Director: Georges Méliès
Cast: Georges Méliès, Victor André, Bleuette Bernon

When filmmakers like Martin Scorsese are queueing up to pay homage to you, you’ve probably earned your place in cinema lore. So it is with Frenchman Georges Méliès – soon to be played by Ben Kingsley in Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret – toymaker, entrepreneur and grand-père of modern sci-fi cinema. He could probably make a mean croque-monsieur if he set his mind to it too, so multi-talented was he. The dazzling A Trip To The Moon’s plot is wonderfully wacky – like the midway point between Button Moon and Alien, it tells the story of top-hatted pioneers who travel into space, discover some weird creatures (the surprisingly explodable ‘Selenites’) and hastily come back again – but the bigger story was what Méliès had achieved with this strange new medium. He fused the adventuring spirit of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells with moving images and proved that with a few strips of celluloid, a flair for experimentation and a cheese-dream imagination, the sky was no longer the limit.