Intertitle of the Week: Cafe Society

This is the only intertitle in A HASHER’S DELIRIUM, aka LE SONGE D’UN GARCON DE CAFE, aka THE DREAM OF A CAFE BOY (I’m translating from both the French and the 1910s US slang) animation pioneer Emile Cohl’s 1 minute 20 second hallucinatory satire on the café set. A little fellow in what appear to be short trousers sits in a void, staring at a huge sphere, upon which are projected various morphing nightmares. Yep, that’s what my experiences in cafes tend to be like.

At film’s end, the video-sphere disappears and the boy elongates, Alice-style, into an auto-arse-kicking ourobouros.

It might all seem a bit, well, arbitrary, were it not for the smokin’ jazz score provided on my copy, which somehow gives the whole thing a context of jumping energy and anything-goes jazz-age brio in which Cohl’s surreal contortions seem, if not inevitable, at least perfectly natural.