A Trip To The Moon In Color

Many people are aware of the iconic picture of a rocketship landing in the eye of the moon, and most film students (the ones worth their salt, anyway) know about the film from which this image comes - A Trip To The Moon by Melies' in 1902. Well, Serge Bromberg discovered a copy of this film in Barcelona that had actually been in color, and knew he had to save it. The film had largely decomposed, but Bromberg was determined to salvage it.

The film was placed in a humidor where the chemicals’ vapors prompted the celluloid to unpeel itself. The chemicals were also destroying the film in the process, making the endeavor a race to get each image digitized in order to recreate Melies’ hand-painted film frame by frame before the original film was gone forever. (Bromberg will not reveal the exact nature of the chemicals.) They essentially made A Trip To The Moon in color!

Now Bromberg is about to release his documentary, The Extraordinary Voyage, that depicts this process. It's being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Here is a link to the MoMA page about the screenings.