© Video Artists International This DVD is avilable from: DanceBooks Amazon 'Gaite Parisienne' reviews Graham Watts reviews

In fact, it’s a great testament to the human condition. The 37-minute full length film of ‘Gaîté Parisienne’ is the product of one extraordinary man’s lifetime labour of love; and another man’s determination to fulfil his wish that his work be seen by everyone. The first of these men is Victor Jessen, an émigré Dane who lived and worked as an engineer in the USA from 1929. Jessen fell in love with ballet as a child in Denmark and rediscovered it many years later through the touring companies that visited Los Angeles, most notably the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The second man is John Mueller, who befriended Jessen in his 80s, and has produced this DVD, as well as interviewing Franklin and producing a short film about Jessen as invaluable extras on the disc.

Still photography had always been Jessen’s hobby and this translated into an obsession to film ballet. At first, he was allowed to film from the wings but the noise of his wind-up movie camera annoyed both the impresario, Sol Hurok, and Massine himself. So, Jessen was forced to film from the audience; dressed all in black, with his camera painted matt black to avoid glare, he would film from a standing position at the back of a central box. Eventually an usher detected him and he thought his secret life was over; but the usher told him, “that’s something I would have liked to do” and he continued to film with the usher’s protection. Amazingly, each magazine of film lasted for only two and a half minutes, and he had to wind the camera up every 30 seconds, and so it would take countless visits to film the same casts in order to piece together one whole ballet. Often, casts would change and he would be left unable to film.

The edited film on this DVD was shot by Jessen over a ten-year period of performances from 1944 to 1954 (the great irony being that Massine had made the ballet in just two weeks, and the Hollywood short was filmed in just a few days); when Jessen had finally got all of the film he needed to create one patchwork recording; he committed the ‘ultimate daring’ by smuggling a bulky tape recorder into the LA Philharmonic auditorium, plugged it into a light socket and recorded the sound to go with his composite film. The silent film was recorded at 16 frames per second; the sound film at 24 frames per second, and it was all edited in a homemade studio. In amongst all of this Jessen lost his job because of this obsession. All told, he deposited 67,000 feet of film to the dance collection of the New York Public Library, which includes 24 complete “jigsaws” of work and substantial chunks of nine more. He died, penniless in 1995, aged 94.

The product of his labour is an amazing thing. ‘Gaîté Parisienne’ traditionally closed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo shows across the USA – Franklin is unable to estimate how many times he must have danced it. This is the only filmed record of it on stage from those times; it took ten years for Jessen to get all 37 minutes (which must be the equivalent of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel frescoes, only he didn’t have to pay to get in or avoid detection!). But this is not just one performance, but many. Jessen concentrated on a cast which included Danilova (as the Glove Seller – the part she didn’t get in the film); Franklin (as The Baron); and Leon Danielian (as the wealthy Peruvian from Brazil – the part Massine made on himself).
 

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The amazing thing is that each sequence is an amalgam of several separate performances over several years: Danilova’s entrance as the Glove Seller is clearly patched from three different performances and her head-dress and hair style changes from one frame to the next! Although the main cast is the same, there are six different women playing the part of The Flower Girl and two Can-Can soloists. I’m especially grateful to Jessen for one thing – for years I’ve had a signed photo of Ballet Russe dancer, Gertrude Tyven, and now I’ve finally seen her dance, as both the Flower Girl and in the Can-Can solo

The important thing is that Jessen’s film captures the essence of it all. Ashton declared that Danilova was the “Queen of the skirt-wagging roles” and here, we can see why; Europe hated the audacious frivolity and salaciousness of the ballet, especially the authenticity of the Can-Can but America loved it, and Jessen captures that energy; the vibrancy, the flirtatiousness, the super-fast steps of the Peruvian; the funny, slapstick fight sequences; the exhilarating sequence of twelve girls tumbling like a set of dominos into the splits; the sprawling, flying fouéttes of the specialists, the Ballet Russe hired for just this purpose; and the final scene (added as an afterthought) of the various players pairing off to go home together to Offenbach’s soft melodies of the Barcarolle. Bit by bit, Jessen got it all and we’re indebted to him for this lifetime of effort; to John Mueller for making this film; and to those wonderful people at Video Artists International for making it commercially available to all, just as Jessen had hoped.

The pressing thought is that there are 23 more full-length films that Jessen made including the Royal Ballet’s American tours of ‘Swan Lake’ (with Fonteyn and Somes) and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (with Fonteyn, Somes and Ashton).