Three pages from Josef Váchal‘s Mnicha strasidlo (The Monk and the Ghost), a 1919 “flip book.”
I found these images in the massive Avant-Garde Page Design. This was the only text explaining the book:
“Early examples of the cinematic imagination in page design drew inspiration from the animation devices and techniques of the 1820s and 1830s that mark the humble beginnings of cinema’s evolution. Czech artist Josef Váchal’s 1919 flip books originated from the thaumatrop, a popular nineteenth-century novelty comprised of a rotating disk that creates an illusion of motion by quickly alternating two slightly different images. Marcel Duchamp’s Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), a motorized construction he produced in 1925, and his film Anemic Cinema (1925), both draw on a similar device called the phenakistoscope.”
Many more posts on Váchal in the future.
