At
the dawn of the last century, two well-established
cartoonists took divergent paths in their
transformation from graphic art to film
performance. Winsor McCay sought to retain
pictorial realism at the service of fantasy or
journalism: both Gertie and the sinking Lusitania
imitate nature through illustration. At the age of
50, when most artists tend to consolidate or
refine their work, Emile Cohl reinvented himself
through regression: he cast off the legacy of fine
illustrated caricature, at which he had excelled,
and leapt backward
to a child’s point of view. He grasped the demands
of the new time-based medium and gave himself over
to a more immediate, primitive, unconscious
sensibility: stick-figures acting out impossible,
incoherent metamorphoses.
Thus
were set in motion two tendencies that mark our
history and survive today in hybrid form: mimesis
and abstraction. One strives for seamless temporal
continuity, fluidity, lifelike design, narrative
cohesion. The other revels in discontinuity,
angular momentum, distortion, collage of disparate
styles; it engages the medium in a self-conscious
dialog; it is unsettling, unconsciously modern,
pulsating in a breathless synthetic tempo.
Fantasmagorie
never fails to transport me with its shocking
simplicity, nervy impudence, and casual self
reference. It embodies the spirit of children’s
play: curiosity, mock combat, an ungravitated
universe of lightness — unhinged and improbable.
Though
it does not conform to any definition of
“experimental animation” (indeed, no satisfactory
definition exists) Cohl’s first film must be
considered its prime, unprecedented example, the
mother lode of inspiration for animators, clowns
and philosophers. If Tom Gunning’s “cinema of
attractions” stimulated Picasso and Braque to flay
space into multiple planes and perspectives then Fantasmagorie
returns the favor by reducing and compressing
space, depicting both the artist and his creation
as elements of the same graphic equation. A real
hand draws a line which then takes on its own
destiny as an autonomous figure with its own
desires and foibles, until it is pulled back into
the humiliation of dependency, re-interpreted by
the artist’s hand. This parent-child relationship
is a perfect illustration of Freud’s insights into
primal relationships. It also encapsulates an
artist’s desire to re-invent drawing as if for the
first time, to return to authentic origins,
unfettered by sophisticated interpretation.
Using
a stick-figure design was both a practical
strategy but also a fundamentally artistic act of
regression, as radical as Picasso’s Demoiselles
d’Avignon primitivism. It signaled a new set
of rules, a rude, unabashed insouciance. Now, for
example, elephants meld into houses, a toy
harlequin inflates into a balloon after having
been broken in two and glued back together, and a
lady’s plumed bonnet is plucked clean then turns
into an expanding bubble enclosing the same (or
another?) harlequin. The narrative structure
boomerangs, richocheting madly, until the “hero”
exits on a hobby horse.
Emile
Cohl’s long second career as the tireless
form-giving artist of astonishment introduced the
essential ingredients of invention, play and
authorship that still pervade the spirit of
independent, experimental animation.
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