Number of user reviews: 11
User score: 6.6
With many of the previous entries, I have strained to find some kind of historical importance for even the most innocuous films, some way in which they foreshadow the later development of the industry. Sometimes, even I feel that I'm reaching a bit; I mean, yes, Passage de Venus could be considered the first sci-fi film, in a kinda-sorta-if-you-squint-really-hard sense, but when we're looking at experiments that old, that primitive, and that far removed from the myriad valences that would eventually signify the term "sci-fi", is such a label productive to analytic discourse? To use the word "sci-fi" would require considerable qualification--so much so that it might be better to omit altogether.
But sometimes, no hyperbole is required. Sometimes there are films that really are that far ahead of the pack, so innovative that they introduce whole new concepts to cinema.
For example, today's entry. I don't have to add any qualifications when I call Pauvre Pierrot the first animated film. No reservations, no "in a sense", no "foreshadows"; Pauvre Pierrot is a straight-up cartoon. There has been nothing else like it up to this point, not in its use of a painted background, not in its use of color, not in its hand-drawn character animations, and not in its considerable but necessary runtime (4 minutes), as this is also the first film with a narrative. Yes, aside from the other cartoons that Emile Reynaud showed at the same time (it's not clear which is the absolute first), Pauvre Pierrot is the first film with fictional characters. Now, granted, the characters here are simply well-worn commedia dell'arte archetypes, but this is still the first time that we've seen anything resembling storytelling, in the familiar sense. This is not just a slice of life, not just an experiment, not just a dry run for a new technology--this is a film that is actually attempting to create an alternate world, a fantasy world. It is the first film (that I'm aware of, anyway) that invokes suspension of disbelief, for it makes no claim, scientific, technical, or otherwise, on "reality"--it is a story fabricated from director Emile Reynaud's imagination. In its attempt to create fantasy, it feels more real than practically everything that has preceded it; this is a work in which characters think and react, have personalities, motivations. Where previous films were akin to looking through windows at people waiting to be seen, Pauvre Pierrot introduces the fourth wall to cinema. These characters do not care if the audience sees them or not; they don't know the audience exists. They are contained entirely within their own world, one apart from ours and yet accessible through it.
The content of this early narrative, is, as might be expected, primitive, unfolding entirely in pantomime (intertitles hadn't been invented yet), though it is still much more developed in narrative sense than any prior film in this series. Harlequin arrives for a tryst with Colombine, Pierrot's entrance forces them to hide, Pierrot sings, and Harlequin scares Pierrot away. That is it. There is still a long way to go before complex stories will be told in film. Likewise, the animation more resembles a series of superimposed cutouts (which they effectively are) than the smooth movement that would become the norm in later cartoons; this is, after all, 40 years before the 12 basic principles of animation were codified. However, Reynaud's work does look ahead to Disney's invention of cel animation by using a single background and drawing only the characters again for each frame--this is the breakthrough that would later make color animation affordable. And, it bears repeating: the fact that any kind of animated film this old exists at all, and that it's perhaps the earliest film of any kind to tell a story, is bloody mind-blowing.
Other connections: Reynaud never found much success in his lifetime. His custom-made Praxinoscope, which was both fragile and extremely labor-intensive to make films for, was soon made obsolete by the Lumiere brothers' Cinematograph. He fell into mental illness in the 1910s, threw most of his life's work into the Seine, and died penniless soon after. His works were virtually forgotten until the 1950s, and really, they still aren't very well-known. Due to their obscurity, his works do not appear to have influenced any other early animators (J Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay, etc.)
Other most-voted titles of 1892:
2. A Hand Shake (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 262 votes)
3. Fencing (William K. Dickson | 243)
4. Le clown et ses chiens (Emile Reynaud | 142 votes)
5. Un bon bock (Emile Reynaud | 86 votes)
6. Boxing (80 votes)
7. Le prince de Galles (Louis Lumiere | 57 votes)
8. Wrestling (William K. Dickson | 41 votes)
9. Man on Parallel Bars (William K. Dickson | 34 votes)
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