Étienne-Jules Marey

A patchwork of the first animated movies from the collections of La Cinémathèque française : Stroboscopic Discs (1833), Zoetropes (since 1867), Reynaud's Praxinoscope (1878-1879), plates of Muybridge and Anschütz (1880-1890), an unseen Marey's chronophotography (1889), Chromolithographs films (since 1897), including one inspired by the second Georges Méliès' film, "Une séance de prestidigitation" (1896), with a photographic version, unseen until now.

Chronophotograph record of a ball falling through a soap bubble.

Directed by Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist, this is believed to be the first cat ever filmed in cinematic history. Jules Marey created the chronophotographic gun in 1882, a device which looked like a short barrelled shotgun with a magazine on top. It was capable of taking twelve consecutive frames a second. He used this to study various animals, the most famous study in what was called Marey’s ‘animated zoo’, was the one involving a cat which was dropped from a height of a few feet in order to see if it always landed on its feet.

Rabbits jump, play and interact with each other in multiple different sequences.

Experimental film of a wave, recorded on the bay of Naples.

Short film of two men fencers

This early cinematic instance of a close-up—or, more accurately, a medium close-up shot of the chest and face of the maker of this film and others like it, Georges Demenÿ saying “Je vous aime”—was made at the request of Hector Marichelle, professor and director of the National Deaf-Mute Institute in France, who planned to use filmed speech to teach deaf students to speak and lip read. This required close views of the performer's lip movements. The project was given to Demenÿ by Étienne-Jules Marey, who headed the Station Physiologique in Paris and whose chronophotographic scientific research of motion is among the most important contributions to the invention of movies. Despite these educational and scientific beginnings, however, this project led Demenÿ to pursue and influence the commercialism of cinema.

Shot of the flight of a fly.

An early short film recording fencers.

Animated stick drawings representing a man walking.