyone in the movie, which doesn't impress me as being too sensitive. Nevertheless Griffith's movie does make its Chinese charactor into a sympathetic figure, which was at a time when the Chinese immigrant received much abuse. In the end, this mawkish Victorian melodrama rises above its faults with a stylishly beautiful film that also brings real tragedy to the screen."

- Dennis Schwartz

[Yxklyx]

#1

http://yxklyx.com/me/movies/images/VoyageToTheMoon.jpg

Le Voyage dans la lune

Director: Georges Méliès

Year 1902

Country: France

"Voyage dans la Lune, Le/A Trip to the Moon (France, 1902), the screen's first science fiction story, was a 14 minute masterpiece (nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet)), created by imaginative French director and master magician Georges Melies (1861-1938) in his version of the Jules Verne story. The silent film's plot, a light-hearted satire criticizing the conservative scientific community of its time, was inspired by Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon (1901).

This film, Melies' 400th and most notable film, was made on an astronomical budget for the time of 10,000 Francs - risky, but worthwhile since it was hugely successful. Its popularity also led to it being illegally copied, released under others' names, and pirated (including one stolen by Edison's film technicians and distributed throughout the US). [For example, an illegal duplicate of the film was available in the USA from Siegmund Lubin under the title A Trip to Mars.]

Melies wrote the whimsical script, acted in the film in the lead role, designed the sets and costumes, directed, photographed, and produced the film! He hired acrobats from the Folies Bergere to play the lunar inhabitants named Selenites, and the scantily dressed assistants (or pages) who launched the cannon were dancers from the Châtelet ballet. The image of the lunar capsule landing in the eye of the moon is a memorable sight and widely-recognized in cinematic history.

As a film pioneer and producer of over 500 short films, Melies made up and invented the film medium as he directed. He developed the art of special effects in earlier films, including double exposure, actors performing with themselves over split screens, and use of the dissolve and fade. He also pioneered the art of film editing. The sets or scenery backdrops in the film are simple, painted flats. It has all the elements that characterize the science-fiction genre: adventurous scientists, a futuristic space voyage, special effects such as superimpositions, and strange aliens in a far-off place."

- Tim Dirks

[Yxklyx]

Final Tally:

Le Voyage dans la lune - 58
Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl - 33.5
Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora - 25.5
The Birth of a Nation - 20.5
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages - 18
The Great Train Robbery - 14.5
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish - 14
Le Scarabée d'or - 12.5
The Blue Bird - 10
Les Vampires - 10