by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday Charles and I went to Gerry Williams’
photographic studio in Golden Hill for his monthly “Mars Movie Night,”
featuring various films made over the years dealing with the Red Planet and
humans either going there or fending off Martians coming here. This program was
one of his most fascinating, showing three films from the 1910’s — a
five-minute Edison short from 1910 called A Trip to Mars, a one-hour British feature from 1913 called A
Message from Mars and an 80-minute Danish
feature from 1918 originally called Himmelskibet and literally translated for English-speaking
audiences as, you guessed it, A Trip to Mars. Gerry had shown the 1910 Edison A Trip to
Mars on one of his previous programs and
it’s an engaging film for what it is but shows just what a sorry record
Edison’s company had for creativity, especially by comparison to the best work
of the independent studios that were breaking Edison’s patent monopoly but
would eventually become the bulwarks of the industry. The 1910 A Trip
to Mars is an obvious knockoff of Georges
Méliès’ marvelous A Trip to the Moon
from 1902, though instead of launching himself to his outer-space destination
via a cannon, the principal character of A Trip to Mars is a scientist who invents a powder that can reverse
the effects of gravity, whereupon the magic stuff propels him through space
directly to Mars (with none of that bothersome nonsense about space being a
vacuum and therefore it being impossible for him to breathe along the way). He
meets giant-sized beings, including one who responds to his attempt to climb
the giant’s nose by blowing cold air over him and turning him into a giant
snowball. Eventually he gets de-iced and falls back to earth with the same
anti-gravity powder with which he went to Mars. It’s an O.K. movie but a
singularly pointless one, and director Ashley Miller (the only person connected
with this project credited on imdb.com) is hardly in Méliès’ league as a
fantasy filmmaker, but its historical importance is undoubted — it appears to
be the first science-fiction film ever made about a trip to Mars and is almost
certainly the earliest one that survives, even though it survives in pretty
beaten-up form, probably from a paper print. Until 1912 the U.S. copyright laws
did not cover film, so it was impossible to copyright a movie — however, still
photos were copyrightable, so
enterprising studios made contact prints of their movies and copyrighted all
the frames in them as photographs. It’s a lucky thing they did, too, because
quite a few films from the very early days from which no cinematic prints
survive nonetheless still exist as paper prints — though the task of
rephotographing every frame and aligning them properly so they can be
re-converted into a watchable movie is arduous, time-consuming and very expensive.
