Entre la terre et la lune, ou de l’antropomorphisation des astres

This study investigates a movement found particularly (but not exclusively) in Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902). It is a movement which has often been interpreted as a point-of-view shot, or at least as a subjective movement, which would simulate the gaze of the characters in the shell shaped spaceship who approach the Moon, or the gaze of the spectators who advance towards the Moon with the camera. On the contrary, this study demonstrates not only that Méliès did not practice here the point-of-view shot at all, but also that this movement is a very complex and problematic one, which represents, among other things, a movement by the Moon. In fact, this movement is part of an anthropomorphic representation of the celestial bodies, at the time very popular and still contaminated by a pre-Copernican and a pre-Ptolemaic conception, where astronomy and magic mixed and merged. In Méliès’s film this movement assumes the typical traits of his magical and “féerique” imagination, and extends a certain practice of his theatrical scene that Jacques Malthête very well synthesized by the formula: “Moving set, fixed camera”.