Danse Macabre - Film - Dudley Murphy / Saint-Saens. 1922. Visual Symphony Production.

The "Danse Macabre" of 1922, is one of the first experimental works on live musical synchronization, of the American director Dudley Murphy, for his emerging company "Visual Symphony Production Inc.", performed on the famous musical work of the same name by Camile Saint-Saens (the other well-known work was "The soul of the cypress", realized in the "Prelude of the afternoon of a faun", of Debussy). At first the tight synchronization was achieved by rheostats that accelerated or slowed the projection speed, depending on the musical performance, although upon his later arrival in France he soon came into contact with the inventor Charles Delacommune, and used his system of devices. for "Synchronismes cinematiques", first with the "Ciné-desks", his best known device, which projected the scheme or the score on a desk at the same projection speed so that the conductor's baton or the performance of the interpreters would adjust synchronously.
For his later collaboration in Léger's "Ballet mécanique", on the contrary, he renounces the "ciné-desks" to use, or at least attempt to use, the rest of the machinery of the "Delacommune system" or "appareils Synchro - ciné" , company that manages it, including the subsequent distribution of the films) and that allowed, through its special electromechanical distributor, to connect directly with a piano-player and various noise devices (also patented by Delacommune) "automatically" with a projector , the stellar bet of the "Ballet Mécanique" with respect to cinematographic synchronism and that, unfortunately, was never carried out by the participants.
Another interesting feature of this film is the stellar performance of Adolph Bolm, great star of Mariinski's ballets, who is so seriously injured on one of his tours of the United States that he ends, after a long convalescence, settling in the country, and beginning a great school of American dance, having among its students Ruth Page (who appears with him in the film) or Martha Graham, among many others.
Although the film has popular characteristics (with the pretense of commercial broadcasting, also based on a well-known musical work by Saint-Saens of general and international success), it can be seen, in a way, as one of the first video-clips of the history of cinema, in certain aspects it takes influences from German expressionism, especially from its typical horror films of the time, and with its "special" effects it can also enter the "experimental" genre, to which it already belongs due to its research in "cinematographic musical synchronism" live. This reconstruction was carried out at the ATI-Gabirol in Malaga, by Ortiz Morales, in 2008, as collateral data for the debate on the thesis "Le Ballet mécanique y Synchro-ciné", and it was mastered again in 2018 for a screening at the conference "The beginnings of cinematographic synchronism" at the Martín Tenllado Conservatory. The performance is by the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra with Michel Plasson as conductor.
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