Charles W. Allen and Francis Trevelyan Miller | Diana, the Huntress / 1916

the dancing diana

by Douglas Messerli

 

 Charles W. Allen and Francis Trevelyan Miller (directors) Diana, the Huntress / 1916

 

Charles W. Allen and Francis Trevelyan Miller’s 1916 retelling of the Diana myth is primarily a dance performance in which Paul Swan plays Pan and Percy Richards and Lionel Braham alternately play Acteon and the stag which Diana (Valda Valkyrien) eventually shoots, killing him.

     Diana is captured by the moon, and her nymphs, sitting in a wooded glen with Pan, are saddened that they have lost her. But Diana, witnessing their dejection, shoots an arrow to earth where it blossoms into flowers, signaling her return. In joy of her reappearance the nymphs dance, accompanied by Pan’s flute and lyres in celebration.

      Meanwhile, Pan goes dancing through the woods, jumping from trees, leaping, and eventually throwing himself into a pond before he falls asleep in exhaustion. In the course of the film, Acteon appears and watches the nymphs and Diana bathing. Angered by his voyeurism, Diana transforms him into stag and ultimately runs him down with her hunters and hounds, killing him with an arrow.

      But the 29-minute film ends with the restoration of Apollo and Diana in their respective homes on the Sun and the Moon.

      Obviously the relationship between Diana and her female nymphs suggest sapphic love and adoration. Their dances were choreographed by the noted dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, who at this time in her career was still highly influenced by the exercises of François Delsarte, and accordingly the early dances consist mostly of the nymphs surrounding Diana in a circle and gesticulating with arms raised.

      As Pan, Paul Swan presents another, far more innovative dance pattern, although also highly influenced by the Delsarte’s aesthetic laid out in his Society of Gymnastics and Voice Culture. By this time, however, Swan had already done some of his entirely nude dances which intrigued and scandalized dance admirers and which would later find a ready enthusiast in Isadora Duncan, with whom Swan may have had an affair.

     Although he does not appear nude here, the young Swan, billed as “the most beautiful man in the world,” represents a Pan who is sufficiently undressed to make his movements appear scandalous to some viewers of the 1916 short.

     This work is particularly interesting in connection with Swan’s noted homosexuality, and the fact that he continued to dance in the outdated modes which we seem him perform here for the rest of his life. From 1939 to 1969, Swan performed dance recitals every Sunday evening in his Carnegie Hall studio, attracting notables such as Andy Warhol (who also filmed him), who thought the dances of the aged performer to be the very definition of camp.

      Most of the extant prints of this film are 4.13-minute extracts from the original 29 minutes, including the version on the DVD compilation of Unseen Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).