American Cinematographer - October 2011 - 70

Here is an example of a damaged frame from the hand-colored print and the same frame fully restored.

B.V. in Amsterdam was able to rejuvenate the film by placing it under a bell jar and giving it the gas — suspending it in a chemical vapor originally formulated by Archives Française du Film. “The film was put in the chemicals at the end of 2001, and it took about two years to have all the images photographed
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with the best digital still camera available at the time,” recalls Bromberg, adding that Lange supervised this work. “Every time a few images were recovered, we’d photograph them before they turned to dust, which is a consequence of using the chemicals. Basically, there were only a few days to photograph the stills, which can be considAmerican Cinematographer

ered the ‘scan’ of the original source.” In October 2002, to celebrate the movie’s centennial (and the 10th anniversary of Lobster’s famous Retour de Flamme shows), Lobster publicly screened a Beta SP tape of the available color images — unstabilized and unrestored — with about half the film in color and the rest in black-andwhite from a fine-grain master positive. At the time, much of the original hand-colored print was still in the chemical vapors. It would be nearly a decade before anything more could be done with these digital snapshots. “Reconstructing the entire film was our Holy Grail,” says Bromberg, “but we never thought we could do it when we started photographing the color frames. We only realized it might be possible when 2K and 4K digital technologies emerged, but even then it seemed like a dream, because the puzzle we were starting with was in so many pieces.” First released in France on Sept. 1, 1902, Le voyage dans la lune was a worldwide event movie in its day. Méliès had a background in theater, and he was never able to shake his reliance on stage technique — he shot his films from a front-rowcenter perspective against painted trompe l’oeil backdrops. But he was also one of the first to utilize jump cuts, stop-motion animation, reverse action and other camera tricks that made his films breathtaking in their time. Ever the showman, Méliès often presented his films with live narration that would flesh out character and story for audiences, and he offered his films for sale in both black-and-white and color. A 1905 American catalogue for Méliès’ Star Films (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art) lists the pictureat 845' in length with a sale price of $126.75, or 15 cents per foot, for a black-and-white print. Color, which was hand-painted on each of the 13,375 frames, was considerably more expensive, and it was therefore far less common for exhibitors who were interested in turning a fast buck to pony up the extra money for a color print. Probably because of its subject matter, Le voyage dans la lune never completely disappeared from public consciousness and continued to elicit curiosity as Man began to dream of venturing into

American Cinematographer - October 2011

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