History of Apnea as Entertainment Spectacle

[Blue Straggler]

No doubt many of you have seen funny old b&w footage from around the 1930s of such delights as a man eating a small meal or playing a violin underwater, effectively performing a near-static apnea entertainment. And I've seen odd little clips from the 1960s of groups having a meal and party underwater (obviously edited together from numerous takes)

But one that really sticks in my mind is a little more interesting. I've only seen it once, nearly 20 years ago, but I have used the good old Internet to verify that I didn't imagine it.

In Buster Keaton's short film The Playhouse, there is a scene in which two twin sisters (I think Virginia Fox plays both sisters, the whole film is technical marvel of split-screening, Keaton plays virtually all the characters, on screen with himself) immerse themselves in a huge glass tank in a music-hall type venue in an attempt to (and I can quote the placecards here) "break the record for staying underwater". If I remember correctly they dive in, hit the bottom and close a metal hoop clasp over their waists to stay down. Obviously lots of edits and cutaways to place-cards.
One of the twins abandons her effort and releases herself.
We get a place-card "that's 4 minutes"...then the other girl appears to struggle, she's stuck, cue comedic attempts by Buster to rescue her by emptying the tank with a teacup etc...

But what was striking was:
this was a reference, in 1921, to static apnea records being held in public - so such things must have been going on (I know about the "underwater swimming" at the Paris Olympics;
regardless of thishaving been a fictional comedy film, the "4 minutes" seems like a reasonably realistic stab at what might have been a strong record at that time.

Yet...I thought static apnea as a record discipline didn't come around until at least the late 1950s.

I think there's a whole alternative history of freediving in the cirus and cabaret circuits, that "real freedivers" seem to be happy to ignore. It's certainly tricky to find many accurate references to this sort of thing - this film is my best bit of evidence...anyone know of any decent sources to read up on this? So many circuses seem to have a "Fish Boy" or some such thing...

 

[Kars]

Interesting post Blue Straggler.

The first apnea appearance I saw on TV was this magician who chained to a metal rack had himself submerged into this big aquarium by two nice ladies in sexy glitter costumes. After 5 minutes he was taken out, without blacking out and being unchained by the ladies.

It was amazing, 5 minutes!

I don't recall his name.
Now 20 odd years later I do 5 minutes myself every week, oh and also one time for the national TV, so I guess I completed that circle

Does anybody know any more freediving performances?

Kars

 

[trux]

Well, I know there was a Russian underwater theatre some years ago. Also there are often underwater spectacles in several Las Vegas show rooms. Cirque de Soleil had an underwater show. Sometimes they use regulators though, I believe. There was a apnea performance this year in Lyon's streets, where a guy was enclosed in glas cylinder filled with water. There are plenty of music video clips turned in apnea underwater. And countless movies with freediving scenes, including many vintage ones. At the beginning, when I launched the Freediving Media Base, I added some links to such videos to the database, but soon I found there were entire websites dedicated just to that. So my collection is not really complete, I just added some of the links for reference. You can check them out at video art @ APNEA.cz (but I believe one of the website hosting the videos went off business, so I am afraid some of the links may be dead).

 

[Blue Straggler]

Kars - thanks, yes apnea has often been very popular with magicians, illusionists and escapologists. Harry Houdini had 5-minute+ breath-hold (often in very cold water, upside down, unpicking a load of padlocks on chains!) and such water cell escapes were taking place long before that too for public spectacle.

What really struck me about the Buster Keaton scene that I described, was that it really was pure static apnea, with no extra "showbiz" to it, and the way it is treated in the short film suggests that this a regular kind of sideshow i.e. it's just a casual lead-in to some Keaton comedy, rather than being any kind of centrepiece of the film.

trux - thanks for your reply and yes there's certainly lots of freediving in old films, the 1930s Tarzan films are a good example (a very impressive long "aqua ballet" in 'Tarzan and His Mate' is particularly notable) but I was really a bit more interested in the history of apnea as live circus spectacle in the 19th and early 20th century. I'm aware of the more recent Las Vegas spectacles, saw footage of one and they were on regulators with tiny pony bottles. I saw a strange documentary about 18 years ago that was a profile of the original "Archaos" circus (crazy French "punk" circus of the late 1980s, looked very much like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!), there was a short clip of their "Aqua Girl" but the narration didn't say much about her act.

It might be worth looking at the online Pathe archive, I remember a few years ago they had a few interesting underwater news pieces including a report, with a bit of a footage, of a DNF competition in the 1930s (the winner did 100 yards in what looked like a very shallow pool, wearing one of those old-fashioned heavy towelling stripy swimming costumes!)

 

[trux]

If you find any links, videos, or documents, Blue Straggler, please post them here so that I can add them to the Freediving Media Base too. Or of course, you can add them there alone too, but unfortunately people rarely add any resources there, so I'll be happy to do it myself.

 

[Blue Straggler]

trux, I will certainly do that! My home Internet connection is really weak at the moment, I need to sort it out (it's been flaky for nearly a year, my fault for not sorting it out!) but when I get it cleared up I'll see if I can dig up those Pathe links (Pathe was a British news agency which made short news films to be shown before films at the cinema, before televisions were common - they are great to watch now with the posh English voice-overs - at the end of the too-short report on that DNF he just says "A hunderd yards, well how about that then")

 

[CEngelbrecht]

I remember a technicolor Danny Kaye flick many years back, don't remember the title. It was just an old Hollywood joke circulating amongst comedians, that Danny Kaye put into a movie.
This scuba diver is at the bottom of the ocean, and suddenly Danny Kaye pops up on a breath hold. The scuba guy has a scetch pad and writes to Kaye, "I got all this expensive diving equipment on, how can you manage to get down here without anything at all?" And Kaye gets the pad and starts writing, then shows it to the camera and the diver: "Because I'm drowning. HELP!"
Laughed my tits off, I was just a kid.

 

[Kars]

Great joke Christian!

I think it would be very cool to recreate that scene!

Kars