The Dancing Skeleton
About The Dancing Skeleton
A skeleton puppet, hung on wires, dances, falls into a pile of bones, and is pulled back together. The French title is Le Squelette joyeux. The Lumière catalog lists it as view 831.
Cast & crew
More about The Dancing Skeleton
Auguste and Louis Lumière produced it. The Grimh catalog numbers it Lumière 831, also AS 398, at 17 meters, with a date before March 20, 1898. Maguire & Baucus listed it as 1831. Wikidata gives the length as 50 seconds. It is a marionette filmed by the Cinématographe, not a stop-motion cartoon.
Themes
Background
By 1898 the Lumière catalog was mixing street views with a few trick subjects. This one is a puppet filmed straight, sold beside the actualities.
Making
The Lumière operator cranked the Cinématographe on a puppet that an unseen hand was already working. The dance and the collapse are in the same shot.
Look
The Cinématographe records the puppet in one setup. The movement is the marionette's, not frame-by-frame animation.
Notes
- The catalog view number is 831.
- A screening is recorded in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on April 24, 1902.
- An American Mutoscope film of a dancing skeleton is a different picture, dated by the AFI to November 1897.
- The wires and the unseen operator are what put the bones back in a pile and then upright.
- Maguire & Baucus sold it in their English-language list as number 1831.
Scenes
- The skeleton dances, drops into a heap of bones, and is reassembled.
