Le singe musicien

In my search for older and older "movies" I've gone past silent films which had actors, directors, a plot, and all the things we've become familiar with in movies, right to moving pictures which were more science experiments than art. Whether the idea of putting a play on film had occurred to these early cinematographers we may never know, but their early dabblings with moving pictures paved the way.

"Le singe musicien" is a short animated clip of a man playing a stringed instrument. I think he's playing a cello based upon my limited knowledge of instruments. Whatever the case, it's interesting to see this evolution of animations and motion pictures in general.

Free on YouTube.

Here's Reynaud's first moving picture. It's not what we think of a moving picture, of course That would require several advances, among them film on a strip of flexible material, and that would depend on the invention of nitrocellulose as a film base, instead of simply highly flammable guncotton. That advance would not occur until the following year.

No, this is an earlier form of moving pictures, known as the praxinoscope or phenakistiscope, a series of images arranged or a whirling disc. The image would turn, different images would present themselves, often through a narrow slit, and 'persistence of vision' would do the rest.

This work by Reynaud, like others created by the same author in 1878, cannot yet be considered a film, not so much due to the absence of photography (which remains a constant in all animated cartoons to this day), but because the images were not on film stock; instead, they were drawn directly onto the praxinoscope.

In any case, the animation of the anthropomorphized monkey appears well-executed and suitable for the child audience it was intended for. The movements seem generally appropriate, although perhaps with an excessive forward bending of the torso and a certain rigidity in the tail. The pointless controversy over the fact that the hand movements do not correspond to the proper way of playing that instrument becomes irrelevant when considering both the technical impossibility of such detailed motion at the time and the playful, rather than educational, purpose of the work.

Rating: NC.