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Everyone can dance. Sure, some limber folks may be more refined than others, but the fact remains: dancing is an innately human thing. We’ve always done it. Always will. And ever since we’ve had the technology, we’ve been capturing dance on film. From the Lumiere brothers’ Danse Serpentine, to whatever the hell Crispin Glover was doing in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, dancing and film were made for each other. Plain and simple.
Comprised of over three-hundred-and-sixty films, spanning one-hundred-and-twenty-five years of cinema, and set to the pensive end title song from Cloud Atlas, here’s a montage celebrating the enduring relationship between the moving image and moving bodies.
You can watch “Dancers in the Dark – A Brief History of Dance in Film ” here:
Who made this?
Jace, a.k.a BREADSWORD is an L.A. based video essayist who specializes in long-form nostalgia-tinged love letters to traditionally ignored animation features like Treasure Planet, The Cat in the Hat, and The Road to El Dorado. (Making the above video something of a deviation from the norm). Impeccably edited and smoother than butter, BREADSWORD essays boast an unparalleled relaxed fit and an expensive narrative tone that starkly contrasts the sing-songy “video essay voice” that has become so prevalent. Essays like this take a lot of time to put together and somehow BREADSWORD makes it all look effortless. You can subscribe to them on YouTube here. And you can follow them on Twitter here
More Videos Like This
- If you haven’t seen BREADSWORD‘s video on Treasure Planet you might want to fix that
- Here’s a video from Fandor on the endurance of one of the absolute kings of film dancing, Singing in the Rain
- Not all BREADSWORD videos are 30-60 minutes, they have a series called “3-minute Love Letters” and I vibe real hard with their video on the best Scooby-Doo DTV feature: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
- A montage of dance and movement in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos
- There’s dancing in film and there are films about dance: here’s the Criterion Collection trailer for Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Pina