ANIMATION PIONEER EMILE COHL REMEMBERED IN PARIS

Though he's forgotten by much of the world, the creator of what some consider the first totally animated cartoon will be remembered by a Paris film institute this week.

Already famous as a political caricaturist and illustrator, 50-year-old Emile Cohl was the creator of 1908's Fantasmagorie (Fantasmagoria). He was inspired when he saw an American cartoon in a Paris movie theatre and figured he could do a better job.

Cohl, who had already made live-action films, produced a surreal two-minute comedy by filming black lines on white paper, then reversing them using negative film to portray a chalkboard picture come to life.

"He considered himself to be the inventor of the animated film," said Jean-Yves Lepinay, who programmed a three-day centennial retrospective for the Forum des Images film institute, which will screen at the Cinematheque Francaise, tarting this Friday.

"He perhaps did not make the very first animated film, but he pioneered the techniques that later became the grammar of animated film."

According to Lepinay, Cohl's virtuosity may have come from his long, varied artistic career: "He was a co-founder of the Incoherent movement, which was a precursor to the Dadaists and the Surrealists, and which all had in common their challenging of society."

The retrospective displays 67 films out of the approximately 300 that Cohl made. The movies include documentary, burlesque, live-action comedy and puppet animation. They were all that three years of research could find.

According to Valerie Vignaux, a film history teacher at Francois Rabelais University in the French city of Tours, Cohl is as important for the history of cinema as his contemporary, stage magician turned filmmaker Georges Melies. However, by 1910, audiences were getting tired of the live-action "trick films" that Melies and Cohl had been making, she said.

"Melies didn't renew himself, but Cohl did by moving into animated films."

Taking 700 drawings to finish, Fantasmagoria is viewed by many film historians as the world's first fully animated film. James Stuart Blackton an American who inspired Cohl, had made The Enchanted Drawing in 1900.

But while some deem this the first real animated film, film experts point out that The Enchanted Drawing combined animation with live action, and was filmed continuously.

Instead, Fantasmagoria left the artist out of the film -- although an animated version of Cohl's hands is seen at the beginning creating the stick figure hero and then briefly near the end reviving him.

"Blackton does not leave the cartoon to its own devices, but Cohl freed the cartoon from its environment," said Lepinay.

Cohl was born Emile Eugene Jean Louis Courtet in 1857 and died in 1938.

One reason that he's mostly forgotten, suggested Lepinay, was that the First World War wrecked the French cinema industry, just as the country's general economy went to pieces. Many pre-war French movies, including Cohl's, fell by the wayside as American films soon predominated the post-war market.

Vignaux observes that Melies controlled almost every aspect of his films. Therefore, his descendants could control their distribution and make them available to broadcasters or film institutes.

On the other hand, Cohl worked for such production companies as Gaumont, Pathe and Eclair. After their initial profits from his films, they had little interest preserving them. Now, most of Cohl's films are considered lost.

"Like Melies, he was forgotten in his own lifetime," said Lepinay. "But unlike Melies, he has never been resurrected."