Berkeley - Stage and Screen

So - building on my last post, where do Berkeley's films, particularly the Warner Brother's films, fit in that schema? How does his choreography relate to the rest of these films? And - what does his choreography, and its relationship to the stage, say about film itself? For that is what these scenes seem to me to be about....

On one level, these films (42nd Street, Golddiggers 33 and Footlight Parade) are all backstage musicals - more than that - they are all strictly performance based. That is, all the music in these films is presented as if it were being performed, for an audience, even if just an audience of one. At the same time, though, the big production numbers completely abandon the stage - the "real" space of the performance. They do this without establishing any sort of fantastic space, however - the films don't present these numbers as anything other than literal stage performances. (And in fact, Berkeley occasionally seems to be deliberately reestablishing the stage as the space for these performances, often by detailing the mechanics of the dances [that will be the subject of yet another post! still to come!]... The exception, though, is Golddiggers of 1935 - which does introduce framing devices into the big production numbers, as we will see below.)

Berkeley's productions get more and more extravagant with each film - and often within each individual film. This is most obvious in 42nd Street, I think. The first number ("Shuffle off to Buffalo") is quite spectacular, with its chorus girls and sleeper cars, but perfectly believable on a stage - Berkeley even keeps the camera in a position to represent the audience, to some extent. The next big number, "Young and Healthy," still seems possible to mount on a stage, but the camera has abandoned the audience and headed for the flies - and the dance itself, with its spinning girls (and wheels inside of wheels) forming patterns only discernable from above - would be utterly pointless on a stage. The choreography here is aimed exclusively at the camera, even if the staging is sort of possible within the "real" space. This kind of choreography is, of course, already something of a Berkeley trademark - the overhead camera, the girls making patterns on the floor.... Usually, though - in the Cantor films I've seen, for example - these scenes are part of the first type of musical - they are not meant as performances as such. In 42nd Street, they are performances - for an audience that couldn't possibly see them. And in the third big number, "42nd Street" itself, the stage space is completely exploded - oh, the dance may start on a stage, but the camera goes diving into the set, and the editing, sets, camera work, choreography, everything is used in a purely cinematic way - creating a number that could exist only on film. It uses space cinematically - in ways that seem deliberately to negate the stage.

In the subsequent films (including, with some variation, Golddiggers 35), this obliteration of the stage continues. Golddiggers of 33 starts, like 42nd Street, on the stage ("We’re in the Money" is completely stagebound), but that's all - the rest of the film takes full advantage of the camera - changing sets on the fly, having the dancers go through multiple costume changes, using editing tricks, and of course making art out of the camera movements and angles and lighting. The usual array of Berkeley devices can be seen - cameras going between the dancer's legs, the overhead shots, the live action animation (dancers forming patterns and pictures), abstract use of light and dark, shapes, tricks with depth and angles of perception, his customary practice of superimposing things - dancers, objects, etc. - on top of one another (the lines of dancers peeling off, revealing another dancer where the first had been. This is often interpreted politically (and another subsequent post will discuss politics, in relation to Mark Roth's essay on the New Deal and Warner Brothers musicals) - as a way of erasing the individuality of the dancers. There's something to that, though I don't know quite what - what's clearer, I think, is the abstraction of these devices. They take on a pure graphic quality - the dancers' faces or bodies replace each other on the screen, creating a kind of flicker - creating constant movement, yet without changing the image. (There might be some who read another metaphor for the cinema here. I will not dispute that interpretation - there doesn't seem to be much of anything in Berkeley's work that can't be read as a figure of cinema.) The graphic quality of Berkeley's work is always very powerful - all the pictures, shapes and such his dancers created - all the lines and circles and curves and patterns of light and dark they made. In dances like "Shadow Waltz", when the lights go out except for the electric violins the dancers are carrying - everything dissappears except the play of light and dark, the streaks of neon violins, arcing around the screen like, well, frames in a strip of film...

Now - in Footlight Parade there is no attempt to even pretend the big numbers are possible on a stage. They are short films - unabashedly. "Honeymoon Hotel" is set in a hotel, with multiple sets, elaborate camera movements, multiple camera angles, editing, and more; "By a Waterfall" - I mean - really*: sure, Dick and Ruby start out on a set that might, sort of, be doable on a stage (but on a stage shared by a movie screen? Though if you say, in front of a movie screen - so that Ruby Keeler leaves Dick Powell and goes into the movie - well - yeah... and symbolically, that's what all of these dances are doing, when you get down to it.) And "Shanghai Lil" looks like a movie set - it is staged like a movie - the sets change, the angles change, the thing is edited - everybody changes costumes half way through... it is pure cinema, without any pretense at anything else. It is as if Berkeley is seeing how far he can take this idea.

The answer is probably given in Golddiggers 1935 - though there are a couple differences in this film. One (stepping back a bit) is that there are musical numbers of the first type - Dick Powell offers up a couple songs out of the blue in this one. And one number - the opening dance by the hotel workers - is something - I don't know where it fits. Everyday life turned into a dance - it turns up in films often enough (like the dancing peasants in Beat Takeshi's Zatoichi, of all places), but it's hard to fit into my scheme, andI'm not sure it's common enough to justify adding a category of musical number. It's a variation on #1....

But Berkeley (who directed this film) also treats the big numbers differently. Specifically, he uses clear framing devices. For "The Words are in my Heart", we start with Dick Powell crooning to Gloria Stuart in a garden. The camera pulls back, and there is a dissolve to a shot of the garden as a model; the camera moves to show the model on top of a piano, with four women reprising the song; the camera then dives into the piano and comes out on a spectacular stage with an army of women in white playing white grand pianos - which start dancing with them, forming typical Berkeley patterns. When it ends - the camera dives back into one of these pianos, coming out to the four women and one piano - then it dives back into the garden model and comes out to reveal Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart again. There is nothing like that in the '33 films - Berkeley's numbers in those films always start by showing a dance performed on stage - and just shifts to the cinematic production number without any transitions of frames.

"Lullaby on Broadway" also has a framing device - it begins with a woman (Winifred Shaw) singing -we only see her face, small and white in a sea of black - the camera comes in closer and closer until she is in closeup as she ends the lyric; the camera spins, so her face is upside down, and there is a dissolve to an map of New York City in place of her face (more graphic matching, if you're looking for that) - the camera then dives into this map and we get the full number. I must drop the pose of studied neutrality here to agree with the critics, and Berkeley himself - this is the peak of Berkeley’s career: this is his best work. "Lullaby on Broadway" is a city symphony - it has all the elements - the dawn to dawn structure, the attempts to show all aspects of the city - the pacing, the musical style. It is also explicitly cinematic - the framing devices ensure that, as do the sets, the story line, the whole structure of the piece. There is a fairly explicit sense of leaving the stage behind and dreaming about the city. It is, thus, the closest of all of Berkeley's numbers (that I have seen) to the third type of musical number - the fantasy sequence. This is true even though it contains one of the best sustained “real dancing” numbers in Berkeley’s career, the tap dance in the nightclub. It's notable that even here, the dancers are subordinating to the camera. Even at the beginning, the two dancers, descending a staircase like Fred and Ginger, are subordinated to the set, the staging, the camera. The camera pulls back as they dance down a huge winding staircase, and they are swallowed by the set, and - more importantly - the full design is revealed: a huge multilevel stage, stairs in the background, and platforms to the left (with a group of revelers - or the orchestra - my memory fails me), and right - where Dick Powell and the girl sit, alone, high above the floor, looking down on the dancers. Then, of course, a veritable army of dancers come out and do an extravagant tap dance - and the camera goes giddy with excitement, and starts shooting from everywhere - even through the floorboards. (And that has to be one of the high points of American cinema.)

When it's done - the camera returns to the map of New York, which dissolves to the singer's face, then pulls away, leaving her, again, a receding white face in a dark field....

And that's a good place to leave it, for tonight. Coming up next - something about the "machinery" of Berkeley's dances, and a postscript on politics and meaning.

*For those looking for a description: Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are lounging on a riverbank, "By a Waterfall" - they croon the song... then Dick takes him a little sleep, and Ruby sneaks off for a swim - plunging into a series of ever larger pools, full of more and more bathing beauties, who end up enacting a number of common Berkeleyisms - the camera goes between their legs while they're swimming, they form a giant zipper, which someone dives into and unzips, then zips back up - etc. You sit back and enjoy the ride along about here somewhere, wondering what he could do to top it....