Costumed Dancer

Directed by Nick Doob

As a senior at Yale College in 1968, Doob was invited to participate in the Scholars of the House Program, a senior honors program that required students to create, in lieu of regular classes, “a finished essay or project which must justify by its scope and quality the freedom which has been granted.” Rather than pursue a more traditional written work, Doob initially chose to make a film, an unorthodox approach that had not been previously attempted. In the end, Doob chose to make two films to fulfill the requirement, beginning with COSTUMED DANCER. The film is a progression of images of a dancer, shot and printed on high contrast stock, and stacked in the printer in a number of layers so as to create multiple images of the dancer, moving from single image to multiple image in a kind of phasing. It is cut to music composed by Doob’s friend David Sewall, who was the subject of one of Doob’s later films, LONDON SONGS (1972). (Yale Film Archive)