In seeking to describe the sensation of something irreducibly different about films made prior to the institutionalisation of cinema in 1915, film historian Andre Gaudreault refers to the “alien quality” of early cinema (2011, 36). In this blog post, I explore a technique found in the first decades of filmmaking which is certainly alien to commercial cinema today – the representation of an object, character or place in multiple styles within the same film e.g. live action, illustration, puppetry, stop motion.
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