Hi Mia,

When I first read your post I disagreed completely, but now I don't know. Perhaps it's brilliant. I haven't decided yet.

Feuillade's films, being silent films, are with the exaggerated acting of silent films. The long movements and frolicking in your clip. While Botticelli, and classical painting in general, seem to be completely the opposite. Both are silent, but the Botticelli seems a very suggestive movement, and underscored rather than overscored. The fairy-tale air in the Boticelli painting seems to be from a move to an imagined world of mythology and the past, while for Fruillade it is more how they used to act also for films taking place in the present (as in his Vampyr, fantomas, judex series).

But then, maybe you're right. I do think you have a point that this strange movement comes from a certain lack of sound. I'm not sure how to understand it at the moment though.
In any case, the connection is stimulating for thought.

Chris, Mia, will think out loud here:

If one thinks for instance of the figure of the Mime, and the way he exaggerates in order to build a silent representation: it's almost as if he's drawing a picture of sound. Perhaps nothing is exactly lost in his silent world, it just takes a different form. Things move between the senses: sometimes accessible to one, sometimes to the other.

One thing I find amazing in the Botticelli painting is the way it shows us all the different aspects of this season, all at once. The contours are drawn, the various qualities enumerated, all in the same small space, and an almost tangible representation emerges: not unlike the way the mime builds a house around himself out of gestures.

What a splendid video. Frolic is exactly the word.
Something which makes it seem very archaic for me is the insistence on archetypes. When did this disappear? At what point in the twentieth century did young women stop weaving crowns of flowers and considering themselves the embodiment of spring itself, or of the river or the trees... as they did in the era of this film and through the many centuries of those grand Italian fountains, and of course in the Botticelli painting you quote? Surely others can say more about this but it seems to me that a whole kind of literalism was lost (compare the discussion on abstraction now).