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.
In a medieval castle, a dark magician thought to be Mephistopheles conjures up a series of bizarre creatures and events in order to torment a pair of interloping cavaliers.
At the royal court, a prince is presenting the princess whom he is pledged to marry when a witch suddenly appears. Though driven off, the witch soon returns, summons some of her servants, and carries off the princess. A rescue party is quickly organized, but the unfortunate captive has been taken to a strange, forbidding realm, from where it will be impossible to rescue her without some special help.
Two travellers are tormented by Satan from inn to inn and eventually experience a buggy ride through the heavens courtesy of the Devil before he takes one of them down to Hell and roasts him on a spit.
Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.
A fairy godmother magically turns Cinderella's rags to a beautiful dress, and a pumpkin into a coach. Cinderella goes to the ball, where she meets the Prince - but will she remember to leave before the magic runs out? Méliès based the art direction on engravings by Gustave Doré. First known example of a fairy-tale adapted to film, and the first film to use dissolves to go from one scene to another.
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.
A man rents an apartment and furnishes it in remarkable fashion.
On a city street, a number of men take advantage of an old drunken bum.
A series of fantastical wrestling matches.
An episodic narrative displaying examples of humankind's brutality, from the story of Cain and Abel through the Hague Convention of 1907.
The Flicker Alley DVD "Georges Méliès: Encore New Discoveries (1896-1911)" misidentified a partial hand-colored print of the 1906 film "Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou La cornue infernale" (The Mysterious Retort) as this film, "L'hallucination de l'alchimiste" (An Hallucinated Alchemist) from 1897, which continues to be considered a lost film.
One of the greatest of black art pictures. The conjurer appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head, and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head, and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.
A wall full of advertising posters comes to life.
In a bakery in the French countryside, Father Latourte, his wife, and their staff are busy with customers, pastries, and baked goods of all kinds. The Latourtes' young daughter, called Red Riding Hood, reads by the firelight until her parents leave for a moment. She starts to play boisterously, getting the bakery staff mixed up in hijinks and pratfalls. Her father and mother return, chagrined by her escapades, and she is told to take a pot of butter and a galette to her grandmother's cottage. Red Riding Hood travels through the forest on her errand, meeting a wolf, who finds out where she is going. Encountering her friends from the village school, she happily pauses her journey to play and dance with them. Meanwhile, at a windmill near the cottage, the miller Sans-Souci has comic trouble with his mule.
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.
In this film, Méliès concocts a combination fairy- and morality tale about the foolishness of trying to look too deeply into the workings of an unstable and inscrutable universe. At a medieval school, an old astronomer begins to teach a class of young men, all armed with telescopes, about the art of scrutinising an imminent eclipse. When a mechanical clock strikes twelve, all the young men rush to the windows and fix their telescopes on the heavens.
Divers go to work on a wrecked ship (the battleship Maine that was blown up in Havana harbour during the Spanish-American War), surrounded by curiously disproportionate fish.
The leader of a marching band demonstrates an unusual way of writing music.
After an evening of excessive wining and dining Baron Munchausen must be helped to bed by his servants. Once asleep, he has bizarre and frightening dreams.
