Directed by Tim Burton (USA, 1990, 105 min.). Digital.

Perhaps the purest example of Tim Burton’s style, Edward Scissorhands is the tale of a lonely outsider (Johnny Depp) who brings welcome weirdness to a humdrum suburban community when he is taken in by a local mom (Dianne Wiest). But soon Edward falls for the beautiful daughter of his adopted family (Winona Rider), complicating his idyllic new life. Burton uses blue tones to guide the film’s changes in mood, beginning with the inky hues of the mansion where Edward lives in solitude; this palette soon gives way to the warm turquoise of mid-century plastics and the azure of cloudless skies, before tumbling into ice and moonlight as the story reaches its gothic end.

Watch the trailer

Preceded by:

A Trip to the Moon with live score by Animal Hospital

Directed by George Méliès (France, 1902, 16 min.) 35mm.

In 1902, pioneer magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès released his masterwork, the science fiction fantasy A Trip to the Moon. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's novels, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the moon in a cannon-propelled capsule and return with a captive lunar inhabitant. Always a performer at heart, Milies wanted to amplify the film’s “shock and delight” factor by infusing it with vivid color. He sent some of the prints to the Paris coloring lab of Elisabeth Thuillier, a former colorist of glass and celluloid products who now directed a studio of two hundred people. These employees painted directly on film stock with brushes in the colors Thuillier chose and specified. Each worker was assigned a different color in assembly line style, with more than twenty separate colors often used for a single film. The result of this painstaking process was an other-worldly cinematic fantasia that enchanted audiences and still remains one of the most famous early films.

Once believed lost, a copy of the original, hand-colored version of Georges Méliès’ masterwork A Trip to the Moon was miraculously found in Barcelona, Spain in 1993. Initially thought too fragile to restore, the film underwent one of the most complex and ambitious film restoration projects ever. Three experts in film restoration – Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation, and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage – used the most advanced digital technologies available to assemble and painstakingly restore the film’s 13,375 fragmented frames. Thanks to the hard work of these technicians, you can now enjoy A Trip to the Moon at the MFA as it was meant to be seen: in vibrant color, on 35mm film.