#108: The Cameraman’s Revenge
Part of the Top 150 Films series
The Cameraman’s Revenge manages to cram in as much inventiveness in just over 12 minutes as Mad Max: Fury Road does in 120 minutes! Over 100 years have passed since this film’s release (the earliest film on this list — spoiler alert!) and yet it remains unlike anything else in the realms of animation or cinema in general. If this were a live-action human-starring feature, it would be unlikely to feature on a list of this nature, but the simple act of transposing this to the insect kingdom is inspired. Starewicz ‘casts’ dead beetles and grasshoppers as the puppets in his melodrama concerning a tale of marital infidelity in which things come to a head thanks to the power of cinema. It’s possible that this is the first in a long line of meta-films, but even without that as a central conceit, the film is wonderfully compelling and freakishly unsettling.
