At home with dance's greatest generation: DVDs and books on the Ballets Russes.

Ballets Russes

Directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller. Zeitgeist Video. DVD, 118 minutes. $29.95. www.zeitgeistvideo.com.

When this dazzling documentary film opened in theaters last fall, it made history. Can anyone remember the last time a ballet movie without a reigning superstar so stirred audiences who were not hardcore dance fans? Even if you can't tell the difference between Ballets Russes and charlotte russe, this chronicle of a fabled institution that expired of natural causes 44 years ago will hold you in the grip of enchantment for two hours.

It isn't the profusion of rarely seen dance clips that alone mesmerizes. What captivates even more is the generation of dancers in that flickering footage and their contemporary reflections on lives dedicated to an artistic ideal. Some of these dancers' names are Frederic Franklin, Alicia Markova, Maria Tallchief, Raven Wilkinson, and Mia Slavenska; and, miraculously, Goldfine and Geller prod and record their memories for the camera. How they talked, and how brilliantly the directors wove their testaments into an inspiring saga!

What emerged from these interviews was an illustrated journey through the rise and fall and splintering of the Ballets Russes after the death of founder Serge Diaghilev in 1929. But what entranced audiences most were the warmth, humanity, wisdom, good humor, and sheer allure of these dancers (several of whom have died since filming began in 2000). They had personalities then.

Meeting them this way would have been satisfaction enough. But Goldfine and celler surrounded these dancers' narratives with jaw-dropping evidence of them in action. The filmed material was gathered from several sources on three continents. Australia, where the company enjoyed an extraordinary success, proved a gold mine that yielded 30 hours of celluloid. Yet the Ballets Russes probably mattered most to Americans, because it was here during World War II that the two competing offshoots of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (the Original Ballet Russe and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo) found refuge. They toured tirelessly to small towns and large, and they instilled in this country an idea of how glamorous and exciting ballet could be. We owe them.

The DVD version of the movie adds an hour of archival material omitted from the release print. The extras include six excerpts from Swan Lake, Red Poppy, Don Quixote, and Giselle, danced by Maria Tallchief, Franklin, Slavenska, Nathalie Krassovska, Alicia Alonso, and Igor Youskevitch. They're home movies shot from the wings or audience, to which music (some of it inappropriate) has been added. Yet the magic permeates every frame.

Then five of the performers tell us how they got into dance. Markova can't resist boasting of her mastery of double pirouettes at the age of 14. A sequence on collaborators includes memoirs of Balanchine, Fokine, Stravinsky, Massine, Nijinska, and Richard Rodgers. Markova recalls her utter confusion over Stravinsky's score for Le Chant du Rossignol and how Diaghilev brought in the composer to teach it to her. The American Mare Platt, ordered by Massine to choreograph Ghost Town, minces no words in trashing Rodgers' commissioned music. And Goldfine and Geller were present at the Ballets Russes reunion in New Orleans in 2000 that started this whole ball rolling. There they filmed SFB principals in the pas de trois from Nijinska's Les Biches, of which we are permitted an agonizingly brief snippet.

Still, DVD may be the ideal way to enjoy this movie. The urge to replay favorite sequences instantly is impossible to resist. Nonagenarian Franklin, with his total recall, unfailing geniality, and impish wit, is alone worth the purchase price.

The film has prompted a renewed interest in the Ballets Russes and its illustrious members. Several of them have even penned their memoirs. Two stand out.

Irina: Baller, Life and Love By Irina Baronova. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2006. 544 pages. Illustrated. $34.95.

Watching Ballets Russes, it is easy to fall in love with Baronova, the cool, elegant, handsome octogenarian with the piercing blue eyes who retired to Australia in the 1980s. And it is even easier to understand why audiences succumbed to her charms 70 years ago.

Baronova is the last survivor of the three "baby ballerinas" who were recruited by Balanchine for the Ballets Russes when they were 12 and 13. Sixty percent of the way through her book, Baronova announces that she is now 21, and you realize how filled with incident these artists' lives were.

Baronova's was suffused with high drama, too. How she and her White Russian family escaped to Romania during the Revolution with the clothes on their backs is a nail-biter. And life at the start was tough for these refugee aristocrats. Yet, the family found its way to Paris. Baronova took class with the legendary Olga Preobrajenska and the dance world opened up to her.

Baronova draws a compassionate portrait of Col. Wassily de Basil, the wily director of the Original Ballet Russe who found time to abet her teenage elopement. Although Balanchine remains a shadowy figure, we gain insight into the working methods of Massine and Fokine. Along with Baronova, we share the privations of constant transatlantic touring.

The dancer tells of a first marriage with a domineering mate, a turbulent affair with the young and hirsute Yul Brynner, and a blissfully happy second marriage to theatrical agent Cecil Tennent (actress Victoria Tennent is their oldest child), which ends in tragedy. Despite the autobiography's length and narrative zest, we thirst for more information on Baronova's work for the Royal Academy of Dance and her coaching of students in her adopted Australia. She probably still has much to tell us.

Ballet Mystique: Behind the Glamour of the Ballet Russe By George Zoritch Mountain View, California: Cynara Editions, 2000. 306 pages. Illustrated, $45. To order: www.georgezoritch.com.

The irrepressible charisma and unnatural good health radiated by George Zoritch in the Goldfine-Geller movie permeates every page of this anecdotal autobiography. The Moscow-born artist, who has packed at least a couple of lifetimes into his 89 years, waltzes us though a career that never seemed to end. Zoritch danced in several companies, performed extensively in musical theater and Hollywood movies, tried choreography, taught privately, and founded the dance program at the University of Arizona. His ebullience is disarming and the photographs are terrific; where else will you see a shot of Brigitte Bardot in her ballerina days?