In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of the flowing cloth. She moves to her right and left across an unadorned stage. Many of the prints were distributed in hand-tinted color.
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Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) Mention Annabelle Moore to a sold-out crowd at the latest summer blockbuster and it's doubtful a single person could tell you who she was. In fact, it would be hard to find anyone who could tell you who she was except for the most knowledgeable film buffs out there. In a short period, Annabelle Moore made about ten films for the Edison studio where she pretty much danced in a variety of ways. The title tells you what's going on in this film that clocks in just under a minute. Obviously most people aren't going to see anything special in what's going on here and it's doubtful most would even be entertained by the dance today. With that said, those who enjoy these early movies from Edison will like this simply because of Annabelle's style when she dances and the way the camera captures it.
One of the earliest surviving films, and most certainly among the first hand-tinted, "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (1895) is a purely cinematic feast, a celebration of motion and color. Annabelle Moore, a Broadway dancer, is dressed in white, flowing robes that change color as the dance progresses. Several other contemporary serpentine dance films exist. It's fascinating how early cinema saw dance as essentially cinematic and most certainly made it so for us. Hypnotic and brilliant, this film, no matter how elementary it might seem for people accustomed to narrative cinema, exudes an acute understanding of what works visually.
. . . Annabelle Whitford (the ONLY dancer in this short; "jHailey's 'storyline' that appears on this page AS OF TODAY is for a different, LATER Annabelle short!) is dressed and tinted here to resemble a certain part of the female anatomy that we in the South simply refer to as "down there." Thomas Alva Edison and his henchmen behind his cameras no doubt ran across this shameless hussy during one of their nights of "Wilding," when they left the all-male confines of their New Jersey labs to blow off some steam in big, bad New York City. Probably it was old Tom himself who came up with the idea to tint Annabelle's wild mop of hair carrot orange, so that her whole head would resemble a female unmentionable when coupled with the luridly swirling pink-tinted lip-like silken skirts wantonly flapping about below it. LAST TANGO IN PAR!S is pretty tame stuff when you see how much raw sex Tom Edison can cram into the 14.34 seconds of ANNABELLE SERPENTINE DANCE!
In a flowing-robe of a dress, Annabelle gracefully moves her arms while standing in place. This causes a swirl of material to float about her body in an effect that is both spectacular and artistic. It does show much less of Annabelle than we saw in "Annabelle Butterfly Dance".The film version that I viewed had "copyright Aug. 1897" imprinted on several frames. It was hand-tinted so that the Ms. Whitford's robe changed to various pastel colors as it swirls. The tinting process, usually done by women, had to be laborious. The Kinetograph would film at 48-frames per second. If that were the case for this 18-second film, there would be 864 frames where only the dress would be hand-painted.
