Turkish Dance, Ella Lola

During the last decade of the 19th Century, motion pictures arrived to the world thanks to the work of people like William K.L. Dickson and the Lumière brothers, whose influential discoveries and inventions set the basis for what we now know as cinema. Dickson's Kinetoscope was the first motion picture devise that became popular, and after its release in 1894 introduced moving images as a widely popular entertainment for the audiences of its time. Those early Kinetoscope films weren't exactly like the movies we know today as they weren't really fictional stories, the first short films were mostly shootings of mundane events or entertainment acts such as acrobats, circus performers and sport events. Among the many Kinetoscope films of those years, the most popular were the ones about female dancers performing an exotic and often sensual dance. Ella Lola would be the star of two of those films.

In this movie, dancer Ella Lola performs a Turkish variation of a "danse Du Ventre", the oriental belly dance. In her dance she shakes, twists and turns around in a very energetic dance. The elements of Turkish folklore can be felt despite the lack of sound as the differences from this and other belly dances are very notorious when her traditional Turkish dress swings in a marvelous way as she dances. Unlike other films about exotic dances, Lola's movies (the other was "Ella Lola, a la Trilby") were of a less erotic nature and more focused on the realistic representation of the dance. A professional dancer since a very young age, Lola's dancing is very graceful and showcases an enormous control over her body. Sadly, it can't be known who was behind the direction and cinematography (which is very good) of the movie, as by those years both Dickson and Heise, Edison's main Kinetoscope filmmakers, were working for a different company.

Ella Lola's two performances on film had the misfortune of being released when the days of this kind of movies were practically over. While her performance in this movie is excellent, and her faithfulness to the traditional dance is remarkable, when the movie was released the days of the popularity of this kind of movies were almost over. It wasn't only that the Kinetoscope was losing against the projected motion pictures invented by the Lumière brothers, cinema itself was changing. Filmmakers were discovering new uses for the medium and now film wasn't only used for the mere reproduction of entertainment events, it was now the source of its very own kind of entertainment. Dances on film had no chance against the French movies the Lumières and Georges Méliès, so films like the ones by dancers like Ella Lola, no matter how good the performances were, became the sub-genre's last dance. 6/10