Il viaggio attraverso l'impossibile

I suppose you could consider this film as a spiritual follow up to A Trip to the Moon. The latter remains George Méliès most famous and iconic film; probably for good reason considering its ambition and imagination. An Impossible Voyage explores similar territory and is certainly a worthy companion-piece as an example of early cinematic science fiction.

In this one a group of scientists don't go to the moon, they head further afield to the sun. Perhaps this illustrates Méliès reaching out further too. Certainly this is another example of him developing the idea of what cinema could be. Unlike most of his peers, he was taking the medium into the story-telling sphere. Films like this were in this sense the beginnings of modern cinema as we know it.

The film features a nice colour tint that adds a great deal to the fantastical look. It contains a number of hand painted sets that gives it all a highly stylised look. The scientists' adventure not only takes them to the sun but also across the mountains of Switzerland, which Méliès also depicts like an alien landscape. The travellers end up in the bottom of the ocean completing their amazing journey. All in all this is an entertaining and highly imaginative work, well worth catching.

really a great hand colored early science fiction movie with full of early special effects,greatest moment in the film that they reach the sun and go into the suns mouth with a train,this scene is very familiar with the trip to the moon when they reach the moon. The tour through the swiss landscape is also a great moment.

As many others have noted, "The Impossible Voyage" essentially follows the same adventure structure as Méliès's earlier and most popular film, "Le Voyage dans la lune" (1902). They are, after all, both based on works by Jules Verne and Adolphe Dennery. "The Impossible Voyage", however, is more elaborate and nearly or about twice as long--especially with the additional couple minutes that were available as an extended ending to exhibitors at extra cost (this ending hasn't been included on the Image Entertainment and Kino releases, but has been recently rediscovered and may be released on the upcoming Flicker Alley release). According to historian John Frazer, it cost 37,500 francs ($7,500) to make. "The Impossible Voyage" is also more chaotic, or anarchic--lampooning science and the adventures of science fiction to far greater extent. Whereas in "Le Voyage dans la lune", there was a clear journey executed in a rather concise manner, "The Impossible Voyage", instead, follows a group from The Institute of Incoherent Geography, led by an engineer Mabouloff (which translates as "Scatterbrains" and is played by Méliès), and the journey is, indeed, incoherent at times and certainly not concisely executed. On their trip, they crash their automobile (and there seems to be no reason they were even using it) in the mountains and spend some time in a hospital. They also become frozen inside a refrigerator while on the Sun. Furthermore, a journey to the Sun is obviously absurd in itself, unlike that to the Moon, which wasn't too far-fetched to the imagination even in 1902.

The overall result of this is mixed. On the one hand, it's an ambitious and entertaining film for 1904; on the other hand, the increased emphasis on chaos and satire here over that in "Le Voyage dans la lune" dissolves some of the narrative structure and continuity, especially in how it elongates the picture. Additionally, I can only appreciate the theatrical shot-scene, tableau style of Méliès's narratives in limited amounts. The fallacy of attempting to make cinema an extension of theatre, which was one of Méliès's stated goals, was fully exposed as a travesty with the early feature-length films (for example, "Queen Elizabeth" (Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth) (1912)) that were theatrical dramas rather than fantasies with spectacular theatrical effects. It's also not often acknowledged that filmmaker contemporaries of Méliès were already introducing and experimenting with the cinematic techniques of scene dissection, continuity editing and different camera positions. George Albert Smith, whom Méliès had even had correspondence with, was probably at the forefront of early pioneers in this respect, but also by the mid to late 1900s, the Vitagraph and Pathé companies were already employing crosscutting. Later, Méliès was also a contemporary of D.W. Griffith. Thus, I can't give Méliès a total pass because of his era. Yet, for its time and for what it is, "The Impossible Voyage" remains a somewhat entertaining and amusing film to this day, although I rank it lower than "Le Voyage dans la lune" and even some of his other fantasies, such as "Bluebeard" (1901) and "Kingdom of the Fairies" (1903).

On a further note, at this time--in the era of fairground exhibition of cinema--extra-filmic lecturers, or narrators, would aid audiences in following these new complex narrative films, or provide supplemental information to them. Méliès wrote narration to his story films, such as "The Impossible Voyage", for this purpose. Méliès also offered most of his films in hand-colored versions, for which exhibitors would have to pay an extra price (to give some credit, a team of women headed by a Mrs. Thullier hand colored most of them). Fortunately, and unlike some of his other films, "The Impossible Voyage" is generally available today in a hand-colored version with narration. It's helpful, and it works against some of the other limits of the film. Of the narration, however, it's also another example of the primitiveness of Méliès's films; it may be seen as an admission of their lack of cinematic storytelling and self-contained narration (or, as historian Noël Burch would say, it's "non-closed").

In 1895, a stage magician named Georges Méliès witnessed how the Lumière brothers changed the history of entertainment when he attended the first public screening of their projected motion pictures, and was marveled at the idea of moving images. Seven years and dozens of short films later, Méliès was a successful filmmaker on his own account, releasing a movie that would become legendary, "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon"), a monumental achievement in which he would finally prove that cinema was more than documentaries and "gimmick films", and that there was something that the Lumières couldn't see: that it was a natural medium for telling stories. So, after having great success with "Le Voyage Dans La Lune", Méliès prepared his next major project as another adaptation of a Jules Verne story: "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", or "The Voyage Through the Impossible".

Better known as "The Impossible Voyage", "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible" is the story of a geographic society (presumably French), which decides to make the ultimate trip. As one can imagine, this won't be a normal voyage, as they will use every vehicle they can use in an attempt to travel across every corner of the world. So, with this in mind, they prepare a train at the Swiss Alps with their advanced machinery and begin their journey. However, first they must arrive to the train, so they use "The Impossible Carriage" to get across the mountains, and after several difficulties, manage to get to the train. With their specially equipped train, the group manages to fly high in the sky, and are literally swallowed by the Sun. The group will face more difficulties, as their voyage will take them to many fantastic places, from the Sun to even the bottom of the Ocean.

The film's source, "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", was a play written collaboratively by Jules Verne and French dramatist Adolphe d'Ennery in 1882, in which the writers adapted to stage the style and themes that Verne had been used in his popular novels. Naturally, Méliès' adaptation lacks the benefits of having dialogs, but his version of "The Impossible Voyage" does keep the same atmosphere of Jules Verne's literary work, capturing the spirit of science fiction in each act of the film and mixing it with that magical fantasy and charmingly whimsical humor that Méliès used to employ in each one of his films. With a runtime of only 24 minutes (something unheard of at the time of its release), "The Impossible Voyage" shows a progression of what Méliès did in "A Trip to the Moon", as the narrative is built in a tighter way (despite the similarities with that previous masterpiece).

As usual in a film by Georges Méliès, the real magic of the movie lays in the extremely clever and detailed way in which Méliès creates his special effects, and in the beautiful art direction he uses to make his fantasy come alive. The world of "The Impossible Voyage" seems like a more detailed trip to the same universe of "A Trip to the Moon", where insanely courageous scientists and inventors use their wonderful and crazy machines to conquer the limits of their fantastic world. In this there's a difference with Verne, as while in the writer's novels there's always a certain factuality in his devices, Méliès versions have more of magical than scientific, which goes perfectly with the comedic tone he uses in his adventure films. A magician until the end, Méliès creates wonderful special effects using every single photographic trick he had discovery at the time (there's a wonderful use of miniatures in the movie).

While the legendary classic "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" is certainly an iconic masterpiece (it'll always be Méliès' most famous work), personally I found "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible" to be a superior film. Maybe it was that I saw it hand-tinted (which gives it an even more beautiful look) or the fact that it gave me the feeling that in this movie Méliès just let his creativity run completely free, but I just enjoyed this one (a bit) more. True, it's a bit tacky for our standards, but even today it holds up surprisingly well and remains as fun as when it was originally done, more than a century ago. "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", or "The Impossible Voyage", definitely makes a perfect companion piece to "Le Voyage Dans La Lune", and it's a nice introduction to the magic of Georges Méliès, the Cinemagician.

10/10

This is a crazy, delightful mess. Explorers make an effort to go to lands never seen and report back. They try to use every conceivable vehicle to go over mountains, under seas, through outer space, actually visiting the sun (I wonder if they went at night so they wouldn't get burned). There are laughs galore because the stuffed shirt explorers were in no way equipped to do any kind of huge investigation. No matter what horrible things happen to them, getting frozen, blown up, crashing from a hundred miles away, going through the sun, and on and on, they always make their way out. One of the stars of this film is the painted scenery. Melies really liked the jagged edges of the mountains and wacky surreal realms of the outer world.