Jeff Mills
A Trip To The Moon

'Le Voyage dans la lune' by George Méliès made cinematic history and not just in the science fiction genre. Even those who have never seen the entire work know what I'm talking about and at least have a clear image of the famous scene where the spaceship crashes into the Moon's eye.

I believe it is the first science fiction film in history, shot in 1902 in the Star Film studio of Méliès in Montreuil, near Paris, filmed with a fixed camera (it's a so-called 'tableau film' composed of a series of scenes, seventeen in total, with fixed shots) and devoid of captions. It lasts about fifteen minutes and is obviously available for streaming on YouTube or other digital channels.

The plot is very naive and loosely inspired by two pioneers of science fiction literature like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells: a congress of astronomers decides to send a spaceship to the Moon, shooting it directly from a cannon. The space travelers reach the satellite and here they meet its inhabitants, the Selenites, who capture them and bring them before their King. In the end, they manage to escape by "falling" the spaceship down to Earth, as if it were plummeting downwards attracted by the Moon's gravity towards Earth.

Méliès himself also took part in the film as an actor, playing the role of the president of the college of astronomers.

Of course, the film is silent and in black and white.

In the nineties, a famous music video by the US alternative band Smashing Pumpkins created a sort of parody in the video for a famous song ('Tonight, Tonight') from the 1996 album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.' The video was directed by the pair of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, famous for directing dozens of music videos, in addition to two really beautiful films like 'Little Miss Sunshine' (2006) and 'Ruby Sparks' (2012).

I can't think of others, but clearly, this won't have been the only time this seminal cinematic work has been re-used, reinterpreted, or reshaped over the years.

Likewise, the work has surely been "scored" multiple times.

Besides, a trend that has become widely diffused, particularly since the nineties, encourages rock and alternative musicians to engage in scoring silent films. This especially happened for the thriving post-rock trend of about a decade ago, a genre whose often grand and intense compositions filled with 'crescendos' rich with pathos and drama, tended to adopt a soundtrack-like component.

So it is no surprise that we encounter a new 'played' version of 'Le Voyage dans la lune.'

The peculiarity of the case lies perhaps more than in the fact itself, in the author of this work, who is the Detroit, Michigan, United States DJ and producer Jeff Mills.

Active since the eighties and considered a pioneer for his approach to DJing, modulating techno, dub, Chicago House, and new wave, Mills inevitably came under the influence of Public Enemy's hip hop, to which he was drawn also for ideological reasons.

In recent years, he developed an interest in what has been termed 'epic techno' and has scored 'Metropolis' by Fritz Lang, 'Fantastic Voyage' by Richard Fleischer, and now 'Le Voyage dans la lune.'

All three records were released on his label, Axis Records, which Mills founded with another major figure in U.S. electronic music, Robert Hood, in 1992 in Chicago.

The work lasts much longer than the original film by Méliès and consists of fifteen tracks, each evoking the atmospheres of different moments of the film. In general, the sounds alternate thrilling or detective noir fascinations, atmospheres worthy of the tense moments in Dario Argento's films, with cyberpunk plots featuring synthetic vaporizations and bubbling and gasping reminiscent of old black-and-white sci-fi cinema along with crystallizations into millions of luminescent diamonds on the big screen.

Perhaps overall it is difficult to give a clear judgment of this work without considering it as necessarily paired with Méliès' film. In and of itself, indeed, listened to without the vision of the work or outside the context for which it was conceived, it does not have much value: every single sound and 'pulse' wants to recall a gesture, an action, a scenic representation.

Only when conceived through the inevitable mediation of the original film and as a homage to an eternal, as well as seminal, work of the science fiction genre, does Jeff Mills' work make sense (anyway, I wouldn't consider his work innovative in its entirety). Otherwise, perhaps better to avoid: the work as a whole does not impress particularly.