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This film clip is a mystery (at the moment anyway). It somewhat resembles a maxixe, but it has samba-like steps throughout. The woman's attire places it around 1914, with the split skirt and headband with a feather. We know that the Brazilian L. Duque (the stage name of Antonio Lopes Amorim Diniz) brought a maxixe to Paris around 1912, but the many descriptions of his maxixe don't quite fit this film clip. Then he returned to his native Brazil around 1922 and brought back a variation of the maxixe called samba, premiering it at his Montmartre club Shéhérazade in the winter of 1922-23. This film clip has a basic step quite similar to Duque's 1923 samba, and performs his cross-steps (later called bota foga) exactly. But this film clip doesn't look like it's from 1923. Could the samba have existed ten years earlier, and this is a couple dancing it? The film is silent, of course, so I added an original recording of the maxixe Amapa, which is exactly the same tempo as their dance. When Duque premiered the samba in Paris, with the Afro-Brazilian orchestra Les Batutas (Os Oito Batutas), he noted that the music for samba was the same as for the maxixe. If anyone knows the source of this clip, please let me know. Either way, it's not Argentine tango. It has a repeating polka-like basic step, with each step repeated 4, 8 or 16 times, like the samba, and is slightly bouncy, like early samba. See more on the maxixe and samba here: This film clip is in the public domain. (All films that were released before 1923 are now in the public domain in the United States.)
