You know it even if you have never seen the film: the face of the Moon with a capsule driven into one eye. That frame comes from Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès, of 1902, and the objects that produced it are on show in a museum opened not long ago inside the Cinémathèque française, at Bercy, in the twelfth arrondissement, the same one as the Palais de la Porte Dorée.
At the Cinémathèque you buy three different tickets, one for the museum, one for the cinema and one for the temporary exhibition, and none of them stands in for another: it is easy to get it wrong at the desk. The museum, besides, closes on Tuesdays.
If cinema was in black and white in 1902, why is that frame in colour?
Let’s go!
1. A museum of 2021, inside a film archive
The Musée Méliès, La Magie du cinéma was inaugurated on 19 May 2021, which makes it one of the most recent museum openings in Paris, and if you are holding a printed guidebook a few years old you will not find it in there.
Around five hundred objects are on show, and the overall inventory of the holdings the museum draws on says plainly what kind of collection this is: 175 pieces of costume, a dozen or so conjuring objects, two pieces of cinema equipment, 6 posters, 300 drawings, 450 original photographs and 380 archive documents.
All of this exists thanks to one person. Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, the film-maker’s granddaughter, spent her life collecting and saving what was left of her grandfather: in 2004 she handed her own collection over to the CNC, which acquired it for the State, and in 2011 she gave the Cinémathèque the nitrate negatives and the printing elements of 77 films in 35 mm.
2. The conjuror who bought himself a theatre
Méliès did not come from cinema, which in 1895 did not yet exist. He came from magic.
The portrait above dates from 1895, the year of the Lumières’ first screening, and Méliès was thirty-four. Seven years earlier, in 1888, he had bought from Robert-Houdin’s widow the theatre the great conjuror had founded in Paris, and there he staged magic shows with machinery, trapdoors and apparitions.
That training explains all the rest. When he saw the Cinématographe, Méliès did not think «an instrument for documenting the world», as the Lumières did: he thought a new trick to add to the repertoire. His films are magic acts filmed, with the camera in the place of the audience.
3. The film that invented storytelling
Le Voyage dans la Lune runs for fourteen minutes, which in 1902 was an enormous length: most films of the time lasted less than a minute and showed a single action. Méliès built instead a series of consecutive tableaux, with a beginning, a development and an end, and he shot them in his glass studio at Montreuil, which he had had built in 1897 and which is the first French film studio. So what you are looking at is not only one of the first science fiction films: it is one of the first films that tell a story.
The frame at the top of this page is the ninth tableau, the moon landing. Look at it closely: the Moon has a human face, with eyes, a nose and a mouth, and the capsule goes into her right eye, the one you see on the left, with a red splash around the point of impact. The clouds around her are painted on a backdrop, and at the two edges of the image you can see the film perforations.
4. The colours painted by hand, 13,795 times
Here is the answer to the question at the start, and it is an answer made of labour.
The colour was not printed: it was painted on to the film with a brush, one frame at a time. The work went to specialist workshops, and Méliès used the atelier of Élisabeth Thuillier, at 87 rue du Bac. Thuillier and her daughter Marie-Berthe, known as Berthe, chose the colours and decided how they were to be applied; the women workers carried it out.
The figures show what an undertaking it was. There were 13,795 images to colour, and more than two hundred women worked at the atelier. Each of them applied one colour only, and a single film could run to more than twenty: one copy therefore passed through as many pairs of hands. Berthe Thuillier recounted that she chose and tested the tints at night, and that during the day the workers applied them following her instructions.
So when you look at that lunar yellow and that red, you are not looking at a technique: you are looking at the work of a chain of women whose names, for the most part, we do not even know.
5. The copy found in Barcelona
How did a film whose negatives no longer exist survive?
By chance, and badly.
An original hand-coloured print was found in Barcelona in 1993, in disastrous condition: the nitrate film had largely decomposed and fused to itself, reduced to a single block. For years it looked beyond saving. The restoration began in 2010, with a frame-by-frame scan and a digital reconstruction, and the restored version was screened at the Cannes Festival on 11 May 2011.
It is the only hand-coloured print of the film known to exist, and the frame you saw at the top of this page comes from it.
6. Who loads the cannon
One production still survives from the shoot, and it is the image that changes the idea you have formed of the film.
In the film the capsule is loaded into a gigantic cannon by a team of figures moving in line. In the still you can see how that team was made up: a line of young women in sailor costumes, with white stockings and straw hats, leaning on one another as they push. Above them, on a walkway, there are more of them and a man in uniform pointing with a stick.
Then look at the lower part of the image, because it is the lesson in craft. What look like rooftops seen from above are a flat painted backdrop, with the tiles, the chimney pots and the beams drawn on it, propped in front of the scene. Méliès did not build the city: he painted it, and the perspective was made by the fixed camera.
7. The drawing in which the Moon grimaces
What did the scene look like before it was shot?
In the museum there is a drawing by Méliès for the film’s poster, recognised as autograph by the Cinémathèque, and the comparison is worth the visit on its own.
It is not a printed poster: it is the preparatory drawing, all in pencil, with the words Le Voyage dans la Lune drawn by hand at the top and, at the bottom, the advertising catchwords Inédit!!, Sensationnel!! and Extraordinaire!!.
Now set the drawing beside the frame. In the film the Moon takes the blow almost without reacting, and the comic effect comes precisely from that impassivity. In the drawing, on the other hand, the Moon grimaces in pain: her eyebrows are arched, her eye wide open, her mouth twisted and her teeth bared. Méliès was selling the gag, and to sell it he exaggerated it. It is the distance between the advertising for a film and the film itself, and it is the same distance today.
8. The end, and the toy kiosk
The story does not end well, and the museum does not hide it. After the First World War cinema became an industry, with the big studios and international distribution, and Méliès’s craftsman method could not stand the comparison. In 1923, hounded by his creditors, he had to sell the Montreuil property back to Pathé.
The crates holding the films were sold to street traders and disappeared, and many reels were melted down for the silver in them. Of almost six hundred films shot in seventeen years a minority survives, and it is all of him you can still see. From 1925 he ran a kiosk selling toys and sweets in the Montparnasse station, and for years nobody knew who the man behind the counter was. He was recognised in 1929 by Léon Druhot, the editor of the Ciné-Journal. Louis Lumière presented him with the Legion of Honour in 1931, and Méliès died on 21 January 1938.
The museum you have just visited exists because his granddaughter put back together, piece by piece, what that failure had scattered.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 September 2026 on the official site cinematheque.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Museum tickets. Full price costs 10 euros and reduced 7.50, which is also the rate for 18 to 25-year-olds. Children from 6 to 17, disabled visitors and people on minimum social benefits pay 5 euros. With the Libre Pass you go in free. Note on the three tickets. The cinema is a separate ticket, 7 euros full price and 5.50 reduced, 4 for 18 to 25-year-olds. The temporary exhibition is a third ticket again: Belmondo, le Magnifique, from 7 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, costs 14 euros full price and 11 reduced. There is, though, a museum plus exhibition package at a reduced price, and the two visits can be made on different days. Guided tours. The museum runs them every Saturday at 16:00, and there is one in French sign language. Pack Tribu. The family ticket costs 22 euros for a maximum of two adults and three under-18s, and it is sold online only. Jeudis Jeunes. On the second Thursday of the month the museum closes early, at 18:00, and reopens in the evening for a visit that is free for 18 to 25-year-olds and for students, with compulsory registration. Opening hours. The museum opens on Monday and from Wednesday to Friday 12:00-19:00, on Saturday and Sunday 11:00-20:00, and it keeps the weekend hours during school holidays and public holidays too. It closes on Tuesdays. The last admission is 45 minutes earlier. Note on the summer closure. The whole Cinémathèque closes in summer: in 2026 it stayed closed from 27 July to 15 September inclusive, and it reopened all its spaces on 16 September. It also closes on 1 May and 25 December. Free admission. Entry to the museum is free on the first Sunday of the month. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is included in the pass. Getting there. The address is 51 rue de Bercy, in the twelfth. Get off at Bercy, served by lines 6 and 14. How long it takes. Allow an hour and a half for the museum. With a screening or the temporary exhibition, reckon on half a day.
Where to go from here
Pre-cinema, the optical machines that prepared the ground for Méliès, is in another Paris museum: Émile Reynaud’s praxinoscopes and the devices that animated images before film are at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
The Paris of shows and cabarets in which Méliès learned his trade is told by the Musée de Montmartre, and the story of the city as a whole by the Musée Carnavalet.
All the images on this page are in the public domain.
