Introducing ‘Divertissements‘, a new series which sees pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler explore ballet’s strange cameo role in film and TV.
Early film pioneer George Méliès was not only a director; he was a magician and mad scientist too. One of his cinematic obsessions was with the “pliability of the body”, having it transform, change size, break into pieces, or disappear entirely.
His favourite bodies to use in creating these special effects? Those of ballerinas belonging to companies like Théâtre du Châtelet and the Folies Bergère.
In 1902, he created La Danseuse microscopique, unfortunately translated as The Dancing Midget. It shows a magician producing an egg that hatches a tiny ballerina. One year later, he made Le rêve d’un maître de ballet, or The Ballet-Master’s Dream. Melies plays a man frustrated with his attempts to create a ballet, and dreams of ever-transforming dancers atop his bed.
Ballerinas aren’t quite as obvious in his most famous creation, 1902’s Le voyage dans la lune, or A Trip To The Moon. Widely regarded as the first science fiction film, its image of a human-faced moon with a rocket shoved uncomfortably into its eye is iconic.
Méliès may not have found room for actual dancing, but dancers appear nonetheless. The last thing the space-faring astronomers of A Trip To The Moon see on earth are ballerinas waving them goodbye; the first thing they see on arrival are the same unearthly beauties, appearing in the moon’s sky as if by magic.
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