Le Voyage dans la Lune

You need only look at it to convince yourself - a conviction now shared by all scientists - that the Earth is completely uninhabitable.
THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON

Spurred on by the success of Jules Verne's extraordinary journeys, Offenbach created this fairy-tale opera in 1875: to please his son the prince, the aptly named Caprice, King Vlan undertakes to travel to the Moon in a shell fired from a cannon. Of course, nothing happens as planned, and the adventure on the supposedly uninhabited star soon becomes a series of situations as incredible as they are absurd.

Behind the folly and exuberance, Offenbach's music conceals a secret nostalgia. And it may well be that, deep down, this journey is a pretext to contemplate our certainties and excesses from the perspective of a Moon-dweller observing our planet. One thinks of the words of Will Anders, a passenger on the Apollo 8 mission: "We came all this way to see the Moon and we discovered the Earth."

It wasn't long before cinema embraced interstellar travel as one of its most prolific obsessions, from Georges Méliès to James Gray. For the time being Offenbach captures this theme and tries to confine it to the dimensions of the stage. The result is a spectacular fantasy involving a take-off and a moon landing, an erupting volcano, a glass palace with mother-of-pearl galleries, trapdoors, fireworks and a camel borrowed from the Jardin d'Acclimatation.

A century and a half of science fiction later, director Olivier Fredj has chosen to show the reverse side of this theatre of special effects. Collaborating with the illustrator Jean Lecointre, he invites us on a vast film set that creates illusions before our very eyes, in tribute to the infinite power of imagination.