A Trip to the Moon

Professor Barbenfouillis and five of his colleagues from the Academy of Astronomy travel to the Moon aboard a rocket propelled by a giant cannon. Once on the lunar surface, the bold explorers face the many perils hidden in the caves of the mysterious planet.

The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship

An inventor dreams that his newly designed airship takes flight.

The Rajah's Dream or The Bewitched Wood

The picture opens with the Sultan lying down to rest on his luxurious cushioned couch. The scene changes to the grounds around the palace.

The Luny Musician

A crazy, rude musician gets some supernatural comeuppance.

Jupiter's Thunderballs

With godly entrapments, Zeus appears on the horizon, engages Hermes as an audience, and tries to throw some thunderbolts. They fizzle. Hephaestus tries to make some repairs but succeeds only in heating the bolts and burning Zeus's hands. Zeus conjures nine muses, but do their incantations help? He dismisses them as well as a visiting Pan, and his fits of pique become counter-productive. Can he get his powers back?

Whimsical Illusions

In this hand-colored short, a magician and his assistant do a series of magic tricks, including making potted plants appear, among others. Melies played the magician, and the actor Manuel played his assistant.

The Knight of the Snow

One of the last films Georges Méliès made. By now, he was under contract for his former rival Pathé, where he made a few of his most lavish productions, including this one. Here, Méliès performed in front of the camera as the Devil […]. His incarnation of Satan this time is a sprightly antagonist who kidnaps a princess by locking her in a cage and taking off through the sky in a dragon-pulled carriage. […]

A Miracle Under the Inquisition

An inquisitor and two of his henchmen burn a woman at the stake. An angel intervenes.

The Mystical Flame

A juggler enters upon the scene, picks up a skull, throws it into the air, catches it in his hands, where it is transformed into a handkerchief. The handkerchief, after being twirled about a wand, is changed to a napkin, and afterward to a tablecloth. Out of the table cloth comes a servant.

Off to Bedlam

Four black minstrels turn into white clowns and back again when they hit or kick each other.

A Moonlight Serenade

Pierrot goes to the house of his love to serenade her, but her father kicks him out. Soon the moon and its goddess Diana come towards the man and offers him something better.

The Spider and the Butterfly

Surviving fragment of a longer film. A magician makes a butterfly woman appear, and a woman in a star. Exhausted, the magician falls asleep and the star woman turns into a spider, dragging the butterfly into her web.

Apparitions

Alone in his room at an inn, a lustful old man is haunted by spirits.

The Dreyfus Affair

The first movie ever censored for political reasons. The title refers to the then contemporaneous Dreyfus affair in which a Jewish military officer was falsely convicted of treason, and it was alleged that he was framed due to anti-semitism.

The Wandering Jew

A Jew who mocked Jesus on the cross is visited by a devil and an angel.

Cinderella or The Glass Slipper

Georges Méliès's first attempt at Cinderella was in 1899. That film was extraordinary then for having multiple scenes and a semblance of a narrative; additionally, the use of dissolves as transitions in it influenced other filmmakers for years to do the same. Méliès was the cinema world's preeminent leader then. By 1912, however, that was no longer the case; frankly, as evidenced by this feature, his style had become dated. Moreover, Méliès had begun to adopt techniques from other filmmakers, such as direct cuts instead of dissolves, and the...

Naval Combat in Greece

An officer calls his sailors to the deck. They assemble around the canon while the officer scans the horizon. They all turn in the direction of the camera to look in the distance. At the same time the ship is hit! This scene is a filmed reconstruction of the 1897 Greek-Turkish war.

The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelee and Destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique

This picture depicts the eruption of the volcano by which over 30,000 souls were hurled into eternity. The numerous explosions which took place during the eruption are plain to be seen. Thousands upon thousands of tons of molten lava, sand, rocks and steam are thrown high in the air and descend with crushing force upon the unfortunate inhabitants of the doomed city of St. Pierre. This is the worst calamity which occurred since a similar eruption by Mt. Vesuvius when Pompeii was destroyed. (Lubin Catalog)

The Skipping Cheese

The interior of a trolley car. A menagerie of passengers notices a foul odour, and pinpoint the source of the stench at a cheese saleswoman. The gendarmerie removes her from the trolley and drags her to the precinct.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The film, a parody of the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, follows a fisherman, Yves, who dreams of traveling by submarine to the bottom of the ocean, where he encounters both realistic and fanciful sea creatures, including a chorus of naiads played by dancers from the Théâtre du Châtelet. Méliès's design for the film includes cut-out sea animals patterned after Alphonse de Neuville's illustrations for Verne's novel.