http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2tP9s8y2Ic&

Le Cochon danseur (The Dancing Pig, 1907), Pathé

I recently asked Paul Rumsey if he could be persuaded to contribute to my ongoing World Cinema Classics series. Paul came up with more than I bargained for, pointing me to a dozen of his favorite films in an ongoing email conversation.

Included were French director Jacques Rivette‘s films Duelle and Noroit (Paul pointed to the similarities in Rivette’s and David Lynch’s work); the work of Czech stop-motion animation director Jiří Barta, the American film “Return to Oz“[1] (a nightmarish reinterpretation of the Oz story where at one point Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk[2]) is sent to a nightmarish Victorian mental institution, to be given electro-shock therapy [3]) and many more such as The Baby by Ted Post, etc….

I’ve finally settled to feature the short 1907 French film above, a film that clearly demonstrates the fairground antecedents that cinema has. Paul describes the film as “beginning almost erotic and ending almost sinister,” a fitting description of this silent film cult rarity. Paul got to see the film via the intriguing blog Hugo Strikes Back!.

I’ve mentioned a similarly exciting French animation here (scroll to the bottom for the Automatic Cleaning Company, a short about a room that cleans itself).