La Danse du feu

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!

As several reviewers have described before, Méliès... well, "borrowed" the idea of the serpentine dance from Dickson, and added his trademark goofy (yet awesome) Devil to it. It kinda works ... but mostly not. I'd rather watch Satan jump around a bit more, because let's be honest, it's an inexhaustible source of fun. He is more than capable to light a pillar of fire, there's no need to involve some random conjured woman in the process! Overall, a sloppy copy of a well-known original, clearly an error in the otherwise exceptional legacy.

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.

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.)