In case you just want to see the actual film:
I linked the video on Wikimedia in OP. Here's the link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/La_Fantasmagorie_%281908%29.webm
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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.
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.
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.
Here's one example of an original musician from the silents' era, playing some fragments: https://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.
That was pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
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That fight film has such an early internet vibe. Just some dudes filming bullshit they think is entertaining.
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VERY well-made, for the first animated film!
But seriously, very impressive to see the creativity in this. I thought the first animated film would be more crude.
Even earlier examples animation'ish tech that predates film would be the Magic lantern in 1603, Phenakistiscope in 1831 and Zoetrope in 1834. Though all of them where limited to a couple of dozen frames at best.
Wonder if it would have been possible to have invented longer animation before film, having a long strip of frames mass produced by a printing press might have been possible, but probably not very economical. Good animation without having film as reference might also have been difficult, e.g. Muybridge's first film was done to figure out if a horse would have all it's legs of the ground in a gallop, an action a little to quick to clearly see with the human eye when in motion.
Wow I'm surprised this isn't more common knowledge. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
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