The Cameraman's Revenge

by Ladislas Starevich, 1912. This film is silent. Since I already got it sitting in my divshare account, here's some Coil to go along with it:



From wikipedia:
Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was director of a museum of natural history in Kaunas. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on. Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: he removed the legs and mandibles from two beetle carcasses, then re-attached them with wax, creating articulated puppets. The result was the short film Lucanus Cervus (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film with a plot and the natal hour of Polish and Russian animation.

In 1911, Starewicz moved to Moscow and began work with the film company of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. There he made two dozen films, most of them puppet animations using dead animals. The best-known film of this period, perhaps of his entire career, was Mest' kinematograficheskogo operatora (The Cameraman's Revenge), a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects.

For more Starewicz, revisit The Devil's Ball(1932), a staple from the 80's cable show Night Flight. It's a segment of a longer film, The Mascot, one of the most accomplished animated films in history.