The Electricity Fairy (Inventions: Untold Stories of the Beautiful Era collection) by Alex Mar

Author:Alex Mar [Mar, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2019-03-28T07:00:00+00:00

For years, she will claim that she does not even watch the new films because the flickering bothers her eyes.

The Edison team proves her skepticism right: their next move is a cheat. Rejected by Loïe, Dickson and Heise invite one of her copycats to the studio. They hire Annabelle Whitford, a young Broadway dancer, to perform versions of three of Loïe’s dances. Unlike Loïe, she is slim and conventionally pretty, and her performances are punctuated with broad smiles and high kicks that showcase her legs. Edison’s company loads their Kinetoscopes with her image, and the prints wear out quickly from repeated viewing. In Paris, the Whitford films are labeled La Danse de La Loïe Fuller.

***

In Paris in 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière unveil their projector with a pop-up screening of their short films in a café. Unlike Dickson with his heavy use of the black-box studio, they have been making films on location. In addition to dozens and dozens of ethnic dances shot around the world, in 1897 they film a graceful serpentine performance by an anonymous dancer in Rome, as well as a rendition by the famous Italian impersonator Leopoldo Fregoli in drag. The following year, they debut a film that features a dog in a robe parodying the number.

And so, with the Lumière brothers threatening to surpass him, Edison collaborates with the Kinetoscope Company to rebrand a projection design by an American team as his own: the Vitascope. He has his first public Vitascope screenings at Koster & Bial’s—“Edison’s Greatest Marvel,” the ads read—on the heels of Loïe Fuller’s own run at the theater. These mass-produced motion-picture shorts, once confined to the world of the Kinetoscope, are swelling into her space. It is unclear if the difference will matter much longer, the difference between someone dancing right in front of you, a moment you have witnessed that can never come back, and the facsimile of a dance—a facsimile that can be shared, precisely, with any number of audiences, across any number of times and locations.

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