The importance of Emile Reynaud’s artistic and technical productions may now be considered a logical and enduring extension of the enormous success of his productions in the nineteenth century: when he sold 100,000 copies of his praxinoscopes (an optical toy producing the illusion of movement), 200,000 tickets to the presentations he gave, before the Cinematographe Lumière, and in the 19th century some half a million people saw the “Pantomimes Lumineuses” his animated projections, in colour and with sound, at the Musée Grévin.
Four special programmes present a panorama of Animated Painting and Animated Photo Painting, first created by Emile Reynaud, and which has left a prolific legacy of continuing relevance, still neglected by official versions of film history. The programmes contain around fifty films made over the span of a century, using a highly diverse set of techniques: animated painting, painted film, animated engraving, the programmes include some very rare films from highly inventive filmmakers, and ranging from early primitive animation to contemporary experimental cinema: Alexandre Alexeïeff, Stuart Blackton, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Roberts Breer, Emile Cohl, George Dunning, Guy Fihman, Oskar Fischinger, Paul Grimault, Peter Kubelka, Lumière brothers, Len Lye, Norman Mc Laren, Georges Meliès, Noburo Ofuji, Julien Pappe, Lotte Reiniger, Emile Reynaud, Walter Ruttmann, Harry Smith, John & James Whitney, Dominique Willoughby.

Around Emile Reynaud
A cinematic reconstitution of the luminous pantomime by Emile Reynaud “ Autour d’une cabine ”. It is interesting to see the contrast between animated painting and the emerging photographic cinema in that period of their initial co-existence and rivality.

Fantasmagories
Reinvention by Stuart Blackton and Emile Cohl of the cartoon within cinema and the fantasy relationships of line (which suddenly animates) with form and figure, as well as the hybrid techniques used by Emile Cohl and Robert Breer (drawing photos, painting, animated objects).

Animated paintings, animated engravings, painted films
Four major inventions in animated painting: abstract film, animated engraving, animated silhouettes and painted films.

Painted Films and animated photo-paintings 1
Len Lye,picking up on animated photo-painting, extended his technique from painted film to filming sequences then re-editing them using “jump cuts” and elliptic edits.

Painted Films and Animated Photo-Paintings 2
Harry Smith, after Len Lye was the second inventor of this process. Oskar Fischinger continued his experiments with animated paintings
in the United States where John and James Withney, in the 40s,
were creating synthetic then digital methods of composing sound
and image.