The Origin of Poetry

Welcome! It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Our topic this time: a cult film from more than 90 years ago.

It first appeared in Paris during the early ‘30s. And it was clearly a new discovery. By then, animation was many things: gag cartoons, grand adventures, political commentary, avant-garde propaganda. But this one “showed that animation could be poetic,” argued an animator from the era. Its director had used the medium “to voice his pain, to lay bare his heart, to tell of his hope for a better future.”

The speaker there was Alexandre Alexeieff, co-inventor of the pinscreen. And he was talking about The Idea (1932), one of his key inspirations to animate.

Today, The Idea is the only fully surviving film by Berthold Bartosch. When he was alive, a critic called him “the least fortunate of all animated film creators in France.” Most of his work had already been lost to time, or to the Nazis.

Even The Idea barely made it; Bartosch spent some of his last years trying to restore it. The film remained in rough shape until 2019, when France’s government backed a digital restoration. That new version came out on a DVD, included in a book about the film, earlier this year.

In other words, the next stage of The Idea’s existence has arrived. It hasn’t looked or sounded this good since the ‘30s, and that book (D’Idée à L’Idée) is full of groundbreaking research. The best time to revisit Bartosch’s classic is right now.