19th Century Color Motion Picture

By Minnesotastan in Video Clips on Sep 28, 2009 at 4:52 pm

The Lumière brothers began producing moving pictures in the 1890s; this short of “The Serpentine Dance” required each frame of the film to be hand-colored.

Several links for this video indicate that it was produced in 1899, although the dialogue by the narrator implies a date of “1913.” The dance is in the style of “Butterfly Girl” Loïe Fuller, who used billowing skirts to create a serpentine dance for the Follies-Bergere; interestingly she is reported to have used multicolored and changing lights to illuminate her skirts during the performance – the effect that this video presumably is trying to recreate.

YouTube link, via Kottke.

Tags: dance, Lumiere, movies

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Edward
Sep 28th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Hasn’t the Internet grown into a stunning adolescent? Did its creators imagined that an 1899 movie would be made available for education and entertainment. Thank-you for this.
Ali S.
Sep 29th, 2009 at 12:34 am
I’m absolutely amazed by the seamless colouring!
Alex
Sep 29th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Wow! That’s amazing …
MadMolecule
Sep 29th, 2009 at 10:17 am
This is really cool! I wonder, though: Why does old motion picture footage run so fast? Is it terribly difficult to slow it down to a more natural-looking speed?
Robert
Sep 29th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I saw a copy of the Great Train Robbery that was hand-painted. Didn’t look as well as this video, though.
elizabeth
Sep 29th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Just beautiful. MadMolecule, I believe the fast motion comes from them not shooting as many frames per second as they do today, so when it plays on a regular speed projector, it looks sped up. Shouldn’t be difficult to alter that, so yeah, I don’t know why nobody does…. Anybody have an answer to this?
Croccydile
Sep 29th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Alot of the old Edison stuff actually shot faster (30+ fps) than what is used to day (24 fps) and alot of silent films were done at 16-18. I remember reading some of the first sound+film experiments that Edison did were actually 50 (!) fps.

Unfortunately, nobody seems agree what the majority of silent films should be played back at, since there was no hard standard for several decades.
Minnesotastan
Sep 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
The reason people and vehicles seem to move more quickly in these old films is because that’s actually how things moved at that time. Because of frictional resistance the rotation of the earth is slowing down, and there is even evidence that time itself is slowing down. These old films provide an invaluable resource to show what life and movement was like in olden days…
MadMolecule
Sep 30th, 2009 at 9:58 am
@Croccydile: Unfortunately, nobody seems agree what the majority of silent films should be played back at, since there was no hard standard for several decades.

Why not play it back at whatever speed makes it look natural? No one watching it cares about fps; it’s just distracting to have it play back unnaturally fast. Viewers have an intuitive sense of how things “ought” to naturally look, in terms of gravity and momentum and such, and it’s the distortion of that that makes it disconcerting to watch.

I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to get “close enough” to natural speed, at least so it wouldn’t draw attention to itself. But then I’ve never tried, so maybe I’m wrong.
Lindsey
Sep 30th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
This may actually be Loie Fuller, not just “in the style of.” According to her wikipedia page, her Serpentine Dance was filmed by the Lumiere brothers around 1896. I was thinking that sure looks like Loie Fuller, although of course it’s impossible to tell. Fascinating! She was an amazing woman.

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