Although moviemakers have focused on all kinds of dancing since Thomas Edison'shand-tinted Vitascopes of music-hall dancers in the 1890s, few of them present it legibly, with respect for its continuities in space and time. Even fewer attempt to connect a dance scene with the entire movie -- to integrate the star dance performance or the ballets for the chorus with the manifest concerns or subtexts of the script.
In classic star vehicles, such as those for Bill (Bojangles) Robinson and Shirley Temple, the screenplays seem to operate in a completely different world from the dances, which function as respites from the dialogue. Six decades later, it's the dance scenes that people want to see, and programs excerpting them appear frequently. But great dance stars are rarely great choreographers. Excerpted from their feature-length contexts and anthologized, the film appearances of even a force of nature, like the flamenco genius Carmen Amaya, take on a dispiriting sameness. Efforts like Fayard Nicholas's to renew and develop the effects of his and his brother Harold's tap choreography with each new movie were rare. Despite those efforts, Hollywood treated the Nicholas Brothers as a specialty act rather than as a star team for whom vehicles were designed, and their numbers were carefully self-contained so that they could be yanked out of a film when it was distributed in the South.
Outstanding exceptions aside -- Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly are the most celebrated -- choreographers in Hollywood pictures, even in the "Golden Age of Musicals" from 1930 to 1960, couldn't command respect for dance from the industry. During the '30s, Busby Berkeley, a nondancer, enjoyed fame and freedom for his extravagant cinematic fantasies, halfway between dances and dreams, but they were not very musical, in the sense that Astaire's or Bob Fosse's dances were -- every frame relating to a story's theme and tone. Nor does much of Berkeley's most treasured work explore the gifts of the trained dancers he showcased, when he showcased them. The great kaleidoscopic numbers relied on the bodies and youthful grace, not the dance technique, of those beautiful girls.
Most real stage choreographers have had a difficult time in Hollywood. George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Twyla Tharp all saw their work diminished, or treated as optical fodder. Jack Cole and, more influentially, Bob Fosse were able to thrive by learning how to treat their own dances as central to a story rather than as accessories to it. As director-choreographer for Sweet Charity (1969), Cabaret (1972), and All That Jazz (1979), Fosse, a bankable perfectionist, called his own shots. Relying on his preternaturally sensitive ear for the coordination of sight and sound to establish visceral rhythms, he related disjunctive cuts point for point with musical scores, which lent those relationships dramatic weight. Then he went further, relating the rhythms of entire sequences to a larger, overarching, rhythmic architecture for an entire work. Every stroke of editing in a Fosse picture "means" something.
His films appeal to both the one-time viewer and the fan, as in "Bye, Bye Life," the culminating fantasy-production number in All That Jazz, during which Roy Scheider (who plays the dying protagonist, choreographer Joe Gideon) and Ben Vereen (who plays O'Connor Flood, an hypostatized version of a Las Vegas headliner) ring changes on the Everly Brothers hit while the choreographer also bids goodbye to the people and the dance influences in his life. Among the influences to which he alludes is that of George Balanchine, by way of a momentary resurrection of the iconic fan-tailed arabesque from Apollo. You needn't know this or any other of the dozen or so theatrical references to appreciate the number; still, if you do, then "Bye, Bye Life" takes on an extra dimension.
Fosse's proved a reasonably profitable compromise for a business whose products are made largely for export -- audiences of primarily one-time viewers who are looking for the gist of the story above all. According to the Web site http://www.worldwideboxoffice.com, Fosse's All That Jazz has totaled a modest $37.8-million in gross revenues internationally since its release in 1979. But to put that figure in context, it might be helpful to know that the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle Top Hat, the second-highest-grossing picture of 1935, has earned $3.2-million worldwide in the seven decades since its release, with $1.8-million of that in domestic sales. Even with adjustment for inflation, these figures are pennies when measured against the revenues of the 1997 Titanic, the highest-grossing picture in history. Titanic -- which substituted doubles for its stars in dance scenes -- has, in six years, earned $1.835-billion worldwide, with U.S. sales accounting for a mere $600.8-million. In other words, even if Astaire and Rogers were to rise from the grave and American audiences were to demand that Hollywood again make musicals that permitted the viewer's sustained concentration on a dance from beginning to end -- complete with the full-figure framing, minimum cuts, and exacting musical synchronization that Astaire required -- the demand would not be a sufficient incentive for the studios and producers to do so.
So why should the movies pay attention to the integrity with which dancing is presented, or to a filmmaker's efforts to connect it with the rest of a film's world? One answer is that if the dances in a movie have been respected, then the rest of the movie is likely to have been made with sensitivity to acting, dialogue, and design as well.
Dance is so easy to fudge in a film. Long before Titanic, Eddie Albert, for instance, did not do his own hoofing when he took on the Ray Bolger part in the 1939 film version of On Your Toes. And there are countless examples of nondancers who are asked to put over dance parts with the help of costumes, editing, lighting, and surrounding corps de ballet.
To be fair, it's not easy to showcase dancers in movies: Many can't act, or don't possess the kinds of faces that catch the light in a way a camera can appreciate. Given the paucity of true dance stars in movies today, it is heartening that the nondancers who are taking on dance roles are doing their own steps and are sufficiently proud of that to make a point of it in interviews. Richard Gere, a trumpet player, is more persuasive as the cornet player in The Cotton Club (1984) than he is as a tapper in Chicago (2002); and Gregory Hines gives the tap performances in The Cotton Club that are worth paying the ticket price to see. Still, Gere has been honest and professional in his tap preparation, and the fact that his honesty has become a marketing point for the movie says something about the moviemakers of our moment. They seem to be realizing that musicals, and the life force that dancing represents -- so disparaged during the last several decades -- provided something important that has been lost.
Over the past 10 years, with a particular intensity in the past five, it has become clear that some moviemakers are, in fact, trying to bring dancing and singing back onto the screen. One thinks not only of Rob Marshall's Chicago (based on Fosse's Broadway musical), but also Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001), Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000), Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot (2000), Nicholas Hytner's Center Stage (2000), and Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (1996). Frederick Wiseman's documentary Ballet (1995) probes the backstage temperatures of American Ballet Theatre during a season. Matthew Diamond's documentary Dancemaker (1996) investigates the Paul Taylor Dance Company during the making of a new work and a tour of India. In 2001, actor Nils Tavernier made his debut as a director with Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, a backstage documentary. Slated for a Christmas release is Robert Altman's The Company, a fictional story set in the backstage milieu of the actual Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Neve Campbell, who has some ballet training, stars as a dancer poised to become a company principal. Malcolm McDowell plays Gerald Arpino, the Joffrey's co-founder.
Many of these filmmakers have run up against the dearth of photogenic star dancers who can also sing and act. Vaudeville, may its soul rest in peace, used to be the alchemical retort for them; ballet, Broadway, and television have been unable to replace it. The solutions to this problem vary, but the most common seems to be to cast for star presence and acting and then get the actors to learn either to dance with sufficient skill in order to cosset the innocent eye into thinking them adept or -- as with Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point (1977) -- to act out the postures of dancing. In such a case, it's usually necessary to surround the stars with mobs of truly experienced dancers to provide a look of authenticity. Amid the smoke and mirrors of the numbers in Chicago, for instance, one might glimpse, in the chorus, Mary Ann Lamb, a former standout with Twyla Tharp's company, and Scott Wise, one of Broadway's most accomplished gypsies.
In contrast to these large, commercial efforts, for the past 32 years, the New York-based Dance Films Association has presented an annual Dance on Camera Festival devoted almost entirely to independent films. Since 1996, the festival has been co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and in that time the range of subjects and the geographical distribution of filmmakers have greatly expanded. This past January, an entire program was devoted to films that focused on classical ballet and postmodern dance in Africa, and another program featured Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky, the scholar Stephanie Jordan's brilliant and definitive film essay, produced by the George Balanchine Foundation, about the most intricate, productive, and long-lived collaboration between choreographer and composer in the history of theatrical dancing. Other New York venues regularly screen new dance films from abroad. The Alliance-Française, for example, has maintained an excellent film-documentary series devoted to classically trained dancers from France, some of whom -- such as the legendary Jean Babilée -- have appeared in person as well.
From time to time, New Yorkers can also see the work of dance-steeped individuals, "independents" in the strictest sense, such as the Philadelphia animator and choreographer Kathy Rose; the philosophical film essayist Daniel Conrad, based in Vancouver, who uses dancers to convey visceral elements of poems or speculations about nature; and the dance historian Marilyn Hunt, who is completing Dancing from the Heart, a documentary about traditional Pueblo culture of the southwestern United States.
A recent anthology of essays, memoirs, and historical studies, Envisioning Dance: On Film and Video (Routledge, 2002), edited by Judy Mitoma and Dale Ann Stieber, both of the University of Californa at Los Angeles, and Elizabeth Zimmer, of The Village Voice, attempts to bring together perspectives from dancers, choreographers, ethnologists, cinematographers, and archivists of the present on the great commercial dance-film artists of the past -- Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, Berkeley, and others. Set up as a college text, and including a DVD with illustrative selections, the book varies essay by essay in rigor and usefulness. Also, despite a section on the studio legends of old Hollywood, the accent is strongly on independent filmmaking rather than on contemporary big-budget features. Nor does Envisioning Dance begin to replace the landmark histories and memoirs of dance and the moving image: the great essay "Dance in Film" and The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, both by Arlene Croce; Dance in the Hollywood Musical by Jerome Delamater; Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films by John E. Mueller; and Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies by Stephen W. Silverman. Still, the very existence of a textbook that emphasizes independent dance films and video suggests the strength that dance filmmaking has developed since the early 1990s.
What about the viewers who aren't already self-selected dance fans? Is it possible to ease them into the subject without, on the one hand, insisting they drench themselves in its mystique -- as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger did in The Red Shoes (1948), or, on the other hand, relying on the sex appeal of a star to pull it off, as Randal Kleiser relied on John Travolta in Grease (1978), the highest-grossing film musical ever? As charming as Travolta was in his Elvis mode there, he was far more interesting in John Badham's 1977 Saturday Night Fever, where his dancing was an expression of a character whose story, told outside a musical context, included complexity and development. Its nondance elements gave the dance meaning. Ten years later, the experienced dance filmmaker Emile Ardolino achieved a commercial success in a similar mode with Dirty Dancing, although the actual dances, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, that Patrick Swayze performed there were less complex than Travolta's mambo-based hustle. The picture was worth seeing, though, just for the cameo appearance of Charles (Honi) Coles -- one of the most elegant rhythm tappers of the 1950s -- as a bandleader with whiskery feet.
One aspect of dance on film that only Croce has explored in any depth is the inclusion of dance scenes in nonmusical comedies and dramas. "Not all directors who have been interested in movement have been great, but few have been great who were not," she writes in "Dance in Film." "Not only do their films move; their dance scenes -- scenes of actual dance or dancelike movement -- are among the greatest ever recorded." What she doesn't say is that after World War II, most of these dance moments have occurred in films made outside the United States.
The films with these haunting dance passages are all at your local video store or library: the exultant dance of the man in the moonlight, abruptly ended by his murder, in Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth (1930); the heartbreakingly pure staging (by David Blair) of Swan Lake, with Tamara Toumanova as Odette, in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970); the flying Bharata Natyam solo, by the stunning dancer-actress who went by the name of Radha, in Jean Renoir's The River (1951); the gently braided couple dances -- their lovely complications for the arms so reminiscent of country-western dancing -- in Faces of Women (1985) by the Ivory Coast director/writer/producer Désiré Ecaré. The works of Akira Kurosawa, an aficionado of the ancient dances of Noh theater, are filled with suggestions of dance. The ceremonial dance for the ancestors in the section he called "The Peach Orchard" in his late film suite Dreams (1990) may well be the most beautiful and sorrowful tribute to vanished ideals of classic art in world cinema.
Finally, there's the remarkable dance scene in Roman Polanski's recent The Pianist. It is neither fun nor uplifting. While three street buskers play a mournful tune, a group of starving Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto trapped at an intersection are paired up at random -- cripples, the elderly, no one escapes -- and forced to hobble through freakish facsimilies of ballroom dancing. Although hardly the most brutal moment in the film in physical terms, in symbolic ones its perversity and humiliation are devastating. It is no accident that the only swastikas in the entire movie are present in this scene: Two of them dot the temples of a Nazi's helmet. This little dance of death, so matter of fact in conveying how the joy of living has been suffocated, makes Ingmar Bergman's wind-swept Totentanz at the end of The Seventh Seal look rather near to heaven in comparison.
Mindy Aloff teaches dance history and criticism at Barnard College and has written about dance for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other publications.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 49, Page B15
