A Trip to the Moon (1902)

The Man in the Moon takes a space capsule square in the eye, in a frame from Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon. Méliès was a stage magician, and the shot is pure theater: a painted face, a real actor under the makeup and a joke that needs no title card. This is the hand-colored version, which survives in a single print; its restoration premiered on the opening night of the 2011 Cannes festival. More than a century on, the wounded Moon is still the shorthand for early cinema itself.