FILM FEST UNEARTHS BURIED DANCE TREASURE.

WHILE IT was not a packed theater, a respectable crowd of movie aficionados, people with long memories and a contingent from the local French community gathered at San Francisco's Kabuki movie theater April 22. The occasion was Ballerina, Jean Benoit-Levy's 1937 film, originally titled La Mort du Cygne. From the excited pre- and post-performance buzz ("I never thought I was ever going to see this film again," said one viewer), quite a few viewers had fondly remembered the film from a Cinematheque showing in New York in the `60s, after which the film inexplicably disappeared.

Ballerina, an award-winning black-and-white French picture with English subtitles and dance sequences choreographed by Paris Opera Ballet director Serge Lifar, takes place backstage at the Paris Opera House. It features Yvette Chauvire, prima ballerina at what was then called the National Opera of Paris; 12-year-old Janine Charrat, who became a prima ballerina a few years later at the same institution; and Yugoslav dancer Mia Slavenska, eventually a star of Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. This tale about a young dancer's misguided love for an older dancer trains its soft-focused eye on the working life of dancers and those surrounding them, unsentimentally but with a great deal of affection and humor. Its theme of an all-consuming passion for one's profession--here dance--is a subject which Benoit-Levy was to pursue in many of his later industrial films, which he produced during his war-era American tenure.

The 1948 MGM film The Unfinished Dance, featuring Cyd Charisse and Margaret O'Brien, was based on Ballerina. The story's peculiar mix of innocence, naivete and evil at one time had tempted Alfred Hitchcock to create his own version, but he couldn't obtain the rights.

So what had happened to Ballerina? Sallie Blumenthal, a founder of the New York Film Festival, had looked for it for years, unable to locate it anywhere. Patrick Bensard, director of the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris, had found a version in Paris, but couldn't get permission to show it, when a chance encounter with a friend in New York led him to contact someone at the film restoration project at Warner Brothers, where Ballerina had been buried for years. Whether the film will tour other film festivals or be made available to the public on video remains to be decided.