VIVA LA DANCE is part of the film retrospective UNSEEN CINEMA that explores long-forgotten American experimental cinema.. Dance and film have shared the aspiration to creatively sculpt motion and time. Some of the first films ever made featured Annabelle's skirt dance, hand-painted in glowing colors. Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis' innovations found their way into Diana the Huntress (1916) and Soul of the Cypress (1920). Highly cinematic renditions of dance evolved in Stella Simon's Hände (1928) and Hector Hoppin's Joie de vivre (1934). In counterpoint, ciné-dance experiments by Steiner, Bute, Fischinger, Crockwell, and Vorkapich dispensed with actual dancers in favor of color, shape, line, and form choreographed into abstract light-play.. 31 FILMS BY FEATURED DIRECTORS: Charles Allen, Grigory Alexandrov, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Frederick S. Armitage, Miklos Bandy, Norman Bel Geddes, David Bradley, Al Brick, Francis Bruguière, Mary Ellen Bute, W.L.K. Dickson, Sergei Eisenstein, Emlen Etting, Anthony Gross, William Heise, Hector Hoppin, Looney Lens, Norman McLaren, Francis Trevelyan Miller, Dudley Murphy, Ted Nemeth, Stella Simon, Ralph Steiner, Edmund Tisse, Willard Van Dyke, Slavko Vorpapich, James White.. "A joyous event... 'movies as art' that not only succeed as challenging entertainment but also have proven to be hugely influential on the craft of cinema." - Chicago Tribune. "An abundance of early, rarely screened, completely restored experimental films...Rich with inventive and curious experiments." - LA Weekly. Curated by Bruce Posner and Produced by David Shepard. www.unseen-cinema.com. Made possible in part by Cineric, Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, Film Preservation Associates