Méliès’s Voyage Restoration

This article aims to present three remediations of Méliès's Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902). After a brief overview of the discussion surrounding the controversial 2011 restoration of the film, I argue that the ambition to reach a technical purity creates a virtual point of view on the film. Without any given paratexts, the digital reactualization can lead its spectator to an isolated state, where she loses the ability to further explore the film as a historical object. Two other remediations are then explored: small clips used in the feature film Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) and a movie in the online catalog of the cinephile subscription video-on-demand service Fandor. These two illustrations highlight the crucial role played by contextualization when archival films are reedited in other works or watched online.