Book Review: Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896-1901)

1. Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896-1901), front cover.

Contributors: Thierry Lecointe, Pascal Fouché, Robert Byrne, Pamela Hutchinson
Researched by: Thierry Lecointe with Pascal Fouché.
Preface: André Gaudreault
Foreword: Pascal Fouché
Introduction: Jacques Malthête
John Libbey, 2020 – paperback, 280 pages, ISBN 978-0861967506

Segueing from my stories, in the previous post, of seeing 1890s flip books (or folioscopes) in French antique/collectors fairs… I did sometimes recognise what I thought were Méliès subjects, and assumed they were known films, so imagined that these paper fragments were not really of archival interest – just fun collectables. How wrong can someone be? One in particular did make me think, however. It was a ‘card party’ theme but I knew it wasn’t the Lumières’ famous Partie de cartes, and might not be the Méliès version of the subject, so I decided to buy it. The same subject features in a book published late last year, Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896-1901) which opens up a whole world of early cinema fascination, generally unrecognised until 2013 when some researchers, collectors, and archivists started to take a deep interest in these little paper/cinema relics and formed a project, resulting in this book.

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André Gaudreault’s preface ‘Back from the Dead…’, one of the sections that’s in both English and French (the title refers to the film subjects now ‘rescued from oblivion’), is very engaging. In just five pages he concisely distils and explains the various aspects of the importance of Thierry Lecointe’s ‘sleuthing’ and analysis, commenting:

‘We are, unfortunately, not used to reading works in which the author constantly revises his hypotheses – as Lecointe does here – as we advance with the reading of the results with which he presents us, and then does not hesitate to abandon those invalidated by the results of his research – which is why he deserves our total respect.’

Professor Gaudreault is the ideal person to write this piece, not only because of his unparalleled knowledge of early film, including Méliès’ trick effects and mise en scène, but also because of his understanding of very short moving image sequences, investigated in his seminal article (with Nicolas Dulac) on ‘looping’ in phenakistiscopes and related toys.[1] If you flip one of these little books, the next thing you are likely to do is flip it again – so the ‘looping’ aspect is relevant. Gaudreault’s enthusiastic endorsement of the subject shines through, and his recognition of the depth of the research, and the analytical perception involved, reinforces those aspects of the project.

Half Book, Half Cinema

In his foreword ‘The Flip Book: a Curious Object, Half Book, Half Cinema’, collector Pascal Fouché briefly outlines the nature and history of flip books in general. Fouché, a professional historian of 20th-century French literature, has long had a passion for these little objects that sit on the fence between motion pictures and illustrated books. With the enthusiasm of a collector and historian he anticipates that ‘This first attempt to identify some of them … could well open up the way to some priceless discoveries.’

Section 1: Which Train? Which Station? Which Film?

The story starts with Bernhard Richter, co-funder of a computer animation company, finding an incomplete flip book featuring a train entering a station, in a bookshop in Germany. He thought it might be Méliès’ 1896 Arrivée d’un train (Gare de Vincennes). Experts from all over started chipping in with theories as to what film this artefact actually represented, with Serge Bromberg (Lobster Films) estimating that with the limited clues in the low-resolution images, the chances of a definite identification were ‘one percent’. However, using period postcards and other evidence, much of it illustrated in the book, the location was eventually pinpointed; and the actual film original identified with near certainty.

The publisher of most of these flip books, Léon Beaulieu, was a previously unknown and somewhat ‘dodgy’ character, whose limited but interesting biography has now been researched. There was another person involved, a printer named Prissette, whose exact role is still unclear.

2. Card party flip book – a selection of the 90 leaves. The likely source of the original film image sequence, exact title not known, is given in Discovering Lost Films. The cover and binding on my example have disappeared (Stephen Herbert Collection).

The question of the Card Party in the Fouché collection – from the same film as the example I happened to have bought – was eventually cleared up, after the team investigated various possibilities. It clearly wasn’t a Lumière subject, but it wasn’t by Méliès either. I’ll not spoil the ‘reveal’ here, but it’s given in the title caption to an online example from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (more about that later). The Beaulieu-published example illustrated in the book has 96 leaves and is described as comprising a sequence of 48 images that are repeated. My own example has 90 numbered leaves, which are 45 images repeated (1.1/2.2/3.3, etc). There is no publisher printed on mine – so probably leaves 91 to 96 are lost (6 leaves covering 3 frames of film action). Page 96 would have had a publisher’s name, but the identifying leaf is now missing. Thierry Lecointe considers that my example is probably the same as the one in the book, which is by Beaulieu.

3. It became clear that the image sequences in many of these 1890s flip books were not exactly the same as known Méliès films – some surviving, others, now lost – that featured in catalogues as frame illustrations.

Going through the book, one gradually becomes aware that most of the other flip books were less easy to explain away. The images were very similar to the known films, mostly by Georges Méliès, but with variations: furniture rearranged, the camera in a different position, background not the same, etc. Before reading this book I had no idea that this was the case. These intriguing differences gradually formed the focus of an international research project that became increasingly complex and almost forensic (but without the criminal element), as the most minute details were examined and recorded by a small team of specialists who were then able to tell this remarkable story. Thierry Lecointe has developed a theory to explain the difference between the images on the flip books and the known images from around 20 related Méliès films.

The main collection

The comprehensive account of Beaulieu’s little books was largely made possible, in terms of the availability of existing materials, by the collection of Pascal Fouché, whose website flipbook.info is the standard resource for flip book researchers and collectors. His collection contained examples of most – probably all – of Beaulieu’s subjects, and other related folioscopes, and he was also involved in further research.

4. Left: My replica Cinématographe Jouet, with replica picture belt. Right: Original picture belts, not all of which are derived from films (Stephen Herbert Collection).

Cinématographe Jouet

This is a replica of the 1902 Cinématographe Jouet. Pascal Fouché was aware of the original toys (researched for the book by silent film expert Eric Lange), and they are relevant because the images used for the picture belts relate to some of the flip books in question. I’ve long been intrigued by this device; almost a flip book but ‘looped’. For demonstration purposes I made the replica many years ago, and supervised the design and build of several larger-scale versions for students and museums, so I was pleased to learn much more about the images used in the original.[2]

Section 2: ‘Proof in pictures’

This section of the book comprises 25 pages illustrating many different sources of information: Postcards of railway stations and locomotives; photographs of, and a patent for, minimal but ingenious mechanical devices for flipping the books; flip book/film frame comparisons; and a disassembled example showing how the pictures were arranged for printing.

Section 3: ‘Flip Book frames’

Section 3 consists of 60 pages of pictures from 26 flip books, each part illustrating key sequences. Arguably there is only one page in the book, showing the coloured leaves from a flip book of ‘Loïe Fuller’ (more likely one of her contemporaries), that definitely needed to be reproduced in colour. However, the publisher decided to make the book a full-colour printing, something a University academic press is unlikely to have done, and the result is fully justified. Although mostly sepia, the images take us closer to the artefact than a greyscale version would have done. The coloured bindings of purple, or green, or yellow, somehow help to give us a more direct connection with these little relics that have now had their story told – so congratulations to publisher John Libbey.

Animations on the web

A large number of the books featured have been photographed by Onno Petersen using a special jig to obtain 2,642 distortion-free photograms without damaging the originals, and meticulously animated by Robert Byrne. You can watch these at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website, silentfilm.org.

Reporting on the 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, silent films expert Pamela Hutchinson, who contributed to the book, wrote: ‘My favorite restoration of the festival didn’t involve film at all, but some miniature ephemera, which were perhaps imperfect as moving images, but seductively tactile, and fragile, as artifacts.’ You can read more at the end of her blog post ‘Welcome to the Realm of Imperfection’ (5 August 2019).

More secrets?

In his Introduction to the book, Méliès expert (and great-grandson of the pioneer film maker) Jacques Malthête gives a cautious reception to the ‘daring conclusions’ of Thierry Lecointe, and concludes: ‘It will be obvious that these folioscopes, arising as they do from the very early days of cinema, have not yet revealed all their secrets.’

Parts of the book are in French, and parts in English, with some sections in both languages. This publication is aimed at the reader who is prepared to use this collection of related articles as a gateway to understanding the exact nature of this complex subject, and this requires involvement and concentration.

Teamwork

The teamwork necessary for this kind of venture perhaps suggests a formula for future research projects and publications in this and related fields. It’s fairly standard of course in professional research in the science, arts and humanities fields, but perhaps less common when related to subjects such as this, essentially a body of just thirty or so small related artefacts, objects that were not taken too seriously just a few years ago. It’s encouraging and impressive to see the collector/historian, professional researchers and experts, specialist photographer and animator, all tackling aspects that come together to form a much more comprehensive picture than would have been the case without the full team. For future projects the component specialisms needed would of course depend on the subject, and there are still issues about how such material should be presented – this book isn’t too easy to navigate – but it’s certainly encouraging to see such joint efforts result in an important publication shedding new and unexpected light on the incunabula of both motion picture films and their less well known, and far from straightforward, flip book incarnations.

Stephen Herbert, March 2021

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Next time: Kissing and Fighting in early flip books.

Notes and references

1. Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault, ‘Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series,’ in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006). [return to text]
2. The original French illustration, and translation of the text, is included in my article ‘Nouvelles Scientifiques’, New Magic Lantern Journal Vol. 6 No. 1 (January 1989), pp.6-7. The article is available on the Magic Lantern Society website. [return to text]