In Medias Res: "I Can't Quite Visualize It; I'll Have to See it On Film"

Monday, July 22, 2013

"I Can't Quite Visualize It; I'll Have to See it On Film"

A post on Rod Dreher's blog, praising An American in Paris, gets my Monday morning started off right, by reminding me of one of the, in my opinion, greatest segments in the whole history of cinema: the "Broadway Rhythm" ballet from Singin' in the Rain. I’m not a huge fan of American in Paris, and I speak here as someone who is a bit of an obsessive when it comes to Hollywood musicals. The praise for that film is surely deserved; the choreography, costuming, and more which went into the dance numbers, particularly the concluding dream sequence set to George Gershwin’s music, is immense. It’s just that, for this viewer anyway, shoehorning all that stuff in didn’t serve the movie itself very well, and the whole thing suffers as a result. Whereas in the case of Singin’ in the Rain, you have an expertly made farce, with the stylized, beautifully danced, 15-minute “Broadway Rhythm” morality play consequently serving as an exquisite counterpoint to the whole movie. “Gotta dance!” indeed. I’ve watched that sequence a hundred times, and it never grows old. Watch it again this morning, particularly its final moments. I always imagine Gene Kelly in the editing room afterwards, going through the footage, shouting at some flunky "More Gene Kelly! More me! MORE ME!!!," all so as to better set up R.F.'s final, deadpan line.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: no mention of Cyd Charisse? More specifically, no mention of Cyd Charisse's legs? Meeeeow....

Singing in the Rain is a genius movie by itself with the singing and dancing, but it's also an important film as a 'meta-movie' IMHO: Kelly wanted to dance and move the art form of dance as much as he could, and big studio film was the platform of the day. He couldn't simply film himself on stage dancing, so he had to put some sort of plot around it. The genius part is that he clues us into this abstract construct of a "plot" by telegraphing the whole thing with the 'Singing Cavalier'. Just as Shakespeare frequently put a play within the play, Kelly put a movie within the movie, which allowed us a suspension of disbelief when somewhat abstract extended dance pieces came into view (that otherwise would have been non-sequitir). In other words, because we were taken into confidence about the artifice of their work on the 'Dancing Cavalier', we granted license to Kelly to take liberties with 'Singing in the Rain'. In that sense, the movie is actually a slight dig at the studio system under which Kelly found himself limited.; Monday, July 22, 2013
Russell Arben Fox said...: Hey, I can't mention everything, Dave! But let it be written:Cyd Charisse was Kelly's greatest female dancing partner (and her comparison's of Astaire and Kelly are actually really astute).

A thumbs up to everything you say about Singin' in the Rain. One of the reasons it is, flat out, the greatest of the Hollywood musicals is because of its "meta" construction; every dance number, indeed every song, is a winking reference to Hollywood's past, and so we get to enjoy those performances not just on their own excellent terms, but as an extension of the whole movie's farcical plot. We're never taken out of the story, because we're brought inside the gag right from the start.; Monday, July 22, 2013

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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"I Can't Quite Visualize It; I'll Have to See it On Film"

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