An animated film by French caricaturist, cartoonist and animator Émile Cohl. It is one of the earliest examples of hand-drawn animation, and considered by many film historians to be the very first animated cartoon. Despite appearances the animation is not created on a blackboard but rather on paper, the blackboard effect achieved by shooting each of the 700 drawings onto negative film. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images on to surrounding walls.
Probably it was screened with largely improvised live music (piano), so this isn’t quite the original experience. There’s a version with some music on archive.org linked in this thread. Watching the silents without any audio feels weird, “empty”, and the original audiences must’ve felt the same.
And yeah, early films were a bit similar to circus attractions, so the comparison is pretty good. They wanted to show something visually striking, so e.g. they filmed many variants of “serpentine dances”, or fights between a chimney sweeper covered in coal and miller covered in flour.
Someone commented on archive that the music was a bit out of its era so I’m curious what contemporary accompaniment would have been like.
Here’s one example of an original musician from the silents’ era, playing some fragments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lwsA0n8OBY
The overall sound was like that, but of course different pianists had different styles and repertoires of typical melodies that they’d improvise with.
Some more ambitious feature length films would employ ensembles or an entire orchestra, which is what Griffith did first for the Birth of a Nation. Of course in that case the music had to be written in advance, though I’m not sure how much of it has been preserved over the decades.
That was pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
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That fight film has such an early internet vibe. Just some dudes filming bullshit they think is entertaining.
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https://piped.video/watch?v=ag1qu38qKfg
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