Dance, Franchonetti Sisters
March. 31,1897
Three young women with dark, curly hair stand on a stage with a black background and patterned carpet or tile underfoot. They wear tights, ballet shoes, and frilly dresses to the knee with multiple petticoats and ruffled drawers. They begin by raising their right legs up by their heads, and then perform a dance with a variety of kicks and leg movements, their hands either in the air or pulling up their skirts. The sisters also grab their right legs again and hop in a circle, then do cartwheels and land on the floor in the splits. Jumping back to their feet, the women twirl in circles and around each other in circles in what appears to be a type of pirouette, while holding up their skirts and showing their bloomers in a manner similar to the cancan.
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Reviews
Redundant and unnecessary.
Admirable film.
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
Dance, Franchonetti Sisters (1897) If you start going through the early history of cinema then you're going to come across countless films that show women dancing. There are dozens of different types of dances and dozens of different women who got in front of the camera to move around so that companies could release more films to the public. This one here features three women doing the dance and for about thirty seconds. In all honesty, with so many dance pictures out there, this one here really doesn't contain anything too special, although the fact that there are three women on display is worthy of being noted. Fans of early cinema will want to check this one out but everyone else could probably just skip it.
Although this is shown in the Biograph as a Quadrille, it is actually a much wilder dance than the old-fashioned French call-dance. Three young women with unbound hair and bare feet dance before a fixed camera. Most notable among their movements are splits. Doubtless the catalogue listing was intended to maintain an air of propriety.What is most interesting is that, despite a fixed camera, one can see all three dancers in full body throughout the film. Although this was standard technique during this period, it became rather passé with moving cameras and editing technique, so that the beauty and movement of dance, perhaps the most closely related to cinema of the lively arts, was lost until its reintroduction in the RKO musicals of Astaire and Rogers in the 1930s.
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