“I am haunted by the impermanence of ballet. I find it tragic that in the century of the cinema, when newsreel film has preserved eighty years of nonentities, from the greasiest political opportunists to pop-singers, there is not one frame of the Diaghilev Ballet in action; that Nijinsky is to be seen only in five seconds of film that show an old man walking from his Vienna hotel. Even in the past thirty years a dismaying number of great ballets and great dancers have been lost to posterity.”