Création de la serpentine

Boy, were serpentine dances popular! In the 1890s, when the first films were exhibited, it was all the rage. Many of these dances were hand-colored, making beautiful pieces of cinema that still are good to look at today. But, considering as that was the 1890s, you'd expect a bit more out of this film from 13 years later.

Indeed, instead of just a simple serpentine dance, there is a story. It's pretty odd. A violinist plays for some noblemen and ladies so they can dance, but another guy--who is actually Satan--has other ideas about dancing. He takes the violinist to a laboratory where they pour liquid into a big cauldron (and they cut to a medium closeup here, which sticks out). The result--a serpentine dancer who performs the dance--along with several other women--for the last couple minutes.

Segundo de Chomón, the maker of this short, had before filmed the serpentine dancer Loie Fuller 8 years before, in a short trick film where a bat turns into Fuller. Instead of making the dance the subject, this time he instead uses the idea to tell a story. The result is a somewhat interesting, if not excellent, short film (due to at least almost half of it being the dancing bit). I suppose if you enjoyed the earlier serpentine dance movies, you'll want to watch this one. Otherwise, it won't look especially great to your average movie-watcher of today.

(Note: IMDb says Max Linder, a pre-Chaplin comedian, played the dance teacher, but I'm not sure that's right. Why would Linder appear in a film he hadn't directed?). (Another Note: The complete film is available on YouTube in a black & white print. A 2-minute fragment which boasts some beautiful hand-color work which can be viewed on Vimeo).

De Chomón finds a new spin on the Serpentine, a dance that had graced screens since the dawn of cinema a decade before, and enlists the aid of Max Linder - cinema's first true star - to put it across. A film that goes in unexpected directions.

Thirteen years earlier, the Edison Company created quite a sensation when they released a film called "The Serpentine Dance". Annabelle Moore flung her arms about rhythmically while wearing a gown with billowy arms. Believe it or not, it was a very hypnotic film and was often imitated (such as a version with Loïe Fuller doing this unusual sort of interpretive dance). At the time, it was a sensation and film historians feel it is one of the great early films.

In 1908, Segundo de Chomón revisited the dance in "The Beginning of the Serpentine Dance". It begins with some 18th century folk doing a rather dull dance. However, one of the guys at the dance is taken to a dungeon by a mysterious Satan-like character (very much a copy of Georges Méliès Satan). Using alchemy and tossing in a picture of the crucifixion, out pops a lady who is doing the dance! But to make it better than the original, SEVEN ladies eventually appear and do this odd dance.

It certainly won't change your life and is quite derivative. However, for film nuts like myself, it's quite an enjoyable piece.

Fourteen years earlier, Thomas Edison's company had filmed the Serpentine dance -- a woman in a flowing road, waving arms around, producing pretty geometric patterns -- as the entire point of SERPENTINE DANCE. But the movies had moved on, and in this movie, Segundo de Chomon uses it as a point of grammar in this rather confused, although interesting film. We get scenery, with a fiddler playing as 18th century patrons do a minuet; we get some Melies moments as the devil appears, makes the dancers vanish and takes the fiddler to pandemonium, where they produce an entire corps de ballet doing the serpentine dance. It's quite lovely.

But it's clear that De Chomon was trying to integrate these elements and produce a story, using these bits as grammatical devices. And the story is a bit muddled. Is dance the product of the devil? Are the dancers imps tempting the audience into evil? It's beautiful and interesting, but the pieces don't fit together. Film grammar would go into other methods entirely.