Is there any evidence Jules Verne saw the film "A Trip to The Moon" (1902) before his death in 1905?

by James_Fennell
gerardmenfin

According to Verne specialists, Jules Verne never wrote about movies, possibly because, like many men of his generation, he thought that movies were inferior to theatre (Demerliac, 2011). Indeed, Verne was also a prolific (and not always successful) playwright, though, by the end of his life, he preferred selling the copyright of his novels to other authors, for a limited time. In 1900, he sold the rights of De la Terre à la Lune to playwright Emile Bergerat for 3 years but it does not seem that the play was ever written or shown (Dehs, 2011).

If Verne was not interested in movies, his son Michel definitely was. In 1900, Michel Verne met filmmaker Ferdinand Zecca at the Pathé pavillion of the 1900 Paris Exposition and they discussed making movies adapted from Verne's works. However, Michel was never in good terms with his father and nothing came out of this at the time (Péret and Péret, 2006). After the death of Verne in 1905, film adaptations and free transpositions of Verne's works started to appear, such as the copyright-defying, American-made Michel Strogoff, which pushed Michel Verne to become himself a film producer and filmmaker in 1912 (his Le Film Jules Verne company was active until the 1960s) (Demerliac, 2011).

Georges Méliès had been working on his own Verne-like movies since 1902: the first was the now famous Voyage dans la Lune, inspired by De la Terre à la Lune and by H.G. Wells's recent The First Men in the Moon, but also by other sources, notably fairground attractions popular at the time and an Offenbach operetta (Lefebvre, 2002). It was followed by Le Dirigeable fantastique (1903), Voyage à travers l'impossible (1906), 200 000 lieues sous les mers ou le cauchemar d'un pêcheur (1907) and A la conquête du Pôle (1912), all very loose adaptations from Verne's books and plays in a way that would make modern fans flock to Twitter to vent their rage (Mottet, 2011).

Still, while early filmmakers (including his son) were definitely interested in Verne, there is no indication that Verne himself was interested in movies or even watched movies, including Méliès's Voyage dans la lune. But could he have done so?

In 1902, when Méliès released his groundbreaking Moon fantasy, Jules Verne was 74 and was living in Amiens, in the North of France, where he had been elected town councillor in 1887. There had been public showings of cinématographe in Amiens as early as July 1896, when a local photographer showed a composite programme that included both "animated photographs" and a demonstration of X-Rays, "direct visions of the invisible" (Le Progrès de la Somme, 8 July 1896 and 28 December 1935). The first show of Lumière movies, accompanied by an orchestra, took place one year later at the Théâtre de l'Alcalzar. The programme also included a live performance of a musician playing the flute with his nose (Le Progrès... 4 to 10 June 1897). The advertising underlined that the show was safe because the projector ran on electricity: this was a direct allusion to the recent tragedy of the Bazar de la Charité in Paris, a deadly fire caused by a cinematograph installation using ether lamps that had claimed 126 lives. From then to 1912, early movies were primarily shown by fairground exhibitors (for whom safety requirements were easier), and that was the case of Méliès's Voyage dans la Lune when the movie toured France's funfairs after its initial run in Paris (Le Marchand, 2015)

Jules Verne was not in good health, suffering from diabetes and visual impairment due to a cataract, and he was limping after his nephew Gaston had shot him in the leg in 1886. He was slowly retreating from public life, no longer travelling or attending the sessions of the City council (he did not run again in 1904), but he was still writing abundantly and gave interviews. On 22 April 1903, Jules Verne and his wife attended at the Theatre d'Amiens a representation of the play Les enfants du Capitaine Grant, a stage adaptation of his novel that he had written with Adolphe D'Ennery in 1878. The critic of Le Progrès... noted how unusual this appearance was now for Jules Verne, who had had his own box in this theatre for many years (D'Ambiani, 1903). Verne, as a councillor, had been in charge of monitoring the theatres, fairs, and circuses, and he had made a point of attending all theatre shows. But he no longer did that, as his sight and hearing were declining and he had trouble walking (Compère, 2005).

Mélies' Voyage dans la Lune reached Amiens early July 1903, brought by fairground exhibitor Julien Marrécau, whose Palais des Cinématographes travelled around France and Belgium. The ad published in the Progrès... of 2 July 1903 read as follow:

Everyone has read Jules Verne. Few people have made some of his extraordinary journeys, notably the Trip to the Moon. Well! It is up to you to make this sidereal crossing, provided you are not afraid to get into a gigantic gun shell and cross ethereal space. If you have the courage, you will explore our satellite, you will discover new lands, you will get to know absolutely bizarre flora and inhabitants. Better still, you will bring back with you one of these lunar constituents and you will be received in apotheosis by your contemporaries. Don't worry. The journey offers no danger, no fatigue. Comfortably seated in Mr. Marrécaut's elegant and comfortable box, in a cool temperature, you will admire the moon at less than a meter, you will attend the drama of Belgrade, you will see how a bather had trouble undressing to go in the water, you will attend a fantastic fishing, etc., etc. Families, moreover, will not fail to take their children there, especially on Thursdays, because it is then that large balloons are offered to the young.

It is interesting that the ad mentioned directly Verne, but of course this makes sense as he was a local celebrity. The Palais des Cinématographes, installed in front of the Hopital des Incurables, was a mere 600 m from Jules Verne's house (now a museum). He could certainly have gone there to see the movie in these early days of July 1903, if he wanted to, as he had done for the play three months earlier. We just don't know that he did.

The Palais des Cinématographes showed the movie programme for about two weeks, and then replaced it by a performance of "looping" stuntmen, the Piste de la Mort (The Deadly Track). The ad insisted, "to avoid any confusion among the readers", that this time it was not a "cinematographic view that was represented, but the reality itself". On the last days of 1904, the Café Ledroux, a coffee house on the Place Gambetta, not far from City Hall, started projecting pictures on the facades of the buildings across the square, much to the delight of passerbys, who stopped to watch "colorized views, landscapes, and animated scenes", and cheered and laughed at this new form of (free) public show. By then, however, Verne was suffering from a severe diabetes crisis, and his health deteriorated quickly until his death on 24 March 1905.

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