Fantasmagorie (film frame)

A single white figure stands against pure black, arms flung out, drawn in nothing but a wavering line. This is a frame from Fantasmagorie, the short Émile Cohl made in 1908 by photographing hundreds of drawings one at a time. Run in sequence, they move: the little clown sprouts, transforms, and melts into whatever the line decides to become next. Cohl had come up through caricature and the Incoherents, the Paris pranksters who mocked fine-art seriousness, and he carried that free-associating spirit onto film. What the comic strip did across a row of panels, he did many times a second. The bright drawing on a dark ground was a darkroom trick: the negative of black ink on white paper, printed in reverse.