On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Giant Cannon, preparatory drawing for the film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902)
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès French
Not on view
In Méliès’s pioneering short film A Trip to the Moon, a group of learned astronomers board a cannon-propelled space capsule to the moon, explore its craters and caverns, and flee from an army of insect-like lunar inhabitants. As the story unfolds, the audience is treated to a spectacular array of ingenious tableaux and special effects, such as the famous sequence in which the spaceship pierces the eye of a crater-faced man in the moon. Every aspect of the imagery, including the elaborately painted theatrical backgrounds, was based on detailed sketches by Méliès, which he re-created in 1930 at the request of the film archivist Henri Langlois.
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