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Comment on On this day in 1908, the first animated film was released: Émile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie"

Then I realized it was pre audio

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.

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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.

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- 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.
  
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  - can@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That was pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
    
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  - PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/watch?v=5lwsA0n8OBY
    
    Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
    
    I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
    
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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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PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/watch?v=YostqK_hFkE

piped.video/watch?v=ag1qu38qKfg

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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