August 17: Fantasmagorie

On 17 August 1908, Fantasmagorie, the first fully animated cartoon, was screened in Paris. Émile Cohl drew it in the style of the Les Arts Incohérents.

Les Arts Incohérents, better known in English as the Incoherent Movement, was started in 1882 when Jules Levy organized an exhibit of “drawings by people who could not draw.” They anticipated surrealism and Dadaism. Incoherent artist and poet Paul Bilhaud produced the first monochromatic painting entitled Negros Fighting in a Cellar at Night. Another famous Incoherent painting was Eugène Bataille’s Mona Lisa with a Pipe. Bataille, also known as Sapeck,would sometimes walk around Paris with his head painted blue.

Although he had originally been apprenticed to a jeweler and later to a maritime insurance broker, Cohl’s passion was drawing; particularly the caricature. In 1878, he gained a position as one of Andre Gill’s assistants. Gill was a well known caricaturist who had earlier been arrested by Napoleon III when he published an unfavorable caricature in Le Lune.

Overwork, cut-throat competition soft tabs viagra leads to physical weakness and above all, the brain. It is recommended to the patient to take their upper figure garments off and taking viagra low cost a gander at the carriage of the storage compartment, neck, shoulders and arms. As the penis get erect with http://djpaulkom.tv/edm/ viagra online uk the dosage of Silagra the arteries in the penile region gets hampered. In some cases, the therapy might be used in conjunction with other forms of hair loss treatment, including LLLT. tadalafil online in uk Fantasmagorie was made up of 700 drawings and lasted a little over one minute. After its release, Cohl was responsible for two more films Le Cauchemar du fantoche and Un Drame chez les fantoches.

Stop action photography—the basis for animation—had been accidentally discovered by Georges Méliès when his camera jammed while he was filming a street scene and he had to take some time to fix it before continuing his shoot. When he later screened the film, he discovered that—because of the lapse of time—a truck had turned into a hearse. Méliès’ 1902 Le Voyage Dans la Lune was the first science fiction film.

In 1911, American cartoonist Windsor McCay began to use short films in his vaudeville act. Like Chol’s Fantasmagorie, McCay’s 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur–which was not fully animated–used line drawings. However, the results were much different. Gertie was not an incoherent character but a loveable dinosaur who had a distinct personality.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD

One Response

  1. Ryan Dickson says:

    After first looking at the “Negros Fighting in a Cellar at Night” painting I thought the picture wouldn’t load so I refreshed the page and the title finally hit me. The paining is supposed to be in a cellar so your not supposed to be able to see. But I wonder why do the two people fighting have to be black? Why can’t it just be two people? Is the painting supposed to be racial? Looking at the time period this was made slavery was a few decades removed. Blacks had the right to vote. So why make a title to like that. Being a African American I am not too fond of this painting.

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