Funny how sometimes when your mind is taken by a specific research or inspiration, the entire world seems to be tuned on the same wavelength.
I recently resumed a personal research on Space Age fashion, while my mind was still taken by early silent films from the Fashion in Film Festival and I found it quite funny to pass in front of Ladurée’s shop at Harrods and spot in the windows of the patisserie most loved by fashionistas worldwide for its colourful creations, brown and silver macaroons packaged in boxes emblazoned with the moon.
I instantly thought about space and French filmmaker and “Cinemagician” Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès and his iconic black and white science fiction film Le voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902).
Mainly based on two books, From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells, Méliès' film starts with a meeting of astronomers.
One of them proposes a trip to the Moon and six brave men agree to go.
After building a bullet-shaped space capsule they are fired into space from a cannon operated by a group of girls (dancers from the Folies-Bergère).
As the capsule pierces the eye of the moon, the astronomers disembark and start wandering around, delighting at the landscape.
They then settle down and fall asleep, dreaming of stars with the face of the Folies-Bergère girls.
Woken up by a snowfall, the astronomers seek shelter in a cavern where they encounter the local aliens, the crustacean-insect like Selenites (more Folies-Bergère acrobats...).
The explorers are arrested by the creatures and taken to the Selenite King.
Eventually the astronomers manage to run back to their capsule that falls through space with a Selenite in tow, landing in an ocean where all are rescued by a ship and taken ashore.
While looking at the Ladurée boxes in the windows it was somehow impossible not to think about the surreal shot of the rocket stuck in the moon, imagined by Méliès as a cream-pie face blinking and smiling at the approaching rocket.
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