Loïe Fuller

A documentary film about dancing on the screen, from its origins after the invention of the movie camera, over the movie musical from the late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, up to the break dance and music videos from the 80s.

Loie Fuller, in her 1920 feature-length film Le Lys de la vie, […] explored the new technique for poetic ends, creating fleeting, dreamlike images that "freed" the medium from "illusionism" and imbued it with fantasy.

Loïe Fuller performs a serpentine dance.

This is another short, simple dance number. It’s quite stunning and unusual though with a bat turning into a woman who proceeds to give us a skirt dance before disappearing into thin air. The dance is mesmerising with the skirt stunningly changing colour throughout the film.

A Serpentine dance performance, possibly featuring Loie Fuller (though the record is unclear). While the film is lost, there is a new digital version based on re-creation from a flipbook produced by Léon Beaulieu around the same time

Edison and Lumiere footage of the Serpentine Dance, created by Loïe Fuller, is reworked to follow the poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarmé, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and a futurist manifesto on dance by Marinetti.