The spectacle of the moon conquest: how visual culture shaped Méliès’ <i>Le voyage dans la Lune</i> and its anti-imperialist satire

It is well-established that Jules Verne’s De la Terre à Lune and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon inspired Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans Lune. At same time, though, film’s written sources cannot fully account for its iconographic, aesthetic, semantic stratification. For this reason, survey will include a set of still neglected or underestimated references pioneering work motion picture art, especially visual antecedents. More precisely, elaborating on Tom Gunning Andre Gaudreault’s notion ‘cinema attractions’, central argument culture pictorial tradition, together with non-traditional theatre paradigms, concurred to determine unique cinematic spectacle at least as much literary models. These considerations are equally valid satirical content film. In fact, written, visual, spectacular combined what David Sandner describes ‘imperial farce’ which critically engaged nineteenth-century French colonial aspirations their ideological cultural background. Based these assumptions, paper aims explore thematic iconographic premises Lune, relating them imperial culture, well critical revision within post-colonial studies. Lastly, analysis focused protagonists’ double role, scientist-explorer since, I demonstrate, parodical depiction retains primary role structuring anti-imperialist satire.