Humorous phases of funny faces

SUMMARY Blackton (with only his arm showing on film) “draws“ a series of funny faces, including a line drawing of two faces, a man with an umbrella, a line drawing of two faces in profile, a clown, faces of “Coon and Cohen,“ the profile of a seated man, and a bottle of Medoc. This earliest surviving American animated film--in the strict sense of single exposures of drawings simulating movement--uses chalkboard sketches and then cut-outs to simplify the process. The opening title, animated with bits of paper, repeats a trick seen the previous year in Edison films. J. Stuart Blackton had in 1897 co-founded the Vitagraph Company, producer of the film. The flickering seen here was common to the earliest animation and resulted from the camera operators failure to achieve consistent exposure in manual one-frame cranking. CREATED/PUBLISHED United States : Vitagraph, 1906. NOTES Copyright: The Vitagraph Co. of America; 6Apr1906; H75272. Digital file