Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894)
by popegrutch
In the same year as Max Skladanowski produced his “Serpentinen Tanz,” W.K.L. Dickson did something very similar in the United States. Unlike the German film, however, this was not made to be projected on a screen, but rather run in a Kinetoscope, a kind of box with a peep-hole and a crank, that could be watched by a single viewer at a time. Another difference is that history tells us the name of the dancer, Annabelle Moore, who appeared as a dancer in many later motion pictures. Her costume is a bit less elaborate, but the general theme is the same and clearly the idea was that a dance with a flowing costume would show off the ability of the camera to capture movement.
Director: W.K.L. Dickson
Camera: William Heise
Run Time: 34 secs
You can watch it for free: here.
[…] even after they were admitted, were usually there as some kind of spectacle, ala Annie Oakley or Annabelle Moore. These women are, like those seen in Lumière films, simply natural women, dressed as they would on […]
[…] anything, a less sexy fight than Corbett & Courtney’s. I would say that this, along with the Annabelle Moore movies, represents one of the first genuine crossovers between moving pictures and Vaudeville, two […]
[…] a low-gravity performance. In other ways, such as composition and content, it is similar to other performances by circus performers that we have seen in from the […]
[…] the last movie of my “dance” sequence, I’m returning to the Kinetoscope period of Edison Studios, for a movie that […]
[…] given in to the idea that this week is all about short dance movies, so I thought I’d include another one from the Winterprogramm of Max Skladanowsky. This […]
[…] you follow a lead where it takes you), here is a movie of the same Annabelle Moore I talked about yesterday, taken one year later and formally identified as a “serpentine” dance, as in the case of the […]