Brief: You should refer in your essay to a range of films but you should pay particularly close attention to TWO course films and discuss them in more detail, including analysis of at least one sequence. The primary film discussed can be chosen from either the weekly screenings or the contextual screenings listed on Talis.
1. Kelly Kessler argues that, if the classical Hollywood musical ‘uses dance to express uncontainable joy and emotion and illustrate romantic possibility, the later choreography of Bob Fosse further reinforces a lack of emotion and social estrangement’ (Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical, 2010:123).
• Drawing on Kessler, compare a Bob Fosse musical with a studio-era antecedent.
2. Jane Feuer suggests that ‘the teen musicals of the 1980s represent a ‘‘reconstruction’’ in that they are not parodic or deconstructive of the conventions of the classical musical. Rather, they introduce new conventions’ (1993: 130).
• Drawing on Feuer, discuss how and why TWO teen dance films (1980s or hip-hop) engage with AND modify the classical musical’s conventions.
3. Richard Dyer argues that ‘Dancing is by definition about bodies in spaces, about how bodies relate to other bodies, how they move through space, how they make use of or submit to the environments around them. Less obviously, singing too is about space; singing carries into space in a different way from speech and different kinds of singing, from crooning to belting, impose themselves different on the world around’. (‘The Colour of Entertainment’ in Only Entertainment (2002:41))
• Drawing on Dyer, analyse TWO musicals engagement with space and place.
List of available films:
Meet Me in St Louis (MGM, Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Swing Time (RKO, Mark Stevens, 1936)
Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli, 1943)
The Pirate (MGM, Vincente Minnelli, 1948)
All That Jazz (Columbia/20th Century Fox, Bob Fosse, 1979)
Flashdance (Paramount, Adrian Lynn, 1983)
Singin’ in the Rain (MGM, Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen, 1952)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Brothers, Mervyn LeRoy /Busby Berkeley 1933)
Top Hat (RKO, Mark Sandrich, 1935)
The Bandwagon (MGM, Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
Carmen Jones (20th Century Fox, Otto Preminger, 1954)
West Side Story (UA, Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise, 1961)
Cabaret (ABC Pictures/Allied Artists, Bob Fosse, 1972)
Dirty Dancing (Vestron Pictures, Emile Ardolino, 1987)
Step Up (Touchstone/Summit, Anne Fletcher, 2006)
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