France
Length: 14 minutes
Director: Georges Meiles
Cast: Victor Andre, Bleuette Bernon, Brunnet, Jeanne d'Alcy, Henri Delannoy, Depierre, Farjaut, Kelm, Georges Melies
Eric's impressions: Could the first movie also end up being the strangest? Stay tuned. During its time, this was a major cinematic achievement for many reasons with its length being near the top of the list. At 14 minutes, it was seven times longer than other films being made. It also was quite artsy for its time - leave it to the French. The most lasting images for me of this sci-fi comedy are the spaceship landing in the right eye of the moon's "face" and the use of umbrellas as alien-killing machines.
Natalie's impressions: I watched this film while living in China last year. Before I go any further, let me just say that now that I am back in the U.S. living with Eric, he and I will both only watch movies in chronological order. I was in a city called Dongying in Shandong Province teaching English literature at a local college. I was only teaching four hours a week so I had a lot of free time. Dongying is a very boring city. There is very little in the way of culture. At the time I watched this film, I had been living in Dongying for five months and I felt I had exhausted the entertainment opportunities the city had to offer. So Eric suggested I start watching more films from our book. I was able to find a surprising amount of the films online. I didn't watch them in chronological order. Rather, I watched them as I found them. Often I would watch movies for twelve hours a day. The day I watched this film was one of those days when I viewed six or seven movies because all the films were less than an hour or a little over an hour long. Now it might seem like watching movies like this would cause al the films to blend together and I did confuse few of them with similar plots and sometimes I would forget that I ever watched it. This film stood out in my mind because it was the first film in the book, it was extremely short and very very silly.
COUNTDOWN: JUST 1,000 MOVIES TO GO
If anything, it was quite interesting to see a movie that was 107 years old. Quite an eccentric little entry into the vast library of film.
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