La columna de fuego

The film "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (often just called "The Serpentine Dance") was one of the earliest sensations when it debuted back in 1895. This dance was a huge sensation on stage and once filmed, folks poured into theaters to see it. And, like most early films that were successful, other filmmakers stole the idea liberally. In fact, some would even take the original film and claim it was theirs! The problem was so rampant (and practically everyone was doing it) that American Biograph put a watermark on their films...a giant AB in the bottom corner...in order to prevent others from saying the film was created by them!

The problem of theft was so bad that the innovative filmmaker Georges Méliès even resorted to stealing, I mean 'borrowing', the idea! This is rather ironic as he was one of the most copied and stolen from filmmakers of his day and many of his films were copied by Edison as well as his most famous copycat, Segundo de Chomón....and many of their films are indistinguishable from the work of Méliès...though more often than not, the work wasn't quite as good as the French master filmmaker's.

Here in "La Colonne de Feu", Méliès takes the Serpentine Dance and makes it his own. Like at least a hundred other films by Méliès, this one begins with a magician or conjurer working at his craft...with a giant frying pan this time. After a little hocus pocus, the Serpentine Dancer appears and begins her weird but mesmerizing dance....a dance you just need to see to appreciate. Well worth seeing...but clearly a rip-off!

Pillar of Fire, The (1899)

*** (out of 4)

aka La Danse du feu

Neat fantasy film from Melies has the devil building a fire, which springs forward a woman who does a strange dance. There are a few special effects here, which are quite nice but the big bonus of this film is that it is hand colored and looks pretty good at that. The devil is painted green and the woman in a mixture of orange and white but the film is a beauty to look at as an early example of color. As for the story, it's really nothing overly special but the film remains worth viewing for fans of the director or anyone interested in the early color films.

If you have seen as many early films as I have, you will be familiar with the various different genres that were common and often imitated around the time this film was made. There were blacksmiths-at-work films, choppy-sea films, card-playing films, women-washing-clothing films, gardeners-getting-sprayed-by-hoses films, street-scene films, workers-leaving-the-factory films, etc. This one-minute special effects snippet by the prolific filmmaker Georges Méliès combines two of these genres: the popular trick film shorts for which he was so well known, and the serpentine dance shorts which Edison had started in the early 1890's and which were often colorized through the hand-painted colorization process. Workers (in this case working for colorist Elisabeth Thuillier) would be hired to ruin their eyesight hand-painting the frames of the filmstrip in this very tedious and admittedly dull way. It often took lots of work and was later beat by the stencil-coloring process which was initiated using positive and negative copies of a film. Here, it's still 1899 and stencil-color hadn't yet come into the field of early film (it wouldn't either for another couple years). So with that in mind the end result of this little feature is actually very good, considering that most of these hand-colored shorts often looked very sloppy and out-of-line. Here, and while there are only a few colors, it doesn't do this and is visually astounding as a result.

There are only a few minor tricks in this short fantasy movie, which are enhanced only by the coloring process. For the most part, however, the film relies entirely on the serpentine dance which is emphasized by the narrative. In this case, the narrative is once again concerning the devil (one of Méliès's favorite characters and here probably played by himself) who here creates a woman from a fire (*Jehanne d'Alcy, so some people think) and has her perform the famous serpentine dance for the rest of the film. The set design, which could possibly be one of his very finest, resembles a sort of religious temple complete with some truly magnificent statues of mythological creatures. Again, the colors are used to show the woman's dress change colors as she dances, creating an interesting effect.

Considering actuality subjects were still a thing even with Méliès by the time this short came out, it's obvious he was combining the genres to cash in on two popularities. Previously, the great director had even outright adapted the Edison version in his "A Serpentine Dance" of 1896 (now lost), but was no doubt past that stuff by 1899. It's also said that this vignette was based upon a scene from H. Rider Haggard's "She: A History of Adventure" novel, (hence the "Haggard's 'She' " bit in the American release title) but since I haven't read the book, I can't say for sure. (Méliès would also do a variation of this later in "The Mystical Flame" of 1903, which is believed by some to have been inspired by Haggard's novel as well). It still stands to reason, however, that this little short is a different addition to the director's catalogue. The aforementioned inclusion of the narrative was not, however, something that he would continue to do throughout his career--this fact alone is one of the main reasons why he finally met with financial failure.

(*Considering Jehanne d'Alcy, sometimes incorrectly spelled as Jeanne d'Alcy, was a popular actress at Méliès's studios I could understand this identification, but I doubt she knew how to dance the serpentine at all despite being a stage actress before turning to film. Additionally, the woman in here doesn't even look like her so I would guess that Méliès hired a professional dancer to star in it instead).

By 1899, the Serpentine Dance had established itself as a staple of the cinematic arts, and one might assume there was little more one could do with the concept. Georges Melies, on the other hand, was all about creativity, and he contributed to the improvement of the base concept by turning it into a narrative. Melies transforms the flowing movements of the Serpentine gown into flickering tongues of flame, alluding to a scene from H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel, She: A History of Adventure. The demonic production design and the opening devil contribute to the proceedings' mysticism and exoticism, as the whole thing transforms into an enchanting visage. Despite this, the film as a whole is rather lacking. A fanciful display of a tired conceit is still a tired conceit, and the film's various filigree does little to save it from being an intriguing visual experience with little substance.

This brief shot-scene film by early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès doesn't really have anything to do with Haggard's "She", an association made probably just because they both feature the pillar of fire. To me, however, it does build upon a cinematic tradition, taken from the stage, of serpentine dances and the early film genre of dance films in general. Löie Fuller invented the Serpentine Dance on stage. Her skirt waving was accompanied by color transformations created by the lighting effects reflecting upon the fabric. For film, beginning at the Edison Company, hand-coloring the negatives became the substitute for this lighting effect, as seen in the Annabelle dance films. Thereafter, nearly every studio and filmmaker in the early days had made a serpentine dance, probably including a straightforward one or more by Méliès.

Méliès adds to this staple of early cinema his common device of a devil to be the director's surrogate as on-screen magician. Out of a cauldron, he conjures a woman who begins performing the serpentine dance. Her dance then becomes the fluttering and flaming of the pillar of fire. Fortunately, the print available today is wonderfully hand-colored, adding to the comparably beautiful colored serpentine dances made by the Edison and Lumiére companies, as well as some others. What this one also has is quite a bit of leg shown by the dancer for early cinema standards, as she lifts her dress up. It also has the typical magic effects of Méliès, and he thankfully doesn't overdo it with too many trick effects. This is how you would hope Méliès would've approached the dance, and he did—a sublime synthesis of two early cinematic directions.

(See "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (1895) and "Danse serpentine" (1897/II) for comparison.)