Danses cosmopolites à transformations (1901) User Reviews

Fancy Dress and Fancy Footwork

[boblipton · 5/10 · 29 November 2016]

A man and a woman dance an ethnic dance in costume. Their costume changes and so does their dance, in the first of a series of transformations.

This Pathe film that showed up on Youtube (credited there to Segundo de Chomon) looks like a stripped-down Melies act. There are no major acrobatics, but the dancers are handsome, their costumes are varied and pleasant and their dancing looks very nice. The transformation (managed by stopping the camera,recostuming the dancers and then repositioning them in front of the camera) is well nigh flawless. It simple lacks an air air of being more than a gimmick film to make it interesting throughout. Eventually, de Chomon would figure out how to do that.

Sophisticated editing and beautiful colour - dance film at the cutting edge

[kekseksa · 20 June 2018]

This is essentially a dance film not a trick film. The two dancers, Cornier and Mescot, made a whole series of films for Pathé in 1901, their Danses cosmopolites au jardin de Paris. This was intended to launch an important new catalogue section Bals et Danses devoted to dance film which was becoming an increasingly important part of the repertoire and would become more important as the various dance crazes of the 1900s-1920s multiplied (although dance films would after 1908 largely be incorporated in the film-magazines and newsreels).

Another reason for giving such an important place to dance films, like the contemporary "magic show" films was that they were both areas where Pathé hoped to, and did, establish a distinct edge over his rivals by the use of the increasingly refined colourisation system being developed by cinamatographer (and Pathé's Spanish agent) Segundo de Chomón in his workshop in Barcelona (the stencil system that what would eventually be patented as Pathéchrome in 1905).

So what De Chomón is take selected frames from the various Garnier-Mescot films, hand-coloured them and put them together in a continuous sequence to create a sort of cross between a dance film and quick-change where the illusion is given that the pair dance a whole range of dances, representing different nations and in different costumes, without ever leaving the scene. The result is a very attractive films of a much greater sophistication than any other company at this time was capable of producing.

The emphasis remained of course on the more popular and sensational aspect of dance. A lead dance film of 1903 consisted of "The Wickedest Girls In the World" showing their pussies - ah, they do, they do, I promise you - and this same couple (Cornier and Mecot) would return that year too to dance a cakewalk for Pathé at the height of the "cakewalk" craze in Europe (1902-1904). One has to live film not just watch it.....