In 2011 the Cannes Film Festival highlighted a return journey eighteen years in the making, the color restoration of Georges Méliès Le voyage dans la lune. The original journey occurred more than 100 years before Cannes decided to honor the French magician. It all began in 1895 when Méliès attended the first ever screening of the Lumèire brother’s films in the Grande Café in Paris. 10 films projected for the very first time in history. What I wouldn’t give to live that one moment in time, to have the recollections of the first kingdom of shadows, the Kingdom of Shadows that Méliès was privy too and that Maxim Gorky wrote about–––
Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.
It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows …
Maxim Gorky, 1896
The illusionist was enamored—what a moment in time for the spectator, when the ghosts of our dreams materialize beyond the imaginary–––immediately after the screening he offered the Lumèire’s 10,000 francs for one of their cameras. Unfortunately as is the serendipitous circumstance of most artists Méliès first encounter with the new medium was rejection. The Lumèire’s refused to sell and so that was the end of Georges Méliès…
—Of course it wasn’t the end.
Georges was a magician! Even worse, a magician who, night after night, conjured the moving shadows of his dreams on stage, so enchanted even before the Lumières came about. And so with the initial rejection behind him, by 1902, Georges Méliès had envisioned and created numerous trick films+ historically culminating in his most famous work and the object of scrutiny, Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon).
Based on the novel by Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon the 14 minute silent film follows six experts from the Astronomer’s Club (one of whom is played by Méliès) as they set off on an expedition to the moon to uncover it’s mysteries. The film was reproduced and reprinted all over Europe and eventually America, unfortunately the original hand-painted color prints of the voyage fell victim to the shifting and often careless times–––they were lost. That is of course till 1993 when, like a stop trick film of the early decades, the voyage materialized once again in a decrepit vault in the cinematheque archives of Barcelona. The story of the restoration is not just a charming look at the history of cinema––the new addition comes with a “re-imagined” soundtrack by the French electronic duo AIR.
AIR’s Album Le voyage dans la lune can be found here.
Enamored with the history of then, I’ve always have a hard time with the concept of a “re-” anything. Words like re-vamp and re-make and re-envision have a tendency to make me hesitate, a kind of hiccup in my thought process that stops me just long enough to make me wonder, exactly what needs to be “re-” whatevered and why? Old versus new, classic versus contemporary is not just a self-perpetuated crisis of the hipster. There really is something to being yanked backwards and forwards at the same time, and that roller coaster ride is not always pleasant. What makes AIR’s musical accompaniment to Le voyage interesting (maybe even pleasant?) is the fact that they are not really replacing anything tangible. Early silent films were fairly independent of music. Accompaniment wasn’t necessarily rare but it was organic, and a lot of the time improvisational piano tunes were replaced by the sounds of the watchers themselves.
Enter AIR. A group that is not unfamiliar with soundscaping for film (Sofia Coppola, case and point) but Le voyage posed both a challenge and a freedom–––
We played facing the screen, to synchronize the music better […] with no dialogue, the soundtrack becomes one of the main narrative threads. That freed us up, I think. The euphoric aspect of our score comes partly from that.
Nicolas Godin of AIR on NPR
Quiet literally faced with the film that inspired an entire genre of filmmaking the duo’s stratospheric key coasts a spectrum between science fiction and fantasy. The soundtrack is a procession where heavier, rhythmic pulses of base instruments are slowly submerged in a delicate gauze of synthesized electronica, punctuated by the brief familiarity of a piano. It sounds a bit like then and now, a musical score that is paying homage to the voyage of the past by grounding it in the present, balancing the visual experience with an auditory one.
But is the venture truly balanced? Does the sound produce something new? With respect to electronica, the argument of new versus old is also a familiar one. A lot of aficionados blame the new wave of electro-pop floatyness on the sweat stained efforts of the go-beforers. Groups like Hot Chip, the XX and AIR would be nothing without the hardcore beats of their predecessors. Free form reviewers on musical havens like Discogs have very particular sentiments on the origins of bands like AIR.
AIR is the spoiled, indulgent, carefree children of kraftwerk. Think of kraftwerk as the parents of techno, who worked hard to hone and develop electronic music in its beginning stages. Their music seems more robotic, rigid, yet startlingly innovative. Their progeny would be AIR, breezy and rich, not having to deal with the trouble of breaking new ground and finding acceptance.
Discogs Forum, Anonymous
Ok, it’s true. The synthesizer sounds of the 70’s, especially those of Vangelis & Jean Michel Jarre were incredibly influential for AIR, but basing the success of the young-uns on the invented gold-standard of their forerunners has always been a murky argument. Roots and origins are sourced from a mélange of musical areas and some genres tend to be lumped together and compared because they seem familiar yet different enough to warrant the contention. The Beatles and The Monkees could be called the fathers of One Direction because of similarity A, B & C…but that’s not the whole story.
Musical contentions aside, AIR’s nouveau-electronica may not be the answer for Le voyage. Maybe silence was always the answer for the work of Georges Meliès. After all every great magic trick is first and formost ensconced in the silence of the audience’s bated-breath. Yet it seems that the conflicting powers of the old and the new are present in both the restoration of Le voyage and AIR, and the resulting relationship creates a really uncanny–I am gonna say it––”re-entrance” into the Kingdom of Shadows. Suddenly the Kingdom is filled with brightly colored automatons, moving within the frame like clothes pins on a laundry line, puppeteered by a kind of astronomical phantasia of sound. It is the future-passed as it was seen, now seen again with a new layer of the whimsical. Playing facing the screen AIR makes a valiant effort to maintain the magicians slight of hand, imbibing Méliès’ work with the sound of future-present. And even if the crisis of old versus new is still churning in your stomach AIR’s roller coaster is gentle enough to quell the discontent.
The newly restored color version of the film with the soundtrack by AIR can be found here, it’s spectacular to watch, especially since the album extends beyond the film and so is not entirely true to the soundscape you hear as you watch Méliès’ magic.
The Original Voyage in black and white can be found here, with a lovely piano accompaniment just like in the old days.
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+Trick films where early films, developed by Méliès which featured transformations, superimpositions, disappearances, rear projections, and the frequent use of stop trick special effects to create fantastical story lines and worlds like the one in Le voyage dans la lune.