A drunk staggers into his apartment and falls asleep. He dreams he climbs to the top of a building and flies to the moon, then falls back to earth. When he wakes, still drunk, he is in his apartment.
This collaboration between Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca -- Zecca plays the lead -- can be viewed as an attempt to build a film vocabulary, shots and images that could and would be used by future film makers: the clock with the improbably long pendulum, that would show up in Chaplin's drunk comedy, 1 A.M.; the flying dream that would show up in Porter's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND; the fall past stars that recalls Melies' AN IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE; the Man in the Moon that swallows the drunk, that De Chomon would reuse in his version of A TRIP TO THE MOON. These and others would be used and reused by others for the next few years.
They would be swept away in half a dozen years when the film grammar pioneered by George Albert Smith and perfected by D.W. Griffith triumphed. A new film language would emerge, with a grammar and vocabulary that had no use for them.
