ABSTRACT
The emergence of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century marks a turning point in the way in which Greece and Rome are conceptualised in the modern world. Cultures previously perceived as remote and inaccessible, as objects of contemplation from a distance or as products of the imagination, are suddenly transformed into a vivid but fleeting reality to be experienced through the senses. One of the most distinctive features of this reconceptualisation of Greece and Rome in cinematic modernity is dance. In addition to the exotic and orientalising dances associated with Pharaonic Egypt and the lands of the Bible which remain in vogue throughout the first few decades of cinema, there is a very popular type of dance commonly identified in the critical and commercial discourse of the time as ‘Grecian’. This type of dance must be set apart from other ‘ancient’ dances that appeal to early film because it celebrates the lightly clad or naked body of the dancer in motion while also striking a precarious but important balance between cinema’s drive for entertainment and its drive for moral uplift. It must also be set apart from other cinematic investments in the human body because of the dynamism and energy with which it responds to cinema’s preoccupation with the corporeal catastrophes of modernity. By 1919, Charlie Chaplin’s Sunnyside could feature dancing girls in white robes within a dream-like sequence which only makes sense when viewed in the larger context of the craze for Grecian dances in numerous, now forgotten, films of the same period. Other case studies considered in this chapter include D. W. Griffith’s Oil and Water (1913) whose dance sequences reminded the early film critic Vachel Lindsay of the pioneer of modern dance Isadora Duncan, Dances of the Ages (1913) which features another pioneer of modern dance, Ted Shawn, as well as Cupid’s Dance (1894) and Cupid and Psyche (1896), two of the earliest films ever made (both produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company) which display the ability of the new medium to record and retrieve a dynamic reality in motion through an engagement with an idyllic Greece of the senses.
