Photos: The Afternoon of a Faun

[pherank]

Can anyone identify the dancer playing the nymph? Is it Vera Nelidova?

[rg]

two French museum websites caption this photo as showing Nijinksy and LYDIA Nelidova.

[Quiggin]

It looks as though the photograph might be one of a series by Baron Adolph von Meyer, a self-made baron who was associated with Alfred Stieglitz and the photo-successionists and later a very successful Vogue photographer. According to Wikipedia,

between 1903 and 1907 his work was published in Alfred Stieglitz's quarterly Camera Work. Cecil Beaton dubbed him "the Debussy of photography". In 1912 he photographed Nijinsky in Paris.

[rg]

these are almost certainly from Baron de Meyer's famous FAUNE series.

[sandik]

RG -- I cannot remember the name of the filmmaker who set these images to a recording of the score, rather like Ken Burns' use of still images -- do you have him on the top of your head?

[rg]

Christian Comte

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0aNjMRGL_E

Joan Acocella did a "Notebook" column in the THE NEW YORKER about Comte and his "films"...

[sandik]

I'm curious -- I remember seeing a film in the 1980s that strung the deMeyer images together with the score -- it's looking like the Comte film is much more recent?

[rg]

you are correct, S. now that i think back, i even have a copy somewhere of a selection of 'historical' films transferred to videocassette and then to disc, of a film like the one you're asking about here; it was on a reel of things like early modern dance works, with St. Denis, and that included a rather scratchy film of FAUNE, in color? or colorized? with music, adding up to a performance of the ballet achieved by sequentially filming still images of the ballet, but this may be something else still different from the film you're thinking about.

if i can locate my copy and if it has credits i can let you know.

[sandik]

I saw it in grad school at Sarah Lawrence -- Rose Anne Thom showed it to my dance history class. I remember it as black and white, though that doesn't mean there isn't a colorized version floating around somewhere. I think she would have found it at NYPL -- I don't think the school owned it.

[pherank]

Thanks for the information on de Meyer. I believe these may be from the same series then: