Kamarinskaja
About Kamarinskaja
Three dancers in fur hats, leather boots, and traditional clothes face the camera and dance a Russian step. Max Skladanowsky filmed the turn. A performer named Tscherpanoff is the billed dancer. The picture lasts 16 seconds.
Cast & crew
More about Kamarinskaja
Kamarinskaja was one number in the Bioscop program Max and Emil Skladanowsky projected at Berlin’s Wintergarten on 1 November 1895. The same bill included an Italian peasant dance, a juggler, a boxing kangaroo, and a serpentine dance. The Wintergarten paid 2,500 Reichsmarks for the whole show, not for this strip alone.
Themes
Background
Paying audiences at the Wintergarten saw projected films on 1 November 1895, weeks before the Lumière public shows in Paris.
Making
Skladanowsky built the camera and the Bioscop projector himself after painting lantern slides with his father. This dance is one of the strips he had ready for the November opening.
Reviews
The Staatsbürger Zeitung of 5 November 1895 described the Bioscop finale as living photographs and admitted the writer could not explain the method.
Look
The dancers are framed full-length, facing the lens, for the whole 16 seconds.
Preservation
The strip survives. A copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- The Bioscop ran as the closing act of a variety bill.
- The house held the program for four weeks, then the brothers took it to Copenhagen and Stockholm.
- A Staatsbürger Zeitung writer, on 5 November 1895, said he could not tell how the enlarged photographs moved.
- A Commons file uses the title Kamarinskaja.
Scenes
- Three dancers in boots and fur hats face the camera and keep the step going until the strip ends.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Kamarinskaja.webm)
