Comment on On this day in 1908, the first animated film was released: Émile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie"
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 1 year ago
First thing I did was try to turn up the volume on my phone. Then I realized it was pre audio. Then I started to rewatch it and caught myself thinking “why am I watching this dank-meme video without audio?”. That this is nearly as trippy, maybe more trippy, than some of the dank videos I’ve seen on the Internet these days, it’s amazing how far we haven’t come, or how perverse we’ve always been.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
can@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Here’s one example of an original musician for the silents, playing some fragments: 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.
can@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That was pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
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Hank@kbin.social 1 year ago
That fight film has such an early internet vibe. Just some dudes filming bullshit they think is entertaining.
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