Legong: Dance of the Virgins

Starring Goesti Poetoe Aloes, Njoman Nyong, Goesti Bagus Mara and Njoman Saplak.

Legong: Dance of the Virgins, filmed entirely on location in Bali in 1935, is a tragic tale of love denied. Poutou, a young girl who is a respected Legong dancer in her community falls in love with the young musician Nyoung. Her father is delighted with Poutou's choice and wants to help her to conquer Nyoung's heart. But Poutou's half sister Saplak wants Nyoungis also and when he chooses Saplak, Poutou drowns herself. Legong's real theme though is much more than melodrama: It is the delineation of Balinese culture. Henry de la Falaise captured religious rituals including frenetic dances and mystical parades, everyday dealings at the local marketplace, a cockfight (which was cut out of the British version) and, in the final scene, a mass cremation.

Small details chronicling the life of the villagers make Legong an absorbing and mesmerizing quasi-documentary.

Shot in beautiful two-color Technicolor, the film features topless Balinese men and women (in the 30s more than half of the movie was cut because of semi-nudity) in luscious surroundings.

Bonus Features

Restored picture and soundtrack by the UCLA Film & Television Archives.

A second optional track featuring a new score composed by Richard Marriott and I Made Subandi and performed by Gamelan Sekar Jaya and the Club Foot Orchestra.

Henry de la Falaise’s previously "lost" film, Kliou the Killer, shot in Indonesia. (1937. B&W version. 52 minutes.)

Complete feature film: Gods of Bali (1952. 56 minutes). Camerawork by Nikola Drakulic. Prepared under the supervision of Robert Snyder. Courtesy of Allegra Fuller Snyder.

DVD-rom article written by ethnomusicologist Katherine Hagedorn and film studies expert Peter Bloom for Gamelan Sekar Jaya.

Video interview with the composers of the new soundtrack.

DVD-rom press kit written by Milestone Film & Video.

Reviews

NEW YORK TIMES

November 30, 2004

NEW DVD’S

Balinese Dancers, Orson Welles and the Return of Spider-Man

By DAVE KEHR

‘Legong: Dance of the Virgins’

An amazing cultural artifact reclaimed by Milestone Film and Video, "Legong: Dance of the Virgins" was filmed in 1933 by the Marquis Henry de la Falaise de la Coudray, a Hollywood dilettante then on his second celebrity wife, the actress Constance Bennett, who followed Gloria Swanson in the marquis’s affections. Using his wife’s money - "Legong" is a "Bennett Production" - Falaise took a two-strip Technicolor camera and a small crew to the South Sea island of Bali, where he shot this delirious blend of sentimental fiction and ethnological fact.

Falaise was following in the footsteps of the documentarian Robert Flaherty, who invented this peculiar blend of fact and fiction with his 1922 "Nanook of the North," and F. W. Murnau, whose 1931 "Tabu" spun a masterpiece of personal filmmaking from Flaherty’s format. But Falaise brought his own sensibility to the project, a frank sensuality that embraced both the lush scenery of the exotic setting and the glowing bodies of his half-nude subjects.

The simple story - of a temple dancer, Poutou, whose passion for the handsome gamelan player Nyong is frustrated when Nyong falls in love with Poutou’s half-sister - plays on the Western audience’s fantasies of the South Seas as a kind of innocent Eden, free of sexual inhibitions and guilt. But the premise also offers plenty of opportunity to record the elaborate rituals (like the Legong - the annual dance of the temple maidens) during a pre-tourism period when they still had their integrity and purpose. The red and green tints of two-strip Technicolor prove to be surprisingly well adapted to the island setting, and the restoration, carried out by the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive, is superb.

The Milestone disc includes both the original score and a new soundtrack composed by Richard Marriott and I Made Subandi and performed by the Gamelan group Sekar Jaya and the Club Foot Orchestra. The latter could stand alone as a ravishing orchestral suite of Balinese themes. Milestone has also included a newly discovered black and white print of Falaise’s long-lost 1937 Technicolor feature, "Kilou, the Killer," shot in what is now Vietnam, as well as the more academically sober 1952 documentary "Gods of Bali," produced by Robert Snyder. Extensive notes round out what is surely one of the best produced and most revelatory DVD’s of 2004.