Retro Review by Reid Ramsey
It was 1897, and although the cameras were not yet moving, the people certainly were. Loie Fuller, working with the Lumiere Brothers, stamped her name on one of cinema’s earliest movements: the serpentine dance film. This movement not only represented a significant portion of early film history, but paved the way, visually, for what cinema could become.
The serpentine dance films captured a dance popularized by Fuller and furthered by other stage performers of the time in which an actress would stand centrally on the stage with a flowing dress and move and twirl, allowing light, color, and fabric to create visually enchanting films and stage performances. A movement en vogue at the turn of the 20th century, these dance films predate subjects such as Hamlet or Dickens adaptations — or in even more modern terms Spider-Man or Batman — which quite a few popular directors have tried their hand at perfecting. The Lumiere Brothers, George Melies, Alice Guy-Blache, William K.L Dickson: among others, they all attempted at least one serpentine dance film to varying degrees of success and stylistic differentiation.
Another modern system brought about by these serpentine films — albeit disputably — is that of the movie star. Loie Fuller may have made the dance popular for the stage and appeared in several filmed versions, but the actress who kickstarted the film movement and rocketed herself to the center of the silent film world was Annabelle, who appeared in Dickson’s wildly popular version. Annabelle’s dance with stardom ignited the public obsession with the lives of those onscreen.
While the historical significance of these films cannot be understated, their aesthetic and formal contributions are often overlooked. On first impression a static dance film may feel visually quaint or perhaps even antiquated, yet these very short films, more than others of the time, reveal what can be achieved when one of cinema’s primary functions is put first: motion. Born out of vaudeville and burlesque traditions, the performances in these films put spectacle above all else. While the directors and performers made their shorts stylistically distinct, in the end, it is the way the fabric moves, the color applied to it, and the allure of the star at the center that make these films each uniquely significant.
Alice Guy-Blache’s version of the serpentine dance film, Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter (1897), may not feature the most talented dancer of all the serpentine films, but for this and several other reasons, it exemplifies what these films could be and what they could mean for cinema as a whole. Walter is not as talented a dancer as the famous Annabelle, and she’s more inconspicuous a presence than Fuller, yet the motion of the fabric is so striking in comparison. She has an ease to her dance that is less Judy Garland and more Marlene Dietrich, more emblematic of Vin Diesel’s sly half-smile than that of a ponderous, sarcastic Gary Oldman. For this distinction, her dance is much more honest and wonderful and is only truly perceptible through a movie camera.
An often overlooked feature of early silent films connecting them to the present is their use of color. The process of hand-tinting involved dyeing color into each frame of the film. This meticulous process is mostly overlooked because most surviving films of the time have lost their color. (Apparently I’m the film geek version of your friend who goes to a museum with you and continuously points out that all the marble statues would have at one time been painted.)
Hand-tinting in dance films draws the eyes directly to the subject in the center of the screen and brings a magical quality as the colors change through the single shot. When viewed in black and white and then in color, these dance films transform from documentary style stage performances into a more elusive work and emblematic of the shape-shifting possibilities of color in cinema to come.
Although existing on polar opposite ends of the film world — both in content and literally chronologically — the style of the serpentine dance films have similarities to the style of one of the biggest action blockbusters over the past ten years: Mad Max: Fury Road. Upon release of George Miller’s impressively simplistic action epic, a lot of noise was made about the way in which Miller shoots the action. The subject of every frame is directly centered, eschewing any thought of the rule of thirds; therefore, as the editing picks up, the viewer’s eyes are asked to do very little other than accepting the next frame put in front of their eyes. Here’s Director of Photography John Seale walking through the process:
In a similar way, the color and placement of the dancers in the serpentine dance films foresaw exactly what motion in cinema could be, regardless of whether or not they contain multiple shots cut together.
Fuller, Walter, and Annabelle, alongside other performers, showed the full beauty of early film through their serpentine dances in the late 19th century. What is often looked at as an obsolete and uninteresting period of cinema, is in fact a rich and fascinating version of the same film form and filmmaking process we see onscreen today. Early silent films are often more idiosyncratic, beautiful, and influential than their reputations would lead to believe, and the serpentine dance movement is no exception.