Flip Book? As I explain this ringing name to you like an onomatopoeia. It is a book that was born with the cinema at the end of the 19th century. It comes from the United States and the expression “to flip over” which means to flip. That we preferred to a flipbook or pocket cinema. It therefore flips very quickly with the thumb so that the pages turn as quickly as possible so that an animated sequence comes to life before our astonished eyes. Which gives it an ephemeral side because necessarily suddenly, it is damaged faster.
And there are of all sizes on all themes, with drawings, photos and are often sold like toy books, gadgets … Our book of the day is simply titled “Flip Book, the book makes its cinema” and it is a collector of the object and historian Pascal Fouché who proposes here to retrace the history of the Flip Book. Because he has, it must also be said, at heart to give it back its letters of nobility because for a long time they were little considered while they require inventiveness and originality. It should also be well designed. In other words, a real playground for artists.
Here, we will especially explore all the playgrounds of these literary extraterrestrials: cinema of course but also sport, eroticism, advertising, sport. Pascal Fouché also gives the word to eight artists Germans, Americans, French, Japanese and South Africans who explain their approach to us.
And then of course we will have fun with about fifteen extracts to leaf through with dexterity and which are at the edge of the pages that we are reading on the flip book. And we understand that this object is, it is true unclassifiable, at the crossroads of cartoons, photography, cinema.
A nice gift to offer to the one who has kept his child’s soul, to the one who simply likes to be told stories.