Walfrid Bergström | Skilda tiders danser (Dances Through the Ages) / 1909

the boston glide

 

Walfrid Bergström (photographer) Skilda tiders danser (Dances Through the Ages) / 1909

 

The short three-minute film “‘Skilda tiders danser,” released by the National Library of Sweden, is actually part of a larger work from 1909 titled in English Dances Through the Ages which also included evidently a gavotte, a minuet, and another unnamed dance.

 

    The extant piece was described as “a soft, gliding Boston” as danced “in a modern salon.”

     The reason why this film, other than its excellently performed “Boston Waltz,” is of interest is that it consists of two women, one all in white, Rosa Grünberg, described as “the lady,” and Emma Meissner as the “cavalier,” costumed, as Laura critic Horak describes it, with “hair pinned up, in black tails, trousers, and a white bowtie....” Both were leading stars in operettas of the day, with Meissner performing as the lead in over 100 operettas. Grünberg was rather famous for her opera recordings. And the two later performed together in the operetta Eve in 1911.

      Horvak describes their rather complex interchanging positions as follows:

 

“When this three-minute scene begins, Meissner sits coquettishly in front of a black curtain on the left side of the frame, looking happily over to Grünberg, who stands in front of a light-colored wallpaper on the right. Grünberg walks over and bows, Meissner stands and curtseys, then Grünberg takes her partner’s hands and sweeps her into a waltz. As they turn, the women switch places in front of the dark and light backgrounds – first they contrast with the background, then blend in, then they contrast again. While the dark- and light-colored backdrops initially suggest a strict binary, the movement of the dance confuses this distinction. They change places again and again, suggesting that this simple binary between light and dark, cavalier and lady, man and woman, is insufficient.”

 

      It was not uncommon in the first decade of the 20th century—as we have witnessed in the female pairing of dancers in the films of 1900 by Alice Guy Blaché—for such cross-dressing encounters, so audiences would have easily accepted these images. However, as Horak adds, “...the performers’ obvious pleasure may have suggested intriguing possibilities to women who were attracted to women and people assigned female who were masculine identified.”

     And, in any event, female cross-dressers became far less common in Sweden throughout the decade, those kinds of roles begin increasingly reassigned to male performers such as Eric Malmberg’s Agaton och Fina (1912), in which actor Victor Arfvidson played the female role. And other examples exist in the American short comedies centered around Sweedie, the maid, performed by Wallace Beery. It was not until the 1940s before such roles for females were again witnessed in Swedish film.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).