You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to this film have been understandably strong, but I can't find anything about what it is I'm actually seeing, beyond the fact it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act. Who was this act? How is it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like? How many people would we find? Is there just one costumed actor moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? Is there a little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?
The dancing pig is shamed.
And how successful was this act? Because if it was successful, why have I never
seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of
articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, stat!" Or
maybe he did! Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good! Who
built this pig!
(Okay, now I've looked it out it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)
I have a question too about the technology used to clean up this clip, less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever AI Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips my algorithm has suggested to me use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...
It's my old workplace, the Trocadero. The next time I was there I took a photograph to compare the two...
Because when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back –
that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have check why,
because documentaries aren't new and film has been around for long
enough now for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.
I've decided it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel.
A couple of other people seem to have delved into the pig-man mystery: see this illustrated blogpost and the replies to this Reddit post for what they found. The short answer seems to be: it's one bloke in the costume, and his stage name was Mr. Oléo, but nobody seems to know what his real name was, or anything about him other than where he performed (all over the place).
ReplyDeleteIn my googling, I also came across a reference to his act in the Dada literary journal Littérature, so clearly he made a big impression on them. Maybe Mr Oléo accidentally founded surrealism? I wouldn't put it past him.
Outstanding research! Thanks so much! A name. We're closer.
DeleteAnd the name is "Mr. Odeo"? So was he English?
DeleteMr Oléo might have been English, but it's more likely that the "Mr" was chosen to make his stage name sound more exotic to the vaudeville audience's ears. Like adding "Madame" or "Monsieur" to a stage name here.
DeleteThe French have long considered giving English names to products/performers to be a good way to make them sound classy and posh – the exact reverse of our attitude to giving French names for things, basically. If you walk through the makeup counters at a department store here, loads of products have French names, and then if you do the same thing at a department store in Paris, you see all the same products but with English names. It's charming but bizarre.
I'd say that the re-rendering is both making it less like 'footage' and more realistic – because by adding frames, and colour, and sharpening detail, it brings the 'footage' closer to what we perceive with our own eyes. There was a lot of discussion of the psychological effects of film, back when 3D and 60fps were being touted as the future of cinema – apparently the flat image, the slight flicker of 24fps, and the sub-realism of limited resolution induce a semi-dreamlike state which make the viewer more willing to suspend disbelief and engage emotionally with what's on the screen. Make it too realistic, and the artifice shows up. (Perhaps this is also a reason why the artifice of old-fashioned cinematography is more effective/affective than the un-self-conscious camera work of the 'just get the character in the shot and hang composition' school.)
ReplyDeleteYou're right. I should have said "accurate" rather than "realistic".
DeleteI shot a film in black and white on Hi-8 vieo back when I was a student, and was astounded how much better it looked in the editing room when my instructors "dropped a field", essentially creating exactly that flicker.