Ballets Russes

This wonderful film is a needed record of the famous Ballet Russes, an essential piece of 20th century dance history. Though there may be critics who feel that many details are left out, one never feels the lack. The filmmakers' careful attention to detail and editing crafts a clear, inspiring, and engaging story. Interviews with some of the greatest dancers of the century recall the colorful history of two ballet companies, The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo directed by Massine, and the Original Ballet Russe, led by Colonel de Basil. The first Ballet Russe had been founded by Serge Diaghilev.

If you know dance history you will be satisfied with the remarkable archival footage, and if you don't know your dance, you will come away entertained, amazed and edified. The directors make brilliant use of interviews with some old but remarkably vivacious dancers. Their oral histories are filled with intrigue, bravado, and passion. These are not folks who have slipped quietly into old age. Despite the fact that many are in their late 80's (in the case of Frederic Franklin an active and svelte 90) all the enthusiasm, artistry and love for dance are fully alive in their eyes, and in the witty and insightful stories they tell. The account of these two companies is tied together with amazing clips of the classic dances, which makes the history delightfully clear. Although the clips are silent the filmmakers are faithful to the original scores that were used, something that does not always happen in such films. Nothing feels arbitrary or gratuitous. In fact, all the editing – particularly the cross cuts from the faces the dancers today to images of their beautiful youthful selves adds poignancy and timelessness.

More than just a film about art history, "Ballet Russes", reminds us that the arts may be ephemeral, but that they have an enduring and timeless value. Those who dedicate themselves to the arts, whether through their minds, imaginations, bodies, hands, or words, have much to tell us and teach us. These artists have the great fortune to have led lives, often at the cost of personal or material sacrifice, that are both unique and source of continual inspiration. Ballet Russes catches that inspiration.

I was mesmerized and enthralled by this 2 hour film. I wanted it to just go on and on. What a fabulous look into the beginnings of modern ballet of the 20th century. The archival footage was remarkable. The interviews with the aged dancers were priceless. If this film had not been made now, this fabulous history would have been lost to us forever. Many of the dancers appearing in this film have since passed away. If you love the ballet you MUST see this film! If you know someone who loves the ballet, urge them to see this film. They will be forever grateful to you. I can't wait until Ballets Russes comes out on DVD so I can add it to my library.

"Ballet Russes" is entrancing.

I am not particularly a ballet fan. I had a few lessons as a six year old, basically enough to vaguely remember there are five basic positions. Though one of my favorite memories is seeing "Rodeo" at the old Metropolitan Opera just before its demolition, I usually find both classical ballet and its bun heads to be boring. I was certainly never able to keep straight in my head the names and places of ballet's 20th century history. I did once take a wrong turn at a summer job at the new Met and froze when I found myself next to Dame Margot Fonteyn as she was warming up alone for a rehearsal.

But until I saw them talking so personally, other legends like Alicia Markova, Maria Tallchief, let alone the endless Russians, were just names to me. This documentary is cultural history made fascinating by entertaining raconteurs and amazing illustrative archival footage. Creators Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine have made the best use of talking heads since Warren Beatty's "Reds."

The word diva is never used, but these are grande dames and gentlemen, in their '80's and '90's, still with erect posture and various accents from around the world, who have commanded the world's stages with an expression and a hand motion, let alone a lifted leg, and know how to put across an anecdote, especially when talking about larger than life, legendary personalities. (We hear from a few corps members in a round-up towards the end.) With deft and sprightly editing, each point an interviewee makes is supported with illustrative photographs or incredible archival film or ephemera documentation, with beautiful music of course. A past world is literally conjured up for us.

Starting at the dissolution of the Diaghilev company that rocked the worlds of dance, music, art, theater and polite society, the film primarily takes a chronological route. From the Russian émigré community of Paris in the 1920's (what James Hilton novels refer to as "White Russians"), we are introduced, "Mikado"-like, to three little girls at school. We get glimpses of ballet mistresses recreating the Russian dance conservatories of their youths and are transported to the birth of a company built on this first generation of a new European life.

With only a frisson of gossip and cattiness, the emphasis is on the styles and personalities of each dancer, manager, choreographer, designer, chaperoning mother, and impresario over 40 years of astonishingly creative artistry amidst sturm und drang. There's a lovely anecdote of two prima ballerinas battling for the attention of a young protégé from each side of the stage during performances. Another regal prima ballerina recalls facts of another's fame, then after what feels like a full minute of silence, lifts an eyebrow and dryly turns from the camera, saying "Of course, I was really the first." There's shades of "Citizen Kane" in remembrances of an infatuated manager pushing forward a young corps dancer as a star.

From amusing to poignant, real world politics off the stage only occasionally crosses their consciousness, when the story deals with World War II, with great anecdotes of escaping Paris before it fell and trying to convince the strict dance masters that rehearsals weren't possible when they were all sea sick nervous wrecks, and moving accounts of racism during their tours.

Men are some of the most eloquent and voluble interviewees, with the point made how long time artistic director Léonide Massine particularly created ballets for male dancers. The film reinforces my biases against George Balanchine, who was affiliated with the company a couple of times, for his misogyny in insisting that the ideal image of women is like anorexic, pre-pubescent boys.

The filmmakers are a bit too uncritical, only occasionally allowing in shots of reviewers' pans. Much is made of some dancers war time Hollywood sojourn, but no distinction is made between corny clap trap and "7 Brides for 7 Brothers," one of the all time great movie musicals, though the footage from the former is rarer and they can assume we've seen the latter. While there's no mention of how they must have influenced Gene Kelly, much is made of the impact the company's tours had in small towns and cities, bringing ballet for the first time around the United States.

While some of the footage of a 2000 reunion goes on a bit too much in showing the elderly dancers trying to recreate their glory days, slipping into Russian arguments about steps, it does demonstrate how much of choreography is kinesthetic memory and can only be transmitted person to person. This is reinforced as we see them now as dance teachers in a disapora around the world - from Denmark to Australia to South America to Arizona -- and one noting that while today's dancers are better athletes and technicians "They have no warmth!" as she firmly corrects them -- just as the original Russian teachers did so long ago in Paris.

As is ironically sung in "A Chorus Line," "Everything is beautiful at the ballet." This film is a beautiful statement that dance doesn't have to be evanescent - it can be passed on. It lives in these dancers' memories and we should be very grateful that they have been captured in this film.

In the Broadway musical smash "A Chorus Line," one of the auditioning dancers sings rapturously of how her real life contrasted sharply and poignantly with the glamorous world of the ballet, where "everything was beautiful." This sensational, down-and-dirty documentary puts that dream-like memory into an altogether different but no less thrilling perspective. More than two dozen of the 20th century's greatest ballet dancers are interviewed and featured in extensive, rare, and breathtaking original period footage that is continuously absorbing and illustrative of the changing styles and influences that resulted from the ersatz "ballet wars" that followed upon the death of impresario Serge Diaghilev at the end of the Roaring 20s. The complex history of competing impresarios and showmen from Massine and Balanchine to Hurok to Da Basil--with a little Agnes DeMille thrown in for good measure--is rich in irony, pathos and, yes--drama! I am not educated about the Dance and so I cannot offer cogent criticism about the myriad issues presented or any of their potential biases/omissions. But I know a ripping good time when I have had one, and this film rates up there with the best documentaries about artists I have ever seen. I never expected a précis of Ballet in America, as one poster indicated; the title is, after all, The Ballets Russes. For this uneducated but interested onlooker, I was mesmerized--not only to see how many of these great artists are still alive (many in their late 80s and early 90s) but to learn from an example they set of how active and vital they remain today--and to see them in antique footage (when some were still teen age "baby ballerinas") is a joy and a privilege. Hearing about the backstage power struggles is juicy fun and endlessly entertaining--all that supposed high brow stuff is really just like watching the intrigues on "Dynasty," but with class, great technique, and charmingly Russian-accented anecdotes. Seeing these personalities in photos and action footage as they interact with the great choreographers and ballet masters is wondrous--and watching the likes of Matisse and Dali designing sets and costumes for their work--sublime. What a rich and rewarding world it was, as well as one of great struggle and sacrifice. We glimpse it all, as well as the shadowing arc of its glorious history.

I could have watched this for another two or so hours without once stirring in my seat. For those who do love the dance, this is a "must-see," and for those with only a passing interest, it cannot fail to capture your attention. This has been a particularly fine year for documentary films and the Oscar voters will have quite a time deciding from the list of deserving nominees. If I were a voting member, I would be checking the box next to this film's title.

This wonderful documentary is a joy and a treasure, particularly for ballet fans, but also full of enjoyment for anyone with any interest in humans or art. It is a blessing that Geller and Goldfine happened upon this subject when they did, and decided to take it up. They have done a beautiful job of putting together with style, what was just a fraction of all the material they amassed, including interviews, current and archival footage, photos and excerpts from movies. Hunting down, choosing, eliminating and organizing into coherence all of this must have been an overwhelming task, and they have done it magnificently. The editing and the accompanying music also help to raise this documentary far above the level of most movies of that genre.

It is evident that the filmmakers fell in love with their many subjects and their stories. For anyone who has spent much time around some of these artists, that is not at all surprising, and they make us fall for them too. These dancers represent precious links with some of the richest of our artistic history; while their awareness of that and of the responsibility and gifts given them is eloquently expressed, they also show themselves to be very real, down-to-earth, fun-loving people--witty, too. We can't help but feel deeply for, and enjoy the hell out of them.

Certainly, even staying strictly within the very particular bounds of their subject, there was so much more one might have wished to have included here--this is such rich, juicy terrain. But time constraints would never allow the movie to cover anywhere near all the fascinating material that could have been included. Some important dancers mentioned either only briefly or not at all include Igor Youskevitch, George Skibine, Vera Zorina, Alicia Alonso, Sono Osato, André Eglevsky, Nana Gollner (aka Nina Golovina), Mary Ellen Moylan and Leon Danielian, among others. I would also have enjoyed a mention, and perhaps a photo or film clip, of Cyd Charisse during her time with the Ballets Russes; she used the stage name Felia Siderova (or Sidorova--research hasn't cleared up for me which spelling is correct).

There are also small mentions that should have been made, and could have without much trouble or time. Some of these include: upon mention of the Markova-Dolin Ballet company, a quick mention of Anton Dolin, and his importance; identifying Serge Lifar in a clip in which he playfully partners Tamara Toumanova outdoors on a lawn; even a brief account of the ultimate fate of founding director René Blum, who left the company to return to Europe, as stated in the movie, but who was tortured and killed by the Nazis. There also were still other companies that used the "Ballets Russes" moniker, and were part of the milieu this movie examines. In spite of things and people not in it, though, BALLETS RUSSES is glorious, and essential viewing.

In the end, no movie can be all things to all viewers, especially when focusing on a specialized slice of life and art. The comment here by gelman@attglobal.net (note: that somewhat negative review has now been taken down by its author, and replaced by a more recent and much more positive one) complains that this film does not follow Balanchine very much outside of his Ballets Russes work, and claims that "there is precious little about the major figures in American ballet and no attempt to explain how American ballet developed from the base provided by the Ballets Russes." I would argue that some of the people in this movie are indeed major figures in American ballet, but that isn't even the point. This movie deals lovingly with a particular, limited (though glorious) slice of cultural history; it is not meant to be a comprehensive history of ballet's development in America, even within the limited time frame it covers. There were certainly other important things happening in American dance concurrently to this movie's events, and I would love to see a movie or movies about them. Those are not the focus of this movie, and not the stories this movie sets out to tell. BALLETS RUSSES keeps its focus and tells its stories lovingly, glitteringly and touchingly. It is not to be missed! Deep thanks to Geller and Goldfine for a great, essential piece of history.