Danses cosmopolites à transformation (1902)

Neither eye-popping nor formally complex (relatively speaking, I hasten to add), Danses cosmopolites à transformation nevertheless has a charm that was very often hidden within the visual, hand-tinted tumult of Segundo de Chomón's later and more celebrated achievements. Employed initially by the brothers Pathe, Chomon was a filmmaker of extraordinary gift whose name just about always appears in the same paragraphs as Georges Méliès; and for marginally good reason. Both men were pioneers of the new medium; both had more than a hand in the development of its various techniques of optical hocus-pocus (multiple-exposures, time-lapse, dissolves, to name the most frequently cited); both gave their filmmaking over to extravagant, impossible visions that made America's rather staid pioneer class look utterly moribund by comparison. But Chomon's determination to embrace the illusory power of what was then a new medium . . . in its known totality . . . often gave his visions an incantatory force that would have rendered them, in retrospect, fairly insufferable were it not for an equivalent spirit of playfulness at their heart (a spirit laid bare in Danses). His films were never dolorous or solemn. They exulted in a joyous sense of potential made positively radiant by the new technology and its vast, still undiscovered galaxies of expression.

In 1964, Jonas Mekas referred to Andy Warhol's films as, in a sense, "a cinema of happiness".

I sometimes think he picked the wrong filmmaker.