Filming an Absinthe Haze

Friday A/V Club: What psychedelic special effects looked like in 1910

I'm tempted to call this an anti-drinking scare film of the pre–World War I era, except I'm not sure it was actually meant as a scare film:

That's Le songe d'un garçon de café, a.k.a. The Hasher's Delirium, a 1910 short by the pioneer animator Emile Cohl. The waiter's hallucinations are the sorts of things you might see in a modern anti-drug movie. But given Cohl's background—he had been involved with the Incoherent movement, a 19th century precursor to surrealism—and given how inventively weird his other animations are, my suspicion is that his film didn't have any moral agenda at all; he wanted to draw some strange things, and he thought an absinthe haze would be as good a narrative excuse for that as any.

But that's just an educated guess. Either way, it's a nice piece of filmmaking, and I say that as someone who does not want to dissuade you from drinking at all.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

How did the smoke monster get off the island?

[DEATFBIRSECIA]

Dissipation?

[Citizen X - #6]

Fact: absinthe can lead the drinker into some bizarre and dangerous situations, including but not limited to falling down a flight of stairs naked. I, uh, heard.

[Brandybuck]

This is why I only drink absinthe on the first floor. When I must drink on the second floor it's always pastis.

[DEATFBIRSECIA]

At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.

At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.

More accurate than any available today? Seems like we can create a trig table with any level of accuracy we choose. I call bullshit.

[BestUsedCarSales]

The comment is that its more accurate because they used Base 60. This is a highly divisible number (as is 12, which is a common theory for why many systems have base 12 counting) and so you can have more clean divisions than you can with base 10, which only has 3 (1,2,5).

That being said, there's nothing preventing us from just using Base 60 if it was actually more useful for this, and this is something that has been well known for hundreds of years. So I'm not sure what they think we'll learn from it. Still a cool story.

I think it kind of just shows that the genius of the Greeks were being at a time when writing started to take off. Who knows how many times these ideas were independently discovered over, and over.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Jesse, that music can't be original, can it?

[Jesse Walker]

Oh, no. It was originally silent, obviously; the soundtrack was added later, and from the sound of it relatively recently.

[Ned Netterville]

I wonder if Trey Parker and Matt Stone watched this before creating South Park?