Living history: recalling the Ballets Russes.

This fall's most gripping dance experience may be no away than your neighborhood movie theater-assuming yours is showing Russes, the extraordinary documentary about the dance company that wouldn't die. Five years in the making, spiced with rare encounters with ballet legends and even rarer footage of those legends in action, the film goes into national release this month, after a round of festival showings at Sundance and in Australia.

If the saga of the Ballets Russes is of epic proportions, so is the raw material that makes up the movie. San Francisco-based, Emmy-winning documentarians Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller collected 30 hours of film clips and 135 hours of taped interviews before editing the cream down to two hours. That's not a lot when you consider that the story really begins in the second decade of the 20th century with Sergei Diaghilev's formation of the Ballets Russes. It continues through the death of the Russian impresario in 1929, when Col. Wassily de Basil took over the company's direction.

What most Americans knew as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was formed in 1938, when dancer-choreographer Leonide Massine broke away from de Basil, who called his troupe The Original Ballet Russe. The company started by Massine and run later by Sergei Denham was trapped in North America during World War II. So, it toured this continent exhaustively and did not expire until 1962. But those endless treks brought ballet to areas of this country that no other company had ever visited. Thus it was that the Ballet Russe inspired generations of youngsters to enter a magical world. When, in the movie, Oklahoma-born ballerina Maria Tallchief says that, without the Ballet Russe, she never would have taken up dancing, she speaks for an entire generation of ballerinas.

"As Frederic Franklin notes in the film," says Goldfine, "'the Ballet Russe was in the covered wagons of ballet.'" Flash forward to 2000 and a reunion of Ballets Russes dancers in New Orleans. Invited by one of the organizers, Goldfine and Geller were intrigued, although their dance experience had been limited to their first film, Isadora Duncan: Movement from the Soul.

"Dan and I had just finished our third documentary in a row with young people as subjects," said Goldfine. "We had been mulling over a film that had a historical angle, returning to the style we'd employed with Duncan. We'd been talking, too, about searching for subjects at the opposite end of the age spectrum. Ballets Russes seemed to encompass both things--a rich tapestry of archival materials and subjects in their 70s, 80s, and 90s."

The pair had met octogenarian Franklin a few months before the reunion. His association with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo stretched back to the 1930s. Then, they interviewed African American dancer Raven Wilkinson, who was forced to quit the company when sponsors in the South refused to let her perform.

"As soon as we met them," says Geller, "we knew we had the beginning of a great tale." Franklin, who sat for 30 hours of interviews, proved an indispensable collaborator. It was he who smoothed the way for an interview (one of the last) with the notoriously reticent ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, then in her late 80s (see "Transitions," March 2005).

When Goldfine and Geller first contemplated the project, they had no idea that the Ballets Russes had generated a huge celluloid legacy. Enter Chicago-based critic (and DANCE MAGAZINE senior advising editor) Ann Barzel, whose incomparable collection of films was made available through the Newberry Library. Help came, too, from the New York Public Library and Jacob's Pillow. Then, Goldfine and Geller found an immense cache of film in Australia, a continent that was virtually introduced to the art form by the Ballet Russe.

It's no surprise that the movie has found favor with ballet aficionados. But why, you wonder, has it drawn such enthusiastic responses from beyond the core dance audience?

Because, says Goldfine, "Ballets Russes is about much more than the history of ballet. It's about the human spirit. It's about a group of funny, warm, smart, delightful people who happened to be some of the 20th century's greatest artists. It's about the life well lived."