When you hear the term synchronised swimming you may very well think of plastic women doing water aerobics in a swimming pool. They wear silly pegs on their noses and are crowned with evangelical smiles. But at the start of the 20th century, the sport was known as Water Ballet, named after the beautiful underwater dance sequences  that Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman performed in glass tanks at variety theatre shows throughout the UK and the USA.

Kellerman was successful across a number of fields, including swimming, fashion, film (where she often starred as a mermaid), and sport. One of the highlights of her career was replacing Anna Pavlova in The Big Show of 1916 at New York’s hippodrome. She was everything a modern woman should be – self-possessed, independent and active.

Kellermann is also credited with popularising the one piece swimsuit for women, after she was arrested for indecency in 1907. Her crime? Flaunting her bare legs on Revere Beach in Boston. Oh, the scandal!

Her biography is told to great effect in the 1952 MGM musical, The Million Dollar Mermaid, starring actor Esther Williams  (herself a champion swimmer). It belonged to a sub-genre called aquatic musicals whose spectacularly elaborate underwater production numbers paved the way for the fantasy film genre. The Million Dollar Mermaid’s splashy, hyperreal aquacades were choreographed by Busby Berkeley and featured Williams rising out of a  cascading waterfall amidst a backdrop of gold lamé-suited mermaids, all spinning and spiraling like tangoing starfish to create a kaleidoscope of human pattern and movement. Production values included vast plumes of coloured smoke, fearless trapeze acts, and bathing beauties shooshing down waterslides lined with flag-waving and skimpily clad modern day gods.  In another memorable scene, Esther plays a pearl-like mermaid in a white tutu who treats us to a cross between an underwater pole dance and a classical ballet  before retreating to the clandestine chamber of a giant clam shell.

It takes a visionary artist to transform a dance film into a sublime celluloid experience that stands alone. Fortunately the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of Dracula provided the perfect basis for a silent film. Canadian Director Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) sets the ballet within a melange of silent film imagery that unfolds like a dream sequence. Maddin, who is best known for his surreal reworkings of vintage aesthetics and silent films harking back to the 1920s and ’30s, has merged theatre, film and ballet to create a phantasmagoric experience for ballet and Dracula lovers alike.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary incorporates the choreography of Mark Godden, a diverse legacy of film imagery and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. The Royal Winnipeg’s ballerinas also prevail as cast members in this production. Principal dancer Tara Birtwhistle plays Lucy Westenra, whose desires are unleashed by the jealous, handsome Chinese goth Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) – who, in this version, is an immigrant from the east. Elements of pantomime dominate the first half of the film, before giving way to dance scenes that immerse us in the lyricism of the story. Lucy’s pas de deux with Dracula is the most sensual dance-with-death I’ve seen – forget about Halloween parties. The second half sees Mina (Cindy Marie-Small) pursued by Dracula in a seductively savage ballet filled with stake-wielding henchman. This is where the film’s eroticism and Grand Guignol style of horror are brought to the fore.

The cinematography gives tremendous depth to the set of Castle Dracula, which come alive with the shadows and haunting figures that lurk within Gustav Mahler’s nocturnes. Maddin used Super 8 and 16mm film and devices such as vaseline lenses, triple exposure, tinting, animation and title overlays to replicate the golden era of cinema’s staging of melodrama in expressionistic settings (in this case, a mansion Jean Cocteau would be at home in).

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary works well precisely because it is silent: Maddin is used to focusing on the intensity of actors’ faces in the absence of sound to tell a story; large parts of the film are expressed through ballet and Maddin’s felicity of style gives it the intensity and beauty it deserves.

I myself eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement and only feel it. This is what dancers do, but instead I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see what I’d got. I came to realise that this feeling had to come out of myself; not out of streams, swaying grasses, soaring birds ... Len Lye.

Every film has its own rhythm, but how many of them engage with the essence of human movement, and of dance? New Zealand Artist Len Lye was interested in the composition of motion, just as musicians compose sound, from a young age. It was Lye, in fact, who coined the phrase ‘Visual music’.

The story goes that Lye as a young boy was watching clouds drift past and considering the way John Constable used to draw clouds to try to convey their motion. “Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? All of a sudden it hit me – if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion.”

Applying principles of human kinetics to his many innovations in film and sculpture, Lye saw movement as ‘unpremeditated being; the uncritical expression of life’. Colours and forms embody rather than emulate movement, an idea he called ‘pure figures of motion’. We see this to mesmerising effect in the zig-zagging rhythms of Free Radicals (1958) set to the tribal drums of Africa’s Bagirmi Tribe. The creativity of indigenous art and dance, particularly that of the southwest Pacific, was a profound influence on Lye’s work.

A pioneer of ‘direct films’ (created without a camera), and ‘direct animation’ (hand-marking film), Lye favoured techniques such as airbrushing paint through stencils, batik, dyeing, scratching and etching. In A Colour Box (1935), a kaleidoscope of vibrant geometric shapes flutter and unfurl into lines that wiggle to the seductive rhythms of Cuban jazz.

A Rainbow Dance (1936) overlays shot footage with vivid colour effects. The narrative follows a playful itinerant (Rupert Doone), who moves through a hallucinatory landscape with the outlaw style of Fred Astaire. Pink fish jump over curling waves, a magenta silhouette of a gentleman plays tennis on a court that stretches out to the horizon like a desert highway, and multiple figures dance across a backdrop of laughing rainbows.

An Artist in Perpetual Motion continues at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until October 11 2009.