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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Haunted Hotel (1907) / Hôtel Électrique (1908)

The Haunted Hotel (which was directed by J. Stuart Blackton and released in 1907) and Hôtel Électrique (which was directed by Segundo de Chomón and released in 1908) are two variations on almost exactly the same theme (that theme being haunted hotels, where everything inside moves around in marvellous stop motion ways).

The Haunted Hotel mixes live action, stop motion (and pixilation) animation, as well as a bunch of other film trickery techniques, to create a series of short scenes where a weary traveller is haunted first by his dinner, then by a napkin, and finally by the entire room itself. It’s wonderful. Especially the end.

This is one of the oldest surviving stop motion films (some of the same director’s earlier attempts are among the many lost), but it’s not only remarkably technically adept, but pretty funny too (I laughed at least three times in six minutes, which is fairly good going I reckon).

The Haunted Hotel was so successful in Europe that apparently every film maker in France spent the next year trying to work out all of Blackton’s techniques (according to wikipedia, at least), which is presumably how Segundo de Chomón’s Hôtel Électrique came about.

Hôtel Électrique copies the basic template of the first film, but upgrades the setting from some dismal single room to a plush, posh French hotel, at the cutting edge of modernity. No expense is spared in providing the guests with the luxuries deserving of their class. Suitcases are unpacked, shoes are shined, hair is brushed, faces are shaved, all in perfect stop motion.

In this film, though, it’s not ghosts pestering people, but electric automation. What starts off as smoothly gliding suitcases and carefully swirling razor blades devolves into chaos when the inevitably of technological failure rears its head and everything turns to horror. The only thing to do is escape with your lives.

It would be another 80 years until Stanley Kubrick remade these two films as The Shining. Never once did he admit his inspiration.

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Notes

1. I watched both of these on youtube

2. The Haunted Hotel here

3. And Hotel Electrique here

4. The picture quality on both is disappointingly terrible

5. Which is a shame

6. I don’t know if there’s better quality versions available elsewhere

7. But I assume there must be, because the gif of the woman having her hair brushed in Hotel Electrique on wikipedia looks utterly marvellous

8. Although maybe that’s simply because it’s been squidged down to almost nothing

9. I watched an earlier J. Stuart Blackton cartoon previously on here

10. Although it was so awful I hid it in the comments rather than give it any prominence on the main part of the article.

11. But The Haunted Hotel is so excellent I have forgiven him now

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Film Information

Title: The Haunted Hotel
Director: J. Stuart Blackton
Year: 1907
Duration: 7 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: Hôtel Électrique
Director: Segundo de Chomón
Year: 1908
Duration: 10 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Fantasmagorie (1908) / Le cauchemar de Fantoche (1908) / Un drame chez les fantoches (1908)

Fantasmagorie, Le cauchemar de Fantoche (The Puppet’s Nightmare) and Un drame chez les Fantoches (The Puppet’s Drama) are three early animated films, all directed by the groundbreaking Emile Cohl, a French artist and animator who was once a member of the Incoherents art movement, an excellently named precursor of the Surrealists.

Both Fantasmagorie (pictured above) and Le cauchemar de Fantoche (pictured below) are essentially a constant stream of visual improvisations, as the simple stick figures and line drawings transform and morph unpredictably through a series of surrealist imagery and interactions for a couple of minutes. They’re utterly wonderful.

That same year, Emile Cohl followed these up with Un drame chez les fantoches, a slightly more complex cartoon, in terms of plot, at least, in that it actually has a story. Unfortunately, it loses something in terms of the sheer energy and imagination of his first two, although it still has a couple of nice sequences in it, too (like the wonderful snake, shown below, which looks fairly like the sort of creature I like to draw).

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Notes

1. I watched all of these on youtube – Fantasmagorie here, Le cauchemar de Fantoche here, and Un drame chez les fantoches here.

2. Although Fantasmagorie is often said to be the first fully animated film, I’m pretty sure the “fully animated” distinction is added only so everyone can talk about this rather than the deadeningly awful Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces, which was directed a couple of years earlier by J. Stuart Blackton.

3. And which Fantasmagorie is clearly inspired by.

4. It’s strange how many early cartoons had to have a bit showing the illustrators hands drawing the first image at the start.

5. Presumably so you understood it was a cartoon and not some sort of dream come to life.

6. Fantasmagorie and Le cauchemar de Fantoche also remind me a lot of Dipdap, which I really love.

7. I wish I was an Incoherent.

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Film Information

Title: Fantasmagorie
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 2 minutes

Title: Le cauchemar de Fantoche
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 2 minutes

Title: Un drame chez les fantoches
Director: Emile Cohl
Year: 1908
Duration: 3 minutes

Title: Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces
Director: J. Stuart Blackton
Year: 1906
Duration: 3 minutes