Due to their unsurpassed filmogénie, dances held a place of honour in early film production. And for the same reason, dance films are easily appreciated by modern audiences, 120 years later. Documenting dancing fads and stage stars of the first decades of the 20th century, early cinema is a real treasure trove for fans of dance spectacles. The five Lumière views Nos. 1350-1354 show the Cake Walk, originally an African-American dance, as first presented in Paris in the 1902-1903 season by a refreshingly mixed black-and-white troupe, of which Mrs and Mr Elk, juvenile siblings Ruth and Frederick Walker and teenagers Nina and Jeanne Pérès are known by name.
Oriental dances came to Paris earlier, in the context of the world exhibitions: belly dancers and Ouled Naïls personify colonised cultures as an exotic, erotic, available woman. European dancers however, such as Cléo de Mérode, Ruth St Denis, Mata Hari and Stacia Napierkowska, reinvented the exotic dance for themselves, granting themselves licence for an attractive degree of mistery and undress.
Since its publication in 1719, the immensely popular Robinson Crusoe had been presented continuously in every type of spectacle, as pantomime, as opera, féerie, magic lantern show. In 1902 Georges Méliès created a cinematographic version, of which a unique, fully hand-coloured and near-complete print was donated to the Cinémathèque française in 2011 by the collector Olivier Auboin-Vermorel. It is a marvel of hand-colouring. “Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé is different from other films by Méliès: certainly it is full of energy and of the dynamic trick-work that had been seen in Le Voyage dans la lune, completed a little earlier: super-impositions, disappearances, reappearances, pyrotechnical effects, very successful dissolves, the final apotheosis tableau, etc. But – and this is what the miraculous exhumation of this beautiful nitrate print has revealed – Méliès’ Robinson Crusoé is above all a film that magnificently uses colour as a language as important as tricks and montage” (Laurent Mannoni).

Mariann Lewinsky