#730) Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895)

#730) Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895)

OR “Skirty Dancing”

Directed by William K. L. Dickson and William Heise

Class of 2024

The Plot: It’s 1895, movies don’t have plots yet. What we do have is Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore demonstrating the Serpentine dance while wearing a flowing dress, as captured by Edison’s camera. And that’s it; the film is less than a minute long, what else do you want from me?

Why It Matters: The NFR provides plenty of historical context for the film and calls it “an excellent example of what the [film] industry created to entice and enchant audiences” in the early days.

But Does It Really?: Eh, I guess. We’ve already got plenty of early Edison films on the list, but I’ll give this one a pass because I recognized it from a Chuck Workman montage, so that’s something. I could frame this in some flowery prose about the dawn of cinema, but at the end of the day, it’s just a dancing woman with a fancy dress. I’ll give “Annabelle Serpentine Dance” its due, but I’m ready to move on.

Everybody Gets One: Annabelle Whitford Moore made her professional dancing debut at age 15 at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The Serpentine dance was one of many Moore filmed for Edison, all of which were quite popular with audiences. Moore would go on to join the Ziegfeld Follies as one of their original Gibson Girls and seems to have retired from performing around 1912.

Wow, That’s Dated: The Serpentine Dance was a specialty dance in the 1890s in which women wearing multilayered dresses would move them about to create a flowing pattern, often accompanied by multi-color lighting. Simple stuff, but this apparently killed in vaudeville and burlesque houses of the time. The dance was created by Loïe Fuller, a stage actor who noticed the interesting effects that occur when a stage light is shone on gauze fabric. The name “Serpentine” came from theater impresario Rudolph Aronson, allegedly coined during Fuller’s audition for him in 1891, no doubt referring to her snakelike movements during the dance. The Serpentine dance was quickly imitated by others, and Fuller’s subsequent lawsuits ruled in favor of the imitators (dance that wasn’t part of any narrative wouldn’t be protected under copyright law until 1976). By the time “Annabelle Serpentine Dance” was made, Fuller had already emigrated to Europe, settling in Paris for the rest of her life.

Other notes

Why this movie took two people to direct it I have no idea, but Dickson and Heise were both longtime Edison employees whose name pop up in many of these early “actualities”.
With Annabelle’s very flowing dress, I suspect Martha Graham would have loved this movie.
Despite my initial guess, the Serpentine dance does not involve running across an airport tarmac with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin yelling, “Serpentine! Serpentine!” It’s mostly an elaborate dress being moved around, but the patterns are surprisingly hypnotic.
This film would have been viewed in its day on Edison’s Kinetoscope, an early viewing device for movies where you would watch the film through a peephole, using a hand crank to control the speed of the film strip inside. To better replicate a real Serpentine performance, some versions of this film were color-tinted by hand. I can see how watching a woman dancing provocatively would be more popular with early moviegoers than a man sneezing.

Legacy

Although the NFR lists “Annabelle Serpentine Dance” as being released in 1895, some sources say it could have been released as early as August 1894. Regardless, the film was one of the first to be publicly exhibited, costing a nickel to watch (about $1.88 today). The film (as well as films in general) was a success, and helped launch moviegoing as we know it.
Some historians have suggested that “Annabelle Serpentine Dance” helped introduce the idea of erotica in film. Some historians have a little too much free time.
This may be the earliest NFR movie with a sequel. In addition to the other types of dances Annabelle Moore was filmed doing (Butterfly dance, Sun dance, etc.), she appeared in 1895’s “Annabelle Serpentine Dance, no. 2” for Edison. Moore also performed the Serpentine dance in a few films released by Edison’s rivals at the American Mutoscope Company (later known as Biograph).

“Annabelle Serpentine Dance” shows up every once in a while in movie history clip packages, most notably in Chuck Workman’s “100 Years at the Movies” and the 2003 documentary “Sex at 24 Frames Per Second”.