1 See, for example, Carlos Fernandéz Cuenca, Segundo de Chomón, maestro de la fantasía y de la técnica (1871-1929), Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1972; Juan-Gabriel Tharrats, Los 500 films de Segundo de Chomón, Zaragoza, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1988; Juan-Gabriel Tharrats, Segundo de Chomón: un pionnier méconnu du cinéma européen, trad. Eva Tharrats, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009; and Joan M. Minguet Batllori, Segundo de Chomón: The Cinema of Fascination, Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals, 2010.
2 Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings, 1922-1934, trans. and ed. Richard Taylor, 1988, London, I.B. Tauris, 2010; Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans. Michael Glenny, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, 1991, London, I.B. Tauris, 2010; Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 3, Writings, 1934-1947, trans. William Powell, ed. Richard Taylor, 1996, London, I.B. Tauris, 2010; Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, trans. William Powell, ed. Richard Taylor, part 1, The Boy from Riga, 1995, London, Seagull Books, 2018; Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, part 2, The True Paths of Discovery, 1995, London, Seagull Books, 2018; Sergei Eisenstein, Mise en Jeu and Mise en Geste, trad. Sergey Levchin, Montreal, Caboose Books, 2014; Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, trad. Margo Shohl Rosen, Brinton Tench Coxe and Natalie Ryabchikova, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2016; Sergei Eisenstein, The Short-Fiction Scenario, trans. Alan Upchurch, 1985, London, Seagull Books, 2017; Sergei Eisenstein, On the Detective Story, trans. Alan Upchurch, London, Seagull Books, 2017; Sergei Eisenstein, On Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch, ed. Jay Leyda, 1986, London, Seagull Books, 2017; Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, trans. Dustin Condren, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth, Berlin, PotemkinPress, 2011.
3 S. M. Eisenstein, « The Montage of Attractions», in Writings, 1922-1934, 33-38, op. cit.. Compare Wanda Strauven (dir.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
4 Réjane Hamus, « Segundo de Chomon [sic]», 1895, No. 27, 1999, p. 50. See also Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914, 4 vols., Bures-sur-Yvette, Édition H. Bousquet, 1993-1996.
5 Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, éd. Bernard Eisenschitz, tome 3, vol. 1, Le Cinéma devient un art, 1909-1920 (l’avant-guerre), 1951, Paris, Denoël, 1973, p. 181.
6 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1908–1928, London, MIT Press, 1982, p. 25. Crafton dates Sculpteur moderne as 1906, but Bousquet, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 67, dates it as March 1908.
7 Eisenstein, « On Disney», in On Disney, op. cit., p. 31.
8 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 172. One of the first of Pathé’s branch offices opened in Moscow in February 1904. Bousquet, op. cit., vol. 1, p. iii. Richard Abel adds, “By early 1908, the French company’s profits from its Russian sales were nearly half of what it took from the United States and considerably greater than its profits from any other foreign country.” The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914, rev. ed., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, p. 43. See also Abel, “Pathé’s Stake in Early Russian Cinema”, Griffithiana, No. 38/39, 1990, p. 242–247.
9 S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 4, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, trans. William Powell, ed. Richard Taylor, London, BFI Publishing, 1995, p. 291. Here, Eisenstein wrote, “I can even remember my first film perfectly clearly. That was also in Paris, in 1906” (p. 290), but elsewhere, he recalled his “first impression of cinema: in Paris, 1908, on the Boulevard des Italiens”, the street on which the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was located during the long tenure of Méliès as its director, where he saw “The famous coachman by that genius Méliès, who drove a carriage pulled by the skeleton of a horse” (p. 9). Compare p. 800n8.
10 Ibid., p. 493. Eisenstein remembered little else of the film, which is unidentified, “But the scene with the branding still remains ineradicable in my memory”, he wrote.
11 Naum Kleiman, Introduction to Eisenstein, On Disney, op. cit., p. xii.
12 Antonio Somaini, “History as ‘Dynamic Mummification’, History as Montage: Eisenstein’s Media Archaeology”, in Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, op. cit., p. 84.
13 Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012, p. 106.
14 Oksana Bulgakowa, Afterword to Eisenstein, Disney, op. cit., p. 128. This edition includes Eisenstein’s diagrams and the illustrations he interpolated into the text, along with specific images that correspond to Eisenstein’s own direct references. Electronic mail from Oksana Bulgakowa, 14 June 2018. These drawings are not included in the other English-language edition of this text (“On Disney”, op. cit.) which also does not include several other illustrations published in the 1986 edition (Eisenstein, “On Disney”, Eisenstein on Disney, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 1986, p. 15, 17, 59). The punctuation of the 1986 edition also differs from the 2017 edition at many points. There are no illustrations in the 1991 French-language edition, Sergueï Eisenstein, Walt Disney, Strasbourg, Circé, 1991, p. 9-97. André Cabaret is credited with this French translation.
15 Bulgakowa, Afterword, op. cit., p. 128.
16 Ibid., p. 142.
17 Ibid.
18 Oksana Bulgakowa, “The Evolving Eisenstein: Three Theoretical Constructs of Sergei Eisenstein”, in Al LaValley and Barry P. Scherr (dir.), Eisenstein at 100: A Reconsideration, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 44–45.
19 Eisenstein, “On Disney”, op. cit., p. 72.
20 Ibid., p. 32ff. In Eisenstein, Disney, op. cit., p. 15ff, Dustin Condren translates this as “plasmaticity.” In the French translation, the term is “plasmaticité.” Compare Eisenstein, Walt Disney, op. cit., p. 28ff.
21 Eisenstein, “On Disney”, op. cit., p. 115.
22 Ibid., p. 32.
23 The identification of Georges Guyot was made in the exposition “Aux origines des trucages : Segundo de Chomón”, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Paris, viewed on 27 November 2017. Additional information about renowned twentieth-century animal sculptor Guyot (1885–1973) is from www.artnet.com/artists/georges-lucien-guyot/, accessed 12 November 2018.
24 Only in the film’s penultimate shots does Mathieu herself appear to mold one of the figures. We see her in close-up shot grabbing a lump of clay that has replaced a miniaturized old woman cackling and hobbling.
25 Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 260.
26 Compare, for example, Cohl’s Les Frères Boutdebois (1908) and Les Chaussures matrimoniales (1909).
27 Eisenstein, “On Disney”, op. cit., 2017, p. 7. Here, Eisenstein seems to allude to Merbabies (1938), in which, he writes, “a striped fish in a cage is transformed into a tiger and roars with the voice of a lion or panther. Octopuses turn into elephants. A fish—into a donkey” (p. 20).
28 Matthew Solomon, “The Medium is the Magic: Trick Films and the Imagination of Celluloid”, in Alexandra Navratil: This Formless Thing, Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Amsterdam, SMBA Amsterdam, Roma Publications, 2013, p. 93-97.
29 Sadoul, op. cit., p. 181.
30 Bulgakowa, Afterword, op. cit. p. 138.
31 Eisenstein, “On Disney”, 2017, op. cit., p. 90. Eisenstein was himself keen on visual comparisons between people and animals, which he created through cinematic juxtapositions and through the biomechanical performances of actors, were a method of provoking deeply rooted responses in the spectator. For Eisenstein, analogies between individual characters and animal species were an especially useful form of “typage,” as Yuri Tsivian explains in both his audio commentary for Strike published on DVD in 1999 by Image Entertainment and in his audiovisual essay about Ivan the Terrible, parts I, II (and III), “Eisenstein’s visual vocabulary”, published on DVD in 2001 by Criterion as a special feature on disc 2 of Eisenstein: The Sound Years.
32 Francis Lacassin, Alfred Machin : de la jungle à l’écran, Paris, Dreamland, 2001; Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade : maître des lions et des vampires, Paris, Pierre Bordas et Fils, 1995.
33 Eisenstein, “On Disney”, 2017, op. cit., p. 96-98.
34 Crafton, Emile Cohl, op. cit., p. 138.
35 Ibid.
36 « Ses doigts agiles manient la pâte, préparée à l’avance par sa compagne et façonnent avec une rapidité merveilleuse des personnages pittoresques et grotesques les plus divers : type de clown, rapin, turc, belle-mère, etc., et le public se divertit largement devant ces marionnettes expressives et comiques qui défilent sous ses yeux comme des personnages de Guignol. » Bousquet, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 29.
37 On the origins of claymation in “lightning sculpting” performances, see Michael Frierson, “The Invention of Plasticine and the Use of Clay in Early Motion Pictures”, Film History 5, No. 2, 1993, p. 145–147. For other similar types of “quick-change” acts and their relationship to early cinema, see my “‘Twenty-Five Heads Under One Hat’: Quick-Change in the 1890s”, in Vivian Sobchack (dir.), Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 2–20.
38 Bousquet, vol. 4, op. cit., p. 901; Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2010, p. 75–76. See also Jean Caroly, Étude sur les nouveaux escamotages de pièces et sur le numéro du “roi des dollars”, Paris, Maison Caroly, 1902.
39 Bousquet, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 137, emphasis mine. According to Bousquet, this role was played by Julienne Mathieu.
40 See also Tharrats, op. cit., p. 29–36, 51–52.
41 Bousquet, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 56, emphasis mine.
42 Ibid., p. 173.
43 The multiple shots of the thief going up and down the staircase in Le Voleur invisible are examples of the practice that began “around 1907 (…) [by] Pathé’s directors (…) [of] us[ing] corridors and staircases in their ‘comings’ and ‘goings’ scenes (…) [as] transition inserts that helped to establish continuity, (…) [but] were also felt to burden the narrative with ‘unnecessary and meaningless footage’.” Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, op. cit., p. 185.
44 Bousquet, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 173, emphasis mine.
45 Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, tome 2, Les pionniers du cinéma, 1897-1909, 1947, Paris, Denoël, 1973.
46 Laurent Le Forestier, Aux sources de l’industrie du cinéma : Le modèle Pathé, 1905-1908, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006; Stéphanie Salmon, Pathé. À la conquête du cinéma, 1896-1929, Paris, Tallandier, 2014.