MOONSHOTS AND MUSICAL SAWS:
MÉLIÈS GETS A MAKEOVER
Georges Méliès wasn’t exactly Spielberg. He was cinema’s first mad scientist—half director, half magician, all-around agent of chaos. In the early 1900s, he wasn’t so much directing films as he was recording fever dreams: rocket ships crashing into eyeball moons, skeletons dancing Irish jigs, ghost houses with attitude. Subtlety? Not so much. Unforgettable? You bet.
Some might recognize him from Hugo, the Scorsese film that turned Méliès into a tragic hero of early cinema, rediscovered by a plucky orphan in a maudlin, syrupy script.
Now, over a century later, a new live performance, Right in the Eye—which I caught today at La Mirada Theatre—has the audacity to do something uncommon: it doesn’t merely pay tribute to Méliès—it hijacks him.
The Kingdom of Fairies (Cinémathèque Française/Alcoléa & cie)
Most tributes would play it safely. Dust off A Trip to the Moon, throw in a piano, perhaps slap a museum plaque on the wall. Not this one. It turns up the volume, tears off the glass case, and throws Méliès a psychedelic house party.
Right in the Eye (En plein dans l’œil) is the unruly, imaginative child of Jean-François Alcoléa—a musician, composer, and sound designer who doesn’t just score films, he converses with them. Born from his long-standing fascination with Méliès, the project grew out of a desire to give silent film not just a voice, but a pulse. The French press has called Alcoléa “a poet of sound,” and it fits—his music doesn’t decorate the image, it dives inside it, reshaping how we see. With Right in the Eye, he’s created something that straddles time: vintage cinema wrapped in live, unpredictable soundscapes.
Right in the Eye - Jean François Alcoléa, Mathieu Lucas & Hervé Joubert (photo by Rudy Burbant)
The idea is straightforward and extravagantly absurd: three musicians play a live soundtrack to Méliès’ silent films. But it’s not the chamber music your grandmother heard. They do bring violins, certainly, but musical saws, bicycle wheels, and instruments that appear to have been appropriated from a Dr. Seuss daydream. Occasionally you have the feeling you’re watching a symphony break into a junkyard and play music out of anything it happens to find lying around.
And here’s the wild part—it works. Really well.
The Moon (Cinémathèque Française/Alcoléa & cie)
What might have been an overly precious love letter instead proves something much more vital. When Méliès has a magician vanish on screen, the music answers with a whoosh that’s like the ghost departing the premises. Trips to the moon are enveloped in spooky, echoing mist. And when someone trips or falls (as they do repeatedly), the score delivers the punchline like a musical rimshot.
There’s no narration. No gradual, reverent history lesson. No museum whisper of, “And now we see the application of the jump cut.” The performance just plunges ahead. It assumes Méliès—raw, absurd, genius—still holds. And for some reason, he does.
The artists treat the films less like fragile artifacts and more like scene partners. They improvise, they prod, they provoke. It’s spontaneous-sounding, a little dangerous, and exactly what Méliès would be doing today—if he’d had the advantage of a Home Depot and a punk rock aesthetic.
Right in the Eye Jean François Alcoléa, Mathieu Lucas & Hervé Joubert (photo by Alain Chasseuil)
This won’t be everyone’s cup of moon juice. If you like your cinema tidy, organized, and tastefully restored, Right in the Eye will look like a full-blown sideshow. But if you’re the kind of person who enjoys getting a kick out of watching artists landing actual blows—especially odd ones—you’re in for a treat. Because the truth is, Méliès was never about perfection. He was about wonder. About surprise. About seeing something you’ve never seen before and saying, “What the hell was that?” That’s what Right in the Eye delivers. Not a history lesson. Not a lecture. A shock of strange magic.
And we could use a little more of that right now.
Right in the Eye (En plein dans l’œil)
reviewed at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts on Sunday, April 6, 2025
75 minutes
tour continues; check local listings
