He is seen as the father of the animated film, yet the world has forgotten Emile Cohl and his ground-breaking 1908 work 'Fantasmagoria'. A Paris film institute is hoping to set that right this week with a centenary retrospective of his work.

Cohl was 50 years old and already famous as a political caricaturist and illustrator when he made an animated film after seeing an American cartoon in a Paris movie theatre and deciding he could do better.

The result was 'Fantasmagoria', a surreal stream-of-consciousness two-minute comedy made by filming black lines on white paper which were then reversed using negative film to make a chalkboard picture come to life.

Its success launched Cohl, who had already made live action films and previously worked as a philatelist, theatre costumier, insurance agent, playwright and actor, on a new career as an animated filmmaker.

"Inventor of the animated film"

"He considered himself to be the inventor of the animated film," said Jean-Yves Lepinay, who programmed the three-day retrospective for the Forum des Images film institute to be screened from Friday at the Cinematheque Francaise.

"He perhaps did not make the very first animated film but he pioneered the techniques that later became the grammar of animated film."

Cohl's virtuosity in animated film stemmed perhaps from his long and varied artistic career before he moved into his new profession, said Lepinay.

"He was a co-founder of the Incoherent movement which was a precursor to the Dadaists and the Surrealists, and which all had in common their challenging of society," he said.

Documentary to burlesque

The retrospective of 67 films — all that three years of research could uncover from the 300 or so that Cohl made in total — reveals movies that range from documentary to burlesque to live action comedy or puppet animation.

For film historian Valerie Vignaux, who teaches at Francois Rabelais University in the French city of Tours, Cohl is as important for the history of cinema as his contemporary, the French film pioneer Georges Melies.

Melies, a stage magician turned movie-maker, is credited with developing many technical and narrative developments in the early years of cinema.

But by 1910 people were growing weary of the sort of live action "trick films" that both Melies and Cohl had been making, said Vignaux.

"Melies didn't renew himself but Cohl did by moving into animated films," she said.

Entirely new

'Fantasmagoria', which can now be seen on websites such as Youtube, was certainly something entirely new for Cohl.

It took 700 drawings to complete and is regarded by many film historians as the first fully animated film ever made. The American whose work had inspired Cohl, James Stuart Blackton, had made 'The Enchanted Drawing' back in 1900.

While considered by some as the first real animated film, film experts note that The Enchanted Drawing was a mix of live action and animation, filmed continuously with just a few cuts to change the character's expression.

Fantasmagoria was different because the artist was not present in the film, even if an animated version of Cohl's hands is shown at the start creating the stick figure hero and then briefly near the end resuscitating him.

"Blackton does not leave the cartoon to its own devices," said Lepinay, "but Cohl freed the cartoon from its environment."

Forgotten in his lifetime

So why is Cohl, who was born Emile Eugene Jean Louis Courtet in 1857 and died in 1938, largely forgotten today?

Lepinay explained that one of the reasons is that World War I devastated the French cinema industry as much as it did the general French economy and many pre-war French movies, including those of Cohl, fell into oblivion as US movies quickly came to dominate the post-war scene.

The film historian Vignaux noted that Melies controlled almost every aspect of his films, and his descendants could therefore keep guard over the family jewels and make them available to broadcasters or film institutes.

But Cohl, who worked between 1912 and 1914 for a studio in New Jersey, was a hired hand for production companies like Gaumont, Pathe and Eclair which had little interest in keeping his name alive after their initial profits from his work.

A majority of Cohl's films are currently untraceable.

"Like Melies he was forgotten in his own lifetime," said Lepinay. "But unlike Melies he has never been resurrected."

AFP