Link (artificially colourised) here
The film, Le Cochon Danseur, is certainly bizarre and the comments are full of people discussing how creepy they found the pig, as well as speculating on whether the scene at the end symbolises that the pig ate the girl or whether it's a simple demonstration of the (very impressive for 1907!) mask's capabilities.
Can anyone shed any light on this? I'm really curious to know whether this kind of thing was part of a wider tradition, or would have been equally as strange to the original intended audience. Are we able to infer whether the pig would have been intended to be funny or scary?
The Cochon Danseur was funny. Not ha-ha funny, but side-splitting, rolling-on-the-floor funny. It was the movie adaptation of a vaudeville act or operetta called the Cochon mondain (The Worldly Pig) or Little Poucette (depending on the advertising, or maybe the act underwent some changes) that had been shown with great success from January to April 1907 at the Casino de Paris. The creator of the character was a mysterious "Mr. Odéo". The Pig danced while his female companion sang popular tunes, as shown on this blog page dedicated to the character. The magazine Fantasio wrote (cited by Guido and Le Forestier, 2010):
We have often seen brave pigs with ribbons trying to imitate some of man's familiar gestures under the guidance of fairground trainers. - There is, say the psychologists, so much in common between them and us! But here, this time, on the stage of one of our most sumptuous music halls, is a man who tries, in his turn, to imitate the pig in some of his familiar gestures. - There is so much in common! psychologists continue to assert. This is not a trivial thing, and the artist who has given himself this fanciful speciality is extraordinarily amusing.
He presents a pig of good company, not even of the demi-monde, though this happens, but of the world. It is true that there are some of them are. The pig wiggles, leaps, pirouettes, dances and smiles like a happy and well-behaved pig. He has a good-natured air that pleases the crowds.
The movie version was released by Pathé in May 1907, right after the show had run its course. For Guido and Le Forestier, the movie version is less "worldly", less bourgeois than the stage one. We can speculate that Mr. Odéo himself was playing the part, which would explain the rather high quality of the costume, which had been sturdy enough to be dancing on stage for 4 months. It is possible that the close-up in the end is supposed to show how sophisticated the suit was, something that was not perceptible on stage. Modern movies have done the same to show off advances in CGI ("Look how we do fur! and skin! and water!").
All the advertising for the movie was based on one word: comical. Here is one ad from July 1907 (Le Rideau artistique et littéraire). Here, the Cochon Danseur was the first act of the cinématographe programme, and it was "comical and very funny". The word was repeated over and over, with some variants ("ultra comical"). As was usual at the time, the Cochon was packaged with other reels: comical, action (hectic!), drama, spectacular, historical etc. It appeared several times with a movie called The race of the mothers-in-law, for a "laugh-out-loud success" (Le Petit Troyen, 16 May 1907). The Cochon Danseur toured France and Algeria, which was a French department, until at least December 1908. Movie criticism did not really exist at the time, so critic and audience reaction are hard to find. One newspaper in northern France, Le Journal de Berck (7 July 1907), wrote:
On Thursday we were treated to sensational novelties, a wonderful hunt, a dancing pig that caused great hilarity, and a multi-character scene at the dentist.
This comic strip from the short-lived American illustré magazine (15 February 1908) seems to have been inspired by the success of the Cochon act and movie: in the countryside, two friends steal a pig and use it for an act where the pig is the "only one to dance the cake walk" (an African-American dance that was taking Europe by storm in that period): their pig is a real, live one, and they make it "dance" by putting in on a heated plate. The audience finds the pig's dance and squeals hilarious, until a farmer recognizes that the pig is his and the two friends are forced to flee.
So that's it for the Cochon Danseur. There was a second movie called La Craquette, sung by the Cochon Mondain, released in August 1913 for a brief showing. It is only known because it appears in cinématographe programmes.
Mr Odéo went on with his Cochon Mondain stage act in Europe (he was in Lisbon in 1912) and elsewhere. He was back in Paris in August 1920 at the Théâtre Marigny, where he shared the stage with Maurice Chevalier. His act was named L'Homme-Cochon, the Man-Pig, but it seems to have been a "quick-change" number, where Odéo turned into a pig, but also into a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a chicken, using suits consisting in a "wicker frame stuffed with horsehair and covered with jersey cloth". In an interview given for the Petit Bleu de Paris (12 August 1920), Odéo said that he used to be a salesman but had become an artist in 1902. He had been travelling the world since, showing his "animals" as far as China, where he had found the audience "intelligent, vibrant and enthusiastic": if we believe him, it was not just the French who had become fond of the Dancing Pig. Odéo had just come back from revolutionary Russia (where he had played in Petrograd) and was again settling in Paris. Odéo was still touring France in 1924. The blog author cited above says that he was active until the 1930s.
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