Australian
Screen

Clip description

This clip begins with six female musicians dressed in 18th century period costume on stage accompanied by an orchestra playing a minuet. After the minuet ends, the camera tilts back to show the orchestra pit as the conductor, Hamilton Webber, explains the development of the German-style waltz. To the music of Emile Waldteufel’s The Skater’s Waltz (Les Patineurs), the stage curtain opens to reveal a man accompanying the orchestra on a piano. Next is what Hamilton describes as a 'jazz’ version of the waltz. As the music plays, an image of a mother rocking her sleeping baby is superimposed over the stage curtains in front of the orchestra.

Curator’s notes

Hurley shoots this segment from different angles, using a few takes to emphasise the shifting focus of attention from the orchestra to the conductor to the people on stage. His camera follows the flow of the sequence, moving smoothly between the orchestra and the stage. This segment can be compared to the variety shorts made by Frank Thring’s Efftee Film Studios around the same time, which also consisted of musical and novelty items (see Melbourne Chinese Orchestra Selections, 1931). Thring was an especially enthusiastic supporter of talking pictures and made the most of the medium by filming live performances for his Efftee Entertainers series.

Filming performers live in the theatre also highlights the roots of these variety shorts in vaudeville, with which audiences of the early 1930s would have been very familiar. The coming of synchronised sound in the late 1920s gave studios like Cinesound and Efftee the opportunity to play with new possibilities. Recording musical items such as 'the evolution of the waltz’ is a perfect example.