Many of the makers of early-twentieth-century dance distrusted film; they thought that it made their art look toylike, foolish. As a result, there is no footage, for example, of Vaslav Nijinsky, who may have been the greatest dancer of the century. The fact that his career was so short—he went mad at twenty-nine—makes this void more painful. Couldn’t we have had even a glimpse?

Strange to say, we were recently offered one. Last July, a YouTube user posted what he called a film fragment of Nijinsky in his 1912 ballet “The Afternoon of a Faun.” Since then, the same source has added three more clips of the Russian dancer in “Faun,” plus one each of him in “The Spectre of the Rose,” “Scheherazade,” “The Blue God,” and “Les Orientales.” The eight segments add up to about three minutes.

I would swear that there was a post on BT long ago when this "footage" first popped out on Youtube. If anything, I suspect a carefully work of creating this glimpses by putting together a sequencial set of Nijinsky's pics.