Skip to main content

Watch the 1907’s Nightmare-Inducing Short Film The Dancing Pig, Now Fully Colorized

One could argue that cinema audiences in the 1900s were less sophisticated than they are today. Marshaling the evidence, one might make an Exhibit A of Le Cochon Danseur (The Dancing Pig), a Pathé-produced silent short that showcases the figure of the title. “Apparently based on a Vaudeville act,” writes the Independent‘s Clarisse Loughrey, “it sees a pig dressed in a fancy tuxedo attempt to seduce a young lady, who in turn rips off his clothes and forces him to dance despite his shameful nakedness.”

Just how deeply the original French audiences thrilled to these proceedings is lost to history; but then, so is the name of the film’s director. This aura of mystery made Le Cochon Danseur an object of fascination a century after its release. But that wasn’t the only factor in play: the design of the pig costume remains impressive today, let alone when considered by the presumed standards of 1907.

The filmmakers must have known this, since the film’s ending cuts — in a time when editing of any kind was a rarity in the cinema — to a close-up of the oversized porcine head expressing a well-articulated look of satisfaction.

We see the pig “flapping his ears, boggling his eyes, flailing his tongue, and chuckling evilly, bearing his sharp, scary teeth,” as the Villains Wiki puts it. “This implies that he possibly ate the woman and revealed himself to be a horrid monster.” It is this final sequence that has made the dancing pig “a popular Internet meme villain” over the past decade and a half. You’ve almost certainly spotted him once or twice, though probably not the colorized version seen in the restored and enhanced video at the top of the post. The original black-and-white film, the inspiration for so many memes and so many nightmares, appears just above.

“Somehow, I feel like I’m actually looking at a hellish human-pig hybrid, not just a 20th-century human in a 20th-century version of a mascot suit,” writes cinephile Tristan Ettleman in his own consideration of the picture. Perhaps Le Cochon Danseur has proven even more compelling to us fully connected 21st-century sophisticates than it did to its first viewers. Or perhaps it simply taps into a universal truth of existence: to paraphrase a much-quoted observation attributed to Margaret Atwood, giant anthropomorphic pigs are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid giant anthropomorphic pigs will eat them.

Related Content:

Watch The Amazing 1912 Animation of Stop-Motion Pioneer Ladislas Starevich, Starring Dead Bugs

Watch The Insects’ Christmas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Starring a Cast of Dead Bugs

The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

Footage of the Last Known Tasmanian Tiger Restored in Color (1933)

When Salvador Dalí Viewed Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist Film, Became Enraged & Shouted: “He Stole It from My Subconscious!” (1936)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Watch the 1907’s Nightmare-Inducing Short Film The Dancing Pig, Now Fully Colorized is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3yp0oxI
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more