Danse serpentine (1896) User Reviews

Now you see it; now you don't

[kekseksa · 29 October 2017]

No one has watched this film for the very good reason that it does not survive. Virtually everyone made versions of Loie Fuller's famous dance (none of them featuring Loie Fuller) including Méliès but the version that survives in a hand-coloured version is by the Lumières. Méliès' version is, as far as one knows, lost.

What the title says

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 15 September 2015]

Let me start this review by saying that I am not 100% sure if I actually watched this film here. Loie Fuller appeared in other films as well and serpentine dance was a famous motive to put on screen back then. I think I did though. This is a very early silent (too bad we cannot yet hear the music she is dancing to) short film, only runs for not even 50 seconds. It is not only early for our standards today as this was made almost 120 years ago, but also for the standards of French filmmaker Georges Méliès for whom this film was a pretty early career effort as well. The title says it all. We see a woman performing the serpentine dance. This is a black-and-white film in the original. Do not be fooled by versions that were changed later on so there's color in it. This was actually a way to make the film more interesting, but also a way in which they changed it for the unrealistic. The dancer was wearing the same outfit during the entire film, yet they changed it from one color to another several times. As a whole, it's not a particularly memorable movie, even if the dancing looks fairly elegant. Méliès has done better.

Fantastic!

[suchenwi · 8/10 · 1 August 2008]

This 49-seconds short was number 765 in the Lumière Frères catalog and shows a woman in very wide dress dancing on a wooden stage. By the flowing movements, it appears more like an abstract play with ever changing, fascinating shapes. No "story development", it's just that.. a visual experiment which has in my eyes succeeded - particular due to the psychedelically changing colors (at least in the MPEG4 file of this film I downloaded from archive.org).

Now, in 1896 there was of course no color film stock available, but it was then already possible (though not easy) to hand-colorize the positive b/w print, frame by frame. I wonder when it was done for this fantastic little piece - the changing shades of red, green and blue show no artefacts which I might expect on a film hand-colored a century ago...

So some questions remain: Was the film colored back in 1896? Were they the same colors we see in this instance? When and how was this coloring made (possibly by computer software)? In any case, I know worse ways to spend 49 seconds :^)