Nijinsky on Video

Posted by Miss Cellania in Everything Else on June 25, 2009 at 11:54 pm


When is a video not a video? Some consider Vaslav Nijinsky the greatest ballet dancer ever, but there is no known film footage of Nijinsky, who retired at age 29 in 1919. He would not allow his company to be filmed. However, YouTube has Nijinsky dance videos. How can that be?

Because, it turns out, these aren’t films. They are computer-generated artifacts, made by Christian Comte, a French artist who has a studio in Cannes. Reached the other day, Comte acknowledged his authorship. “These films are animations of photographs, achieved thanks to a process that I invented,” he said. “I work as an alchemist in animated cinema.” He uses still photographs and, by employing a computer to alter them—tilt a head, move an arm—fills in the gaps between successive shots. That’s why his “Faun” footage is so much longer than his other footage. He had all those de Meyer stills. This is basically no different from the way Steven Spielberg got the dinosaurs to run around the jungle in “Jurassic Park.”

Link -via Boing Boing


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9 comments to "Nijinsky on Video"

  1. Edward
    June 26th, 2009 at 12:30 am

    I rarely feel this way about Neatorama posts and never before one by Miss C, but this is a complete waste of time.

  2. Johnny Cat
    June 26th, 2009 at 12:50 am

    Yeah, most of us also read Boing Boing, so this is rather redundant.

  3. LisaL
    June 26th, 2009 at 1:20 am

    I don't read Boing Boing so it's not redundant for everyone. Just b/c one site posts something doesn't automatically make it offlimits for other sites... geeze.

    Anywho.. don't really see anything special with this post other than giving this guy more view hits. The videos are only a few seconds long, and most of that is taken up by just introducing the 2nd clip.

  4. Alex
    June 26th, 2009 at 1:33 am

    It's pretty nifty ... We don't coordinate postings with Boing Boing, and considering that we cover the same grounds it's actually interesting that not too many of our posts overlap.

  5. Skipweasel
    June 26th, 2009 at 2:28 am

    Fairly clever, but oh, so pretentious...

    “I work as an alchemist in animated cinema.”

    Yeah, well, I work as lion tamer in a primary school.

  6. popeye
    June 26th, 2009 at 7:01 am

    this is complete garbage i really dont see what is so special about it. the movement is not even humanistic and he calls this a dance?

  7. MrPumpernickel
    June 26th, 2009 at 8:58 am

    I don't get it, was anyone fooled by this? I mean, it's not even very well made.

  8. cuimhne
    June 26th, 2009 at 11:01 am

    Atrocious. Not even a basic innate sense of timing. Not a new technique either. And he does sound incredibly pretentious.

  9. monkey_town
    June 26th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    It's awful as a recreation of the dance, but if you just take it as an animation style, it ends up looking kind of cool. The longest clip had a very eerie quality to it, almost like paper dolls but definitely venturing into the Uncanny Valley.


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