Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

The earliest example: Heinrich Telemucher’s 1891 short feature Ich Habe Keine Augapfel, in which two eyeballs drop from a man’s face and roll around for a long while on the floor. The film is important for two reasons other than its significance to the timetable of the history of animation. Number one, it is the first film in which someone’s eyeballs fall out. And secondly, this device became a staple of both Romanian silent films and early Japanese talkies. Whereas Romanian cinema used the device as a metaphor for the 1918 union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the Japanese used it for straightforward comic purposes, often having the newly eyeless character exclaim, “Now I can see the way two balls on the ground see!” or “I look much taller from down here!” It eventually became so commonplace in Japanese cinema that one Japanese film critic quipped pithily, “All those eyeballs falling out is enough to make one wish one’s own eyeballs would fall out so one would no longer have to watch even one more movie in which someone’s eyeballs fall out.” Granted, it is pithier in Japanese, in which the entire sentiment is conveyed in kanji with just one character.