The influence of film on dance goes as far back as the earliest years of cinema. African American street dancers mimicked the slow‐motion effects of film, performing their dances in perfect half‐time. The Ballets Russes encountered the Futurists in 1916 who were experimenting with film, resulting in a collaboration between Léonard Massine and Giacomo Balla that approximated the effects of film on stage. Meanwhile, dance was a favorite subject of Thomas Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France, who recorded the performances of vaudeville artists such as Amy Muller and Bets ... More

The influence of film on dance goes as far back as the earliest years of cinema. African American street dancers mimicked the slow‐motion effects of film, performing their dances in perfect half‐time. The Ballets Russes encountered the Futurists in 1916 who were experimenting with film, resulting in a collaboration between Léonard Massine and Giacomo Balla that approximated the effects of film on stage. Meanwhile, dance was a favorite subject of Thomas Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France, who recorded the performances of vaudeville artists such as Amy Muller and Betsy Ross against black curtains with a locked‐off camera. The ways in which dance and film have collaborated since these early encounters contrasts with much of the writing on dancefilm. While dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers have explored the points of contact between choreography and the moving image, critics and theorists have struggled to reconcile dance and film in their writing, favoring one discipline or the other. There has been no survey of the history of the form and few convincing attempts to describe the type of cinematic movements it produces. Drawing on intersecting points in the fields of dance studies and film theory to describe the devices and formal parameters of dancefilm, this book offers a new perspective and interpretative framework for considering the form.