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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-lrUkCD ... re=related



The Nederlands Filmmuseum titlecard places this in Britain, 1910. It is Anonymous. I have never seen early animation quite like this -- does anyone have a guess as to who may have produced it?

I take no heed of the comment that it may have been produced in India.

spadeneal

Can't tell you anything about the film itself, but it is on one of Edition Filmmuseum's best-selling short cinema collections, Crazy Cinematographe 1896-1916.

Here's the link:

http://www.edition-filmmuseum.com/produ ... -1916.html

Looks like the work of Walter R. Booth (though it's not his 1907 film THE SORCEROR'S SCISSORS).

Thank you Urbanora. I hadn't heard of Booth so I went investigating for films. There are many on the BFI site that I cannot access -- I would have liked to have seen The Haunted Curiosity Shop and The Over-Incubated Baby. However I was able to find Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost and The Airship Destroyer.

I was quite surprised by Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost -- here, from 1901, is a full-fledged multi-scene story film with superimposed titles for each sea change in the story. I was only a few seconds into The Airship Destroyer only to realize I had seen it before long ago in an 8mm print titled The Possibilities of War in the Air. They did not identify the film maker or source and I didn't know it was a British film; I had thought it French.

spadeneal

There's an extract from Booth's THE SORCEROR'S SCISSORS on Moving History (a collection of films from British public sector moving image archives) here: http://www.movinghistory.ac.uk/archives ... cerer.html (for some I can't make the file play - hope you can).

Thanks! I was able to get the clip to play in the Real Player. Pretty mind-blowing stuff! Booth is especially interesting in that he is able to synthesize the influences of Méliès and J. Stuart Blackton. I also note in his imdb entry he appears to be animating in clay by 1911 which is very early for that technique; though it appears in Wallace MacCutcheon's The Sculptor's Nightmare it really doesn't become a common technique until Art Clokey's Gumbasia (1952).

spadeneal

The film is by Walter Booth. It is Paper Cuttings (1912) made for Kineto Films. See IMDB - "Scissors cut paper shapes relevant to a coal strike. "

The Sorcerer's Scissors is also available in one of the files from the Huntley Archive (Huntley 11016 but I cannot recall the title it goes under].