director Louis Feuillade, both of whom had once worked for caricature papers and therefore could be expected to know Cohl by reputation, if not personally. At Gaumont, Cohl collaborated with the other directors whenever possible, learning cinematography from Arnaud and directing chases, comedies, féeries ("fairy pieces"), and pageants. But his specialty was animation. He worked in a corner of the studio with a vertically mounted Gaumont camera and a single assistant to operate it. He turned out four sequences a month for insertion in mostly live action films. Studio director Léon Gaumont, in one of his visits, dubbed him "the Benedictine". The idea for doing animation was born from the huge success of the film The Haunted Hotel, released by Vitagraph and directed by J. Stuart Blackton. It premiered in Paris in April 1907 and there was immediately a demand for more films using its incredible object animation techniques. According to a story told by Arnaud in 1922, Gaumont had ordered his staff to figure out the "mystery of 'The Haunted Hotel'." Cohl studied the film frame by frame, and in this way discovered the techniques of animation. Cohl, who was always seeking to enlarge his reputation in later life, never corroborated this story. Also, there were a fair number of films released before 1907 with stop-motion and/or drawn animation in them, by Blackton and others, any one of which could have taught Cohl animation, if he didn't just work the technique out on his own. The main reason The Haunted Hotel is significant is the fact that it was popular enough to make the arduous work of animation profitable. Cohl made Fantasmagorie from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a "stream of consciousness" style. It borrowed from Blackton in using a "chalk-line effect" (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a