The Musical Mode: Putting on "The Red Shoes"

Abstract

The musical has not died with the wave of nostalgic Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire tributes, with big budget catastrophes like The Wiz, with Bob Fosse, John Travolta, electronic music, and commercial rock video editing; it is the Hollywood musical, or that generic tradition defined and conventionalized in Hollywood during the golden age of the studio era, that may not be recoverable. The musical itself has as many possibilities now as it did at the onset of those days, although the current reformation of technique and message awaits the energy brought to the older form by artists of the stature of Berkeley, Minnelli, Astaire, Kelly, and Garland. It is important to recognize that the musical is primarily a mode of cinematic art that cannot expend itself, and only secondarily a cinematic genre which can. What I refer to here as mode has been and could be designated as genre, while what I classify as genre could be termed sub-genre. The distinctions will be better expressed with discrete terms, however, because the redundancy implies that the two systems operate according to the same principles, sub-genre as a smaller, well-defined part of genre. The term genre itself has been applied variously in literary and film scholarship to distinguish increasingly larger categories of performance types, from story form to stylistic tradition. But cinematic genre and mode are not necessarily related in this concentric manner, because they consider separate aspects of filmic typicality: genre specifies content and mode specifies method. Different modes can explore the same genre, and different genres can be activated by the same mode. So, should we consider musical and horror as two modes and Western and popular sport film (e.g., baseball and boxing dramas) as two genres, we have in the intersection of system and narrative four possible kinds of film (i.e., musical Western, musical sport film, horror Western, horror sport film), several of which have been explored to a limited degree.