A Peace of Coal (1910)

[spadeneal]

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

[CoffeeDan]

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

[urbanora]

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

[spadeneal]

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

[urbanora]

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).

[spadeneal]

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

[agantuk]

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].