The Impossible Voyage (1904). 20 minutes. Directed by Georges Méliès. Starring Georges Méliès, Fernande Albany, and Jehanne d’Alcy.
Much like Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent short film A Trip to the Moon, the 1904 Méliès film The Impossible Voyage focuses on a group of proto-astronauts who plot to ascend to the heavens and explore the universe. As an adventure film and trick film, The Impossible Voyage clearly grows out of its sister attraction in terms of the earlier movie’s technological feats and focus on exploration. In the case of the 1904 film, however, the explorers land on the sun rather than the moon, do not encounter adversaries there, and end up journeying through the ocean in addition to the sky. Moreover, in comparison with A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage especially causes us to examine the character and ambitions of daring interstellar adventurers as they push forward, hell-bent on conquering the heavens; their at times reckless behavior for the sake of progress; and the implications of their devil-may-care attitudes for the rest of society. The movie thus wonderfully complicates Méliès’ frequent focus on great dreamers while simultaneously allowing its characters’ intrepid dreams to flourish on the screen. As a result, The Impossible Voyage manages to engage in a satirical depiction of scientific discovery while generating the kind of fantastic movie magic that was a Méliès staple.
In The Impossible Voyage, a collection of astronaut-explorers resolve to embark on a journey to the sun. They commission the construction of a train equipped with balloons and a capsule to carry them to their target. The explorers then travel to the Swiss Alps in order to launch their ship but fail in their first attempt to leave the earth: they must be rescued by mountain climbers and are hospitalized. Soon, however, they successfully rocket themselves into space. On the sun, they are exposed to extreme heat, which they attempt to combat with a refrigerated train car; but the explorers become frozen and nearly die. After recovering, they leave the sun and descend to earth in their capsule, landing in the ocean. The travelers observe sea life underwater, but a fire breaks out in their submarine’s engine room and they must escape. They make their way back to land, where they are rescued again by mountain folk. Finally returning home, the adventurers are received enthusiastically and congratulated.
As a trick film, The Impossible Voyage does not disappoint: it uses special effects such as explosions; disappearances in smoke; large, frequently mobile paper elements such as backdrops, trains, and space capsules; double exposures; miniatures; and color tinting. But in addition to its many tricks, The Impossible Voyage bears the signs of a remarkable imagination in terms of the movie’s visual beauty and spirited plot. This creative fantasy dimension is characteristic of Méliès’ work, reflective of his own personal genius and preoccupations, and attributable to his intense involvement in the filmmaking process. As one of cinema’s first auteurs, Méliès—in his many hundreds of movies—took on the role of actor (he stars here as the chief engineer), director, screenwriter, art designer, special effects engineer, editor, and colorist. Méliès commented that in order to successfully bring his visions to life, he was compelled to appear on screen in dramatic roles, and by extension he donned many proverbial hats to successfully achieve his desired outcomes.
One of the sequences in The Impossible Voyage in which the multifaceted, innovative talents of Méliès are on full display is the underwater episode, during which we see the space capsule land in the ocean. Footage of real fish swimming by is shown in a double exposure. Within the ship, the inhabitants pull up a curtain, revealing a portal through which they can see static illustrations of jellyfish and a menacing, live-action octopus; the latter consists of a man in an octopus suit with his full, human face showing. The double exposure that precedes this moment and the pyrotechnic effects that succeed it (when the capsule catches fire) are a pleasure to watch. But perhaps the loveliest moment in the undersea sequence is when this angry animal appears, grimacing at the explorers through their porthole with a face that resembles the cranky humanoid sun that we see earlier in The Impossible Voyage, and the perturbed man-faced moon of A Trip to the Moon. Sometimes the human element of Méliès’ work is what is especially entertaining, even when the entertainment takes the form of something as crude as a man in a silly costume.
Apart from the surly octopus, as the explorers embark on the pursuit of their untamed dreams, they largely do so unchallenged. This is because the characters lack the solid opposition of a proper antagonist. Rather than showing us the astronauts encountering space monsters (such as the Selenites in the earlier A Trip to the Moon, who must be obliterated in smoke as the lunar explorers defend themselves), The Impossible Voyage does not feature a supernatural enemy force. Instead, the later film is infused with the energy of human figures who bear the markers of compassion and generosity. In particular, the film shows us kind, everyday folk in the form of its Swiss characters. Muted, supportive, and relegated to the background, they lack the personality of the aliens in A Trip to the Moon; they also lack the dramatic flair of The Impossible Voyage’s protagonists. As an easily identifiable group, however, whether they are mountaineering or simply attending to village life, the Swiss people of The Impossible Voyage constitute a distinctive force within the narrative.
Although the astronauts and mountain people combine forces to further the solar mission, there are nevertheless marked dissimilarities between the characters. The scientists of The Impossible Voyage dress finely, focus on and obsess over their adventurous exploits, traverse the universe, and are celebrated when they return home. In contrast, the Swiss characters are dressed practically, must curtail their own activities to help the band of discovery-driven strangers, are confined to the mountains and plains of their native land, and enjoy marginal rewards for their role in the explorer story.
The relationship between the two groups is lopsided for another reason: the astronauts depend upon the Swiss figures and would not survive without them, whereas their helpers hardly need or benefit from the interruptions of the explorers. Indeed, in spite of their role as less glamorous, less bombastic, supplemental helpers who receive minor recognition for their own feats, the Swiss characters nevertheless possess a kind of power that the explorers do not acknowledge. For while the film’s central dramatic quest puts the adventurers at the center of the camera’s focus, nevertheless the Alpine dwellers lingering on the periphery, and divorced from the drama of intergalactic discovery, are also the reason that the drama can continue. If the Swiss characters were less inclined to indulge the astronauts’ whims, there would be no astronauts to speak of. Indeed, the nearly impossible trip to the sun would not be possible at all.
Through the explorer/mountain dweller dynamic, The Impossible Voyage expresses its larger preoccupation with antithetical extremes. Consider the juxtaposition of the heavens with the sea, the freezer car on the astronauts’ magical flying vessel and the icy mountain conditions on earth versus the extreme heat of the sun, the highs of the Swiss Alps versus the lows of the bottom of the ocean, the factory workers and all other laborers versus the upper-crust explorers, and the first attempt to launch into space versus the second. Even the film’s heavenly sun with its expressive face is the opposite of the anthropomorphic moon in A Trip to the Moon, in spite of their similar appearance.
In juxtapositions such as these, Méliès conveys the poles of discovery and exploration—the fantastic range of adventures that dreamers can encounter. But he also evokes the either/or, off/on nature of the explorers, people who are content only with extremes and are not compatible with day-to-day life as experienced by the numerous and diverse groups of people they meet. Even within the mindset of the adventurers themselves we find a fundamental oppositional pair: in The Impossible Voyage there is a strong, pervasive sense that the astronauts’ inclinations towards the rational and practical (manifested by their meticulous construction of the space vessel, the seemingly logical inclusion of the freezer car, and so on) nevertheless are inextricably meshed with fantastic, irrational aspirations. The voyagers’ conflicted endeavors accordingly result in a messy mayhem that spills into nearly everything they touch—a crashed car, overheated apparatuses, an exploding submarine, a freezer designed to bring relief to the explorers that nevertheless nearly kills them, and flames and smoke everywhere. Through the satirical depiction of its characters’ complex explorer mindset and their indelicate romp through space, The Impossible Voyage suggests that the great men at the helm of discovery do not drive the world forward without damaging it; and moreover, that a certain amount of anti-social behavior is always co-regent to grand, adventurous gestures.
It is true that the voyagers often behave like cads; it is also true that if they continued to explore terrain above the earth or beneath the sea, there might be little left of this world or any other. But we can easily be carried away by their adventures on this stellar holiday. For although the astronauts operate on a different plane from us, the environs that they collide with, via a celestial gasoline, tingle with a kind of electrical creativity that is hard to turn away from. What is explored in The Impossible Voyage is at least as important as who is exploring it, and who or what comes out the winner in any story depends upon who is narrating it. But there is no narration in The Impossible Voyage—there is only the silent beauty of fantastic habitats.
Méliès tells a story about people inclined to focus on the big picture, but he is the one who is in charge of the moving picture and in charge of them, and he ensures that their grandiose visions never really get in the way of the utter loveliness of the movie’s visual artistry. Méliès’ chief business was always wonder, and his most exhilarating movies are transportive, enveloping us in brightly colored smoke and blasting us into other worlds on the ships of dreams. His characters may set off to discover the far corners of the galaxy, but by 1904, Méliès’ films already inhabited a universe all their own; and they will always be inclusive of both people who are inclined to shoot for the stars and those who are content to gaze up at the skies from afar.
