They Thought it Was a Marvel: Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874-1961), Pioneer of Puppet Animation by Tjitte de Vries and Ati Mul (review)

Histories of early cinema and other optical entertainment devices are obsessed with firsts. The questions revolve typically around such matters as who was the first to patent such and such a device, who was the first to spin a disc of serial images and annex it to a projecting device, or who was the first to introduce perforation marks in celluloid - and whether the celluloid must be in strip form to count as film. In the late nineteenth century there was a flurry of devices and a parade of names, which all contributed more or less, depending on one's perspective, to the development of cinematic culture in forms that we might recognise today: praxinoscope, zoopraxiscope, chronophotographs, biofantascope, kinetograph, kinetophonograph, Reynaud, Muybridge, Marey, Friese-Green, Edison, to cite just a handful. The debates about the pre- and early history of cinema are manifold for at least two reasons. Firstly, such a plethora of inventions in various parts of the globe means that any simple history of progressive and teleological development towards a final output - cinematic culture - is impossible to reconstruct. It may belie a false question that mistakes an outcome for the endpoint of a logical process. Secondly, so much has been lost or was not accurately documented at the time. This is particularly true of early celluloid materials. These little film strips, animations, and trick films are made on a volatile material that burns, snaps or decays over time, and whose contents were, in any case, regarded as flimsy, as insubstantial as the material on which they were recorded. Those early optical experiments on celluloid and the like were likely to be melted down for shoe heels or dumped in the Seine. It is into this already much contested field of history, of identification of firsts, of reconstructing the missing, that de Vries and Mul step, in a magisterial work that investigates the career of the English filmist Arthur Melbourne-Cooper.

Cooper is a controversial figure when it comes to questions of firsts. De Vries and Mul take up the cause of Cooper's daughter, who advocated for the significant and overlooked role of her self-effacing father in cinema history. They devote much of their study to establishing the veracity of the claim that Cooper made a stop motion animated film, Matches Appeal, in 1899. De Vries and Mul amass as much firm and circumstantial evidence for theat date as they can, and also air the cases of those who would place Matches Appeal some fifteen years later, making it a call for donated matches for soldiers fighting in the First World War and not the Boer War. Many have doubted the 1899 claim. One curator from Kodak observed datable edge codes on a now lost duplicate of the strip, which showed it to be from around 1915. Another historian argued that there is no evidence that the 'Appeal' around which the animated film revolves occurred at that date, though such a one occurred later. Still another argued that the technique was too advanced, not jerky enough, for the late nineteenth century. De Vries and Mul take on each of these counterarguments and patiently pick them apart. If De Vries and Mul's dating is true, then Cooper's work predates J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, from 1906, which is commonly designated as the first animated moving picture. In fact, the authors go far further in overturning what has been assumed. They argue that Matches Appeal was the third of Cooper's films in 1899, for two shorts with animated matches performing sports may well have been made before it, being themselves the pretext for the commission of the appeal film.

There is no clinching argument in the book, though there is much evidence that...