Upon its initial release, Le Voyage was extremely popular within the newly formed genre of moving pictures. Its most famous image depicted the moon as a human face with a bullet-shaped spacecraft painfully crashed into its right eye. In the story, earth travelers arrive on the lunar surface to discover it is nothing more than a man’s face populated by little green men – a deliberate, surreal mockery of scientific beliefs regarding outer space. This was also the first film to utilize hand-painted color, dissolves, time-lapse photography, and multiple exposures. Despite its popularity and innovation, Méliès’s film was not the success it should have been during its time. Thomas Edison and his technicians, taking advantage of an era before copyright laws, reproduced and distributed the groundbreaking film throughout the United States and realized great profits from its success, profits that contributed to the financial ruin of Méliès.
Fast forward to 1993 when Filmoteca de Catalunya discovered the only surviving hand-colored print of the film. The restoration process of the badly decomposed film took many years, culminating in the digital restoration at the Technicolor Lab of Los Angeles in 2010. The producers approached Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicholas Godin of the French musical duo known as AIR to compose the contemporary soundtrack to the restored version of Le Voyage. AIR’s minimal, melodic and dreamlike sound sequences have been widely integrated into television and film by directors such as Sofia Coppola. Though Le Voyage is only 14 minutes long, AIR were so honored to be chosen to compose the music for this classic French film that Dunckel and Godin composed an entire album devoted to the re-release of the film.
Le Voyage dans La Lune, a newly restored part of film history, is now living its second life in theaters across the globe. AIR’s original film score and full-length feature CD soundtrack will be released on Feb. 7 in the United States and Canada.
