“An Experience of the Impossible”: The Planetary Imagination in Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon

In Georges Méliès’s masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon, one of the first spectacles that the astronomer-adventurers encounter is the image of Earth rising above the horizon. The scene in Méliès’s 1902 fantasy film is an uncanny foreshadow of two of the most famous photographs in human history, Earthrise and Blue Marble. The image of Earth from space evokes the critical question of what it means to consider human existence on a planetary scale, a question that began to take a newly urgent form in Méliès’s time and continues to haunt modern audiences. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak argues that planetarity constitutes “an experience of the impossible.” Méliès, with his unique penchant for staging impossible situations, is uniquely suited to exploring the radical alterity of “the planetary imagination.”