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Poster for Beginning of the Serpentine Dance
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Released
1908 · FILM

Beginning of the Serpentine Dance

Color
Black & White
Runtime
4 min
Language
FR
Fantasy

Synopsis

In a living room, four contemporary couples from the time the film was shot dance a waltz under the direction of a violinist (Linder). They begin a minuet and their costumes change suddenly. A man enters and seems interested in what he sees, casts a spell, and everything disappears. Transforming himself into the devil, the visitor takes the violinist with him to hell, where he creates a large piece of silk out of a cauldron. The fabric unrolls, revealing a young woman in a silk dress that starts dancing the serpentine. While she dances, other women join in a synchronized ballet, before all of them vanish into bursts of flames.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 3

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Also known as

  • Schöpfung des Serpentintanzesde
  • Beginning of the Serpentine Danceen

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