1908: FANTASMAGORIE

Director:  Émile Cohl
Length:  1:20 minute

   This is “Fantasmagorie”, and it is barely over a minute long—the shortest movie I’m watching for my 101 Movies project (though, of course, many of the pictures I watched for my post on nineteenth-century films were this short or much shorter).  I realize it might seem like cheating, watching a movie that’s barely long enough to be a movie, but this one is special.  Why?  Because it’s the first animated film... kinda.  I say kinda, because I ran across many other hand-drawn movies when researching earlier years.  Those apparently don’t count.  According to my reference book on the history of movies,

"Until then animation had been nothing more than bits, tricks, and pencil drawings jumping about.  Fantasmagorie elevated the whole medium, showcasing its storytelling possibilities." - Alex Ben Block

   It’s funny that he would say that, because “pencil drawings jumping about” is almost exactly what this movie is.  "Fantasmagorie" was designed based on an artistic style called the Incoherent movement, which is an apt description.  I’m not even going to bother explaining what this movie is about—that would be impossible.  Stick figures leap about and transform into this or that with all the impatient energy of a four-year-old high on sugar.  And crack.  The only brief section that even vaguely “showcases” any “storytelling possibilities” is a bit where the main character goes to the theater to watch a play (or a film, which might make this the first movie to portray a character watching a movie), and is frustrated by the woman sitting in the row in front of him wearing an outrageously-sized headdress.  The rest of the movie is extremely difficult to follow and even harder to describe.  If you’re that curious, you can watch it yourself—it's only a minute long, after all.

   Despite its incoherent non-narrative style and extreme brevity, though, I wouldn’t consider “Fantasmagorie” to be a move backward, as I might “Baby’s Toilet”, or even “Fire!”.  The reason is that those choices were intentional.  This movie resembles the proto-films of the 1890s, but that is because of a deliberate style—Émile Cohl made this movie simplistic and nonsensical because he wanted to.  In fact, aside from Méliès, he is the only filmmaker so far featured on this blog who I would say has a distinct, identifiable style.

   Also, you can’t really compare the length of this movie along the same scale as you would live-action films.  Émile Cohl himself drew each of the 700 frames of “Fantasmagorie”, using an illuminated glass plate to align each frame with the one before it.  The process took four months, which was a long time for a movie to be made in 1908.  During that year alone, James Williamson made 14 movies, Edwin Porter made 46, and Georges Méliès made 61.  So comparatively speaking, this movie might as well be forty-two minutes long.