Emile Cohl’ Animated Anarchy

Emile Cohl (1857-1938) is reputed to be a pioneer of animated cinema. He was the first person to realise a film almost entirely with drawings. The principle of the animated film image may have been known, but Cohl was the first to use it in a creative way, and the first to design a drawn film character (Fantoche) who had new adventures in different episodes. Furthermore, Emile Cohl is praised as an inventor, because he animated puppets, coloured films by hand and even evoked images by scratching. As with many inventions, it is always tricky to claim the honour, as it often involves a certain chauvinism. But it goes without saying that Emile Cohl is entitled to the historical merit of systematically converting the huge potential of his medium into a substantial number of comical films. In just thirteen years, he realised some three hundred films, ranging from pure animation films, cartoons with a live-action framework to pure slapstick cinema with actors, newsreels and educational cartoons. One recurring element in his oeuvre is his anarchist mentality and his delirious, absurdist fantasy. Cohl may not be the absolute pioneer (in 1900, the American Stuart Blackton realised The Enchanted Drawing), but he did for animated film what Georges Méliès did for cinema. Just like Méliès handled the early grammar of cinema with far more imagination than the Lumière brothers, Emile Cohl expended the possibilities of the image-by-image technique more than anybody else. Pixilation, cut-out animation, living objects: he immediately worked the whole spectrum. Méliès started out as a magician, Emile Cohl first made a career as a caricaturist, strip cartoonist avant la lettre, publisher, playwright, assistant magician, costume designer and author of numerous rebuses and mind games. Moreover, he cultivated hobbies like fishing, genealogy and stamp collecting and was one of the first recreational cyclists. He was already past fifty when he started his first animation film, but Cohl systematically injected his cinematic oeuvre with a mild dose of subversive humour. The naively mischievous antics of his first character Fantoche are completely in line with the absurdist pranks that Les Incohérents pulled, a short-lived artists’ movement that enlivened the French capital from 1882 to 1896 as precursors of the Dadaists and surrealists. Several publications appeared last year, and Cohl’s work was finally put on DVD. It is high time to rediscover, with childlike amazement, one of the most striking personalities from the early days of the animated cartoon. The Emile Cohl programme consists of two blocks. Cohl in Close up comprises more than one hour of Cohl footage, preceded by a short lecture by Edwin Carels (researcher at the Hogeschool Gent) and with special accompaniment by Heleen van Haegenborgh. Cohl in Perspective links Cohl’s oeuvre to the work of kindred spirits from successive generations of animation filmmakers.

This program screened as part of HAFF 2009