Monsieur Laurent, célèbre dompteur d'animaux féroces (1896-1902)

Опубликовано: 27 Март 2025
на канале: Films by the Year

451

https://grimh.org/index.php?option=co...
Director: Unknown
Lion tamer: Auguste Laurent
Dancer: [Mme. Bob Walter?]
Production Company: Unknown
Country: France
Notes: This film is identified as Serpentine Dance (1900) on IMDb, YouTube, Letterbox, etc. and Alice Guy is credited as the director, Mme. Ondine as the dancer. First of all, Guy never claimed to to have directed any of the four serpentine dance films included in the filmography compiled by Francis Lacassin in her memoirs. Lacassin includes the films because "no one other than Alice Guy could have been the director." This just isn't true because Gaumont cinematographers, Henri Vallouy and Anatole Thiberville also directed films during this period and addition Gaumont, before he began producing films, bought films from filmmakers such as Clément-Maurice and Albert Kirchner and added them to the Gaumont catalogue. The source of this film that you'll find on YouTube, etc. is the Saved from the Flames DVD set which doesn't identify the director or production company. It merely indicates that it's a French film from 1900. And who is this Mme. Ondine? All online references refer back to IMDb and sites that mirror info from IMDb and IMDb provides no further info other than that she supposedly appears in this film. Janet Fuentes pointed out to me that the dancer resembles Mme. Bob Walter, who was famous for performing the serpentine dance in a cage with lions. "In the Austrian ANNO archive, you can find a long, blow-by-blow, feature article account of Mme. Bob's act in the lion's cage in Paris, and its impact on the theatre audience: Neues Wiener Journal 16. November 1893 page 4. In the Internet Archive text archive, by searching "danse serpentine" you can pull up L'Escarmouche Magazine from 1894, page 74, to find her act described in the context of other circus/variety acts on the bill at Eden Theatre in Paris."

Early-film historian Jean-Claude Seguin, whose site is referenced above, provides evidence of an exhibition of this film (it is actually four films edited together - Lions et Zébus dans la même cage, Lions sauteurs, ...) in Haiti in 1902. The exhibitors were Édouard Hervet and B. Didier who traveled throughout Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean exhibiting Lumière films so although there are no entries in the Lumière catalogue for these films it's possible they were made with a Lumière camera by one of their concessionaires.

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