Public Domain Theatre: Fantasmagorie

What with all the fuss over illegal downloading of music and films, copyright law has been very much in the news recently. It's easy to forget - at least, it is if you happen to be a Hollywood executive - that copyright has two parts to it. It was put in place in order to protect the creative investment that the content creator puts into their work, but it was also time-limited so that everyone could benefit from that investment directly. In other words, it is just as important for copyright protection to end as it is for it to begin.

Copyright law is an absolute mess, inconsistent across countries, types of media and any number of other factors. There is agreement on one thing, though: once a creative work falls out of copyright protection, it is fair game for anyone to use it, share it, remix it and turn it into something better. This is what "public domain" means, and it's a fantastic concept.

(While we're on the subject, Creative Commons licensing offers a halfway house for content creators, so that they can maintain some creative control while giving opportunities to the public to use their work. Definitely worth a look if you're any kind of content provider.)

In the spirit of celebrating public domain work, I'm starting a new feature on this blog, with the startlingly original title of Public Domain Theatre. This is going to be an irregularly-recurring feature, pointing out the best or most interesting public domain stuff out there, and possibly adding to or changing it in an attempt to make it even better.

I'm told that it makes sense to begin at the very beginning, so for the first installment we'll look at what may very well be the first fully animated film ever made, Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie. Produced entirely by hand in 1908, this film is a milestone in the history of the cinema.

No, there's nothing wrong with your speakers, it's supposed to be completely silent. Fantasmagorie is, as I'm sure you've noticed, one of the oddest little films you're likely to see. It is also surprisingly sophisticated. The early sequence in the cinema is not only funny, it also displays a good knowledge of physics (notice the slight "boing" in the woman's head as the man pulls out each feather). Moreover, it introduces comedy tropes (such as sitting behind someone with a huge hat) that are still used today, and dissolves into a brilliantly surreal section almost worthy (in concept, at least) of Monty Python.

Other elements in this film have been echoed throughout animation history. If we go right up to the other end of the timeline, with Alan Becker's Animator vs Animation (2006), we can see it begin in exactly the same way as Fantasmagorie. The "protagonist trapped in a surreal nightmare" is yet another trope used in later films - the latest example that I can think of is the memory-erasing dream sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has a very similar feel.

While obviously this film is not brilliant by today's standards, it's easy to forget quite how incredible it must have been to its first viewers. Even taking into account the fact that film itself was in its infancy, this was still the first time that anyone was able to see something on the big screen that they could never have seen in real life. No more was this form of artistic expression limited by what you could get an actor to do - now, anything you could imagine, draw and sculpt could be filmed. Without this step in thinking, there would have been no Harryhausen creatures, no unconvincing elephant attacks in The Return of the King, and definitely no Toy Story. We have an awful lot to thank M. Cohl for.