Vincente Minnelli Research Articles

An Interview with Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert, curators of Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962 (Grey Art Gallery, 2024)—Part Two

The exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962, running between March and July 2024, examines the art of US expats in Paris following World War II. The following is the second of a two-part interview with the show’s curators, Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert. In this second part, the curators discuss the title of their show, which constitutes a reference to Vincente Minnelli’s famous film An American in Paris (1951, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron). Their choice to pluralize “American” reveals much about their conceptual approach. They also discuss the inter-influence but also tensions between French and US artists of the post-war period. They evoke the idea of dialogue between New York and Paris, a notion that has been eclipsed by assumptions about the ascendancy of the New York art scene over the Parisian counterpart in the postwar period (for example, Guilbaut 1983). The curators turn us towards the idea of other forms of globalism, and other forms of modernism, that do not center the New York school. The interview concludes with a brief connection of this exhibit to the “post-global” moment in curatorial world (O’Neill 2019) and the wider society.

Vincente Minnelli’s Melodrama Some Came Running and the Crossing of Borders

Vincente Minnelli’s Melodrama Some Came Running and the Crossing of Borders

The Black Film Ambassador

In celebration of the Pacific Film Archive at 50, Josslyn Luckett, a former student of PFA programmer and UCBerkeley professor Albert Johnson reflects on the global reach of his career and legacy. One of the founding “co-conspirators” of Film Quarterly, Johnson presented African, Asian, and Latin American cinema at the PFA for three decades, while programming U.S. directors from Vincente Minnelli to Melvin Van Peebles across the globe. While Johnson became known for his iconic “Craft of Cinema” profile series at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), this article highlights under-acknowledged aspects of his film curation and writing, including his early championing of many of the independent Black directors known now as the L.A. Rebellion.

Film Chronicle dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: Stranger on the Third Floor by dir. by Boris Ingster, and: Spellbound dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, and: The Big Lebowski dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen, and: An American in Paris dir. by Vincente Minnelli, and: The Kid dir. by Charlie Chaplin, and: Le Grand Amour dir. by Pierre Étaix, and: Wild Strawberries

Film Chronicle dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: Stranger on the Third Floor by dir. by Boris Ingster, and: Spellbound dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, and: The Big Lebowski dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen, and: An American in Paris dir. by Vincente Minnelli, and: The Kid dir. by Charlie Chaplin, and: Le Grand Amour dir. by Pierre Étaix, and: Wild Strawberries

When Movies Get Sick

Stevens offers insights about the impact of COVID-19 on film industry It has suddenly unfastened the values that traditionally attach to proximity, particularly regarding human bodies, as vocabulary focusing on the distance between them- social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine- become part of our quotidian language Distance has become the sign of intimacy- of respect, care, concern, shared understanding of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life Within discussions of film aesthetics, cinephiles tout the value of cinema for inviting audiences to attend to bodies in space, referring to the composition recorded by the camera and whose projection is offered up for our pleasure

The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky

Reviewed by: The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky Christopher D. Stone Adam R. Ochonicky , The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $32.00 (paper). Released the same year that five Best Picture nominees, including the winner, took place in the cinematic Midwest, Adam R. Ochonicky’s The American Midwest in Film and Literature examines popular representations of America’s heartland via a carefully curated array of cultural texts. His collection hinges mostly on film and skews heavily to the last three decades. Ochonicky divides his study into nine chapters, each one focusing typically on three text or film examples. Although the book’s subtitle bestows equal weight to “violence” and “nostalgia,” the latter earns top billing in practice. Indeed, if violence stalks half the study, nostalgia pervades all but one chapter. Ochonicky defines nostalgia as “a general preoccupation with idealized imagery of the past and a related desire to reenact or somehow to relive that past which has been lost or potentially is entirely fabricated” (9). He augments this definition by identifying three modes of nostalgia. Nostalgic spatiality is connected to a physical space; nostalgic violence stems from the desire to manage the behavior or appearance of others; and nostalgic atonement tries to redress the present’s debt to the past. Of the three, nostalgic spatiality looms the largest. It certainly infuses the first chapter, which tackles the writings of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900), and Vincente Minnelli’s film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). While lining up the Technicolor Judy Garland musical alongside turn-of-the-century texts is a bit awkward, especially since Ochonicky slots all other period pieces by release date, his discussion of Turner’s idealized nostalgia establishes a series of ideas that he profitably revisits throughout the book. The second chapter jumps ahead to the Great Depression and World War II, engaging Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s sociological study Middletown (1929), Preston Sturges’s movie The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek [End Page 189] (1944), and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940). Drawing on James R. Shortridge—one of the book’s major influences, along with Victoria E. Johnson—Ochonicky casts the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as an era in which the Midwest’s popular stock fell. This occurred due partly to the influence of “revolt from the village” writers. Enjoining and advancing that trend, the latter two titles assail their respective midwestern settings by satirizing the pious pretentions of small-town America and castigating the cramped, infuriating, racist conditions of Chicago. According to chapter 3, the region’s image did not improve in the 1970s. Here Ochonicky employs three films—Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) to reflect on nostalgic violence. Whether via an obsessively memorializing, James Dean-channeling killer who longs to conform (Badlands), or expatriate Germans failing to restart their lives in Wisconsin (Stroszek), or a killing machine who ritualistically reenacts the slaying of his sister in a bid to recreate the Long Fifties ( Halloween), these films feature vacuous White males whose violence obscures their vacancy. Whereas the first half of Ochonicky’s book races through eight decades of cultural representations, the final three chapters linger on twelve years. The first of these chapters uses three films—Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) to analyze masculine violence. While Boys Don’t Cry fits snugly within the rubric of nostalgic violence, Ochonicky advances different themes with the other two movies. For example, he posits Gran Torino as a throwback to Frederick Jackson Turner. Here the protagonist is a rugged individualist operating within a new borderland betwixt “civilization” and “savagery” who saves a Hmong family by instructing them on how to be White and masculine. The film equates Whiteness and masculinity with assertiveness, productiveness, and being comfortable with racial slurs. If Gran Torino exhibits apprehension about changing demographics, the films of chapter five, Alexander Payne’s About...

Three-Quarter Time in Early Film Musicals

The waltz, mainly associated with Vienna and the operetta, was outdated when film musicals came into being, which utilized more modern dances. Nevertheless, the waltz appeared in this new media, although with other purposes-nostalgia being among them. The paper examines three Walzerlieder: Cole Porter’s song “Wunderbar” from Kiss Me, Kate, in which the protagonists remember a previous Broadway show; in Lloyd Bacon’s film musical Wonder Bar, an extended Valse amoureuse, which illuminates eroticism in a night club; and, in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, Ira and George Gershwin’s song “By Strauss”-a hommage to the waltz, owned by the older generation, as contrasted to youth drawn to more modern trots and tunes, as found in “I Got Rhythm.”

When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden (review)

Reviewed by: When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden Bernard F. Dick Ethan Mordden. When Broadway Went to Hollywood. New York. Oxford UP. 2016. 257 pp. Ethan Mordden, who has chronicled the development of the Broadway musical in a series of definitive studies that spanned the 1920s through the 1950s, has now turned his attention to Broadway songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who enriched the Hollywood musical with their art. Anyone familiar with Mordden's work such as Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (Oxford, 1999) knows he has the ability to describe the shows of an era that he did not experience personally but through methodical research at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and original cast recordings can write about them so authoritatively that it seemed he attended the opening nights. He had an easier time with When Broadway Went to Hollywood, having seen the films he discusses. Still, he writes with such immediacy, distilling the world of the film in a few paragraphs, that one does not seek a detailed analysis. That scholar can provide. Mordden is a scholar-critic. Although his works are not heavily documented, his research is so deeply embedded in the text that one does not miss the scholarly apparatus. There are more ways for an author to prove that he or she is knowledgeable without adding on fifty pages of small-print footnotes. The question that When Broadway Went to Hollywood poses is whether or not songwriters from the musical stage brought something unique to the movie musical that it otherwise would have lacked. One has only to look at the musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made at RKO in the 1930s. Astaire and Rogers may have been the greatest dance team in film, but Top Hat (1935) would have been just another "boy meets girl" musical without Irving Berlin's songs, particularly "Cheek to Cheek." The same would be true of Follow the Fleet (1936) without Berlin's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" and Carefree (1938) without his "Change Partners and Dance." Think of Swing Time (1936) without Jerome Kern's "A Fine Romance" and "The Way You Look Tonight" or Shall We Dance (1937) without George Gershwin's "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Compare the scores of their RKO movies to their reunion film, The Barkleys of Broadway (MGM, 1949). Only one number stands out, Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away from Me," which Astaire sang to Rogers a decade earlier in Shall We Dance, Stage musicals either came to the screen more or less intact (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, My Fair Lady) or radically altered. If the studio felt that some of the songs were too risqué ("But in the Morning, No" in Du Barry Was a Lady [1943]) somber ("Lonely Town" in On the Town [1949]), or beyond the vocal ability of the performers ("I've Never Been in Love Before" in Guys and Dolls [1955]), they were dropped. In The Gay Divorcee (1934), the movie version of Cole Porter's provocatively entitled The Gay Divorce (1932), all of the songs were discarded except "Night and Day." But that was Hollywood, which wanted Broadway composers and lyricists but often did not know what to do with them. Much of Kurt Weill's score for One Touch of Venus (Universal-International, 1948) was scrapped, but at least "Speak Low" survived, with Ava Gardner lip synching to Eileen Wilson's vocal. If the reader is new to Mordden, be advised that he can raise an eyebrow. For example, he calls The Pirate (MGM, 1948) "the first gay movie musical" (134). True, the composer, Cole Porter, and the director, Vincente Minnelli, were gay, but Mordden goes further and implies that Gene [End Page 72] Kelley's biceps rings are gay accessories. The book jacket notes that Mordden is the author of "five collections of short stories chronicling gay life in New York City." Presumably, he knows whereof he speaks. Anyone new to the movie...

REFLECTIONS OF THE FRENCH ART BETWEEN THE MID-19TH AND THE EARLY 20TH CENTURIES IN VINCENTE MINNELLI'S FILMS

This thesis aims at examining and putting forward some already familiar, as well as the newly proposed reflections, i.e. influences of the French art produced between the mid19th and early 20th centuries found in three films directed by Vincente Minnelli, including An American in Paris (1951), Lust for Life (1956), and Gigi (1958). Following a thorough elaboration on particular biographical details that might have been the reason for Minnelli’s affection for art, and the development of his style, the thesis heads towards the overview of the production of all three films, and more importantly towards their analysis seeking art references that shaped the visual component of each one of them, while simultaneously trying to discover possible reasons for their appearance.

Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans (review)

Reviewed by: Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans Chad Trevitte Victoria Evans, Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. £75.00. 208 pages. In the interviews Douglas Sirk granted at the end of his career, his early experience as a painter and theatrical director in Weimar Germany allowed him to augment his new reputation as a cinematic artist as well as a progressive social critic. While later studies have challenged any consistent view of him as a subversive auteur, many of the best have continued to combine aesthetic, historical, and political approaches in order to reassess his films within a fuller context. A recent book by Victoria Evans, which largely explores how Sirk’s melodramas are informed by key trends in modernist painting and architecture, offers a valuable contribution to Sirk scholarship by establishing its own links between the visual design of his films and their broader social and political dimensions. The book is organized in three parts, each containing two chapters. The first two chapters evaluate Sirk’s cinematography with reference to painting, with the opening chapter offering an alternative to ironic, Brechtian readings of the director’s signature use of internal framing. Here Evans first reviews Michael Fried’s distinction between “absorptive” and “theatrical” modes of pictorial representation, noting how the former parallels the customary view of melodrama as fostering an unreflective, immersive sort of audience identification, whereas the latter parallels the more distanced critical reflection associated with Brecht’s “alienation effect.” Against this backdrop, Evans then argues that a third mode drawn from Austrian art historian [End Page 61] Alois Riegl—“attentiveness”—overcomes Fried’s dichotomy by allowing a more balanced, dynamic reciprocity between these impulses in the viewer. For Evans, it is this third mode that does fuller justice to the nuanced effects of Sirk’s compositions, and her sustained analysis of the homecoming scene in All I Desire offers one of the finest examples of these effects. In the second chapter Evans turns to the influence of expressionist painting in Sirk’s color design with, among other things, a rather intriguing comparison between Wassily Kandinsky’s color theories and the director’s Technicolor palette in Magnificent Obsession. While Sirk did not name Kandinsky among his artistic influences, the painter’s association of blue with spiritual transformation and white with spiritual rebirth emerges in pivotal moments of Sirk’s film, and Kandinsky’s theosophical background is shown to have its own counterpart in the numinous transcendentalism of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel. Evans explores these affinities within a broader discussion of how Sirk’s expressive color design responds to contemporaneous debates about modern art in the United States, essentially providing a syncretic combination of European high culture and American mass culture that can also be seen in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris. The next two chapters more strongly emphasize social and political themes. Chapter Three, “The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture,” draws on Ben Singer’s analysis of cultural anxieties towards technology in post-WWI melodrama, with The Tarnished Angels serving as the fullest reflection of this theme in Sirk. While Sirk initially struggled to understand the motives of Robert Stack’s self-destructive stunt pilot in the studio script, Evans argues that the director would have found a familiar analog in Ernst Jünger’s cult of the mechanized modern warrior—a proto-fascist vision of perpetually mobilized, technologically advanced masculinity that arose in reaction against the decadence of Weimar culture. Seen in this light, the film steers away from the Faulkner novel’s tragic romanticism, offering in its place a more grounded, humane rebuke of Stack’s neurotic addiction to the euphoria he once felt as a World War I fighter pilot. In the following chapter, Evans offers a comparison of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Imitation of Life with Sirk’s 1959 remake, with particular attention to how the racial divide is reflected in their settings. The key difference explored here is Sirk’s distinctive counterpoint between urban and suburban housing, which Evans situates within the social history of post-New Deal government and commercial policies...

Love Me Tonight (1932) and the Development of the Integrated Film Musical

The 1932 film Love Me Tonight has been hailed for its influence on the development of the Hollywood musical genre, and is frequently cited as one of the first truly integrated musicals for the screen.1 Directed by Rouben Mamoulian with music by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, the film was a definitive aesthetic step away from the backstage musical of the early talkies, using songs to help tell the story instead of maintaining a separation between narrative and the spectacle of musical performance. Mamoulian claimed that in the film, “dialogue, song, and music were integrated into an organic unity.”2 And Rodgers similarly recounted that the creative team aimed for “dialogue, song and scoring [to] all be integrated as closely as possible so that the final product would have a unity of style and design.”3 Writers on the film musical have propagated this view, leaving the creative team’s claim to integration relatively unquestioned. Mark Grant, for instance, writes that Love Me Tonight was “arguably the first completely integrated musical comedy on stage or screen,” thanks to Mamoulian’s “holistically interweaving music, rhythm, blocking, and the ‘beats’ of the scene … to create a sculpture-in-motion that was not merely superficially exciting but expressive of the psychological subtext.”4 Similarly, Joseph Horowitz claims that “narrative structure and musical structure … prove one and the same.”5 Indeed, many of the filmic techniques in Love Me Tonight did become standard for Hollywood musicals of the next decades. Vincente Minnelli and Kurt Weill both subsequently called Love Me Tonight “the perfect film musical.”6

Judy Garland and MGM’s Nostalgic Midwestern Home

Judy Garland and MGM’s Nostalgic Midwestern Home Patricia Oman Judy Garland starred in more than twenty-five films for MGM between 1935 and 1950, including a whole slew of “backyard” musicals with fellow singer/dancer Mickey Rooney. In many of these musicals, the teenage Garland plays a precocious, aspiring/professional singer, but following 1939’s The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming), MGM cast Garland in several musicals in which she plays preternaturally talented amateurs. These “amateur” musicals are set at the turn of the twentieth century in the Midwest or West and help to define the characteristics of the subgenre Rick Altman would later call “folk” musicals.1 In particular, Garland’s MGM folk musicals—The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1944), The Harvey Girls (dir. George Sidney, 1946), and In the Good Old Summertime (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, 1949)—paint a nostalgic portrait of the Midwest as the American home. Whether set on a Kansas farm, in a big Victorian house in St. Louis, on the (admittedly non-midwestern) Arizona frontier, or in a nostalgic Chicago neighborhood, these films all reject the urbane, cosmopolitan musicals popular on Broadway in the 1920s and in Hollywood in the 1930s. As Desiree J. Garcia argues, Hollywood folk musicals in general “shifted both form and content to foreground ordinary, specifically American subject matter that found its musical inspiration not in European kingdoms or places of entertainment, but in the idyllic American countryside and small towns of the early twentieth century.”2 Garland’s MGM folk musicals promote a nostalgic, fantasy version of the early-twentieth-century Midwest in particular as the ideal location for this project. [End Page 209] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. The courtyard of Dorothy’s Kansas farm. The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939). Creating and Recycling the Midwestern Home In all of these films, home is the primary theme. While most musicals of the classical period end with a marriage, they do not all define the home in relation to the Midwest, as Garland’s MGM folk musicals do. Meet Me in St. Louis, The Harvey Girls, and In the Good Old Summertime each build on the home theme of The Wizard of Oz and employ folk strategies to define a nostalgic, turn-of-the-twentieth-century fantasy of domestic life, though some are more successfully than others. The one film set outside the Midwest, The Harvey Girls, falls flat in that respect, suggesting that the Midwest (or a nostalgic, fantasy version of the Midwest) is better suited for this project than is the frontier. MGM’s 1939 musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s popular 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz revises many key features of the story to emphasize the importance of Dorothy’s midwestern home. The film’s revisionist take is partly due to the conventions of Hollywood classical narrative, which requires a plot driven by character psychology (i.e., clear cause and effect),3 but the change from a fairy tale to a Bildungsroman has significant effects on the representation of Kansas. In the novel, for instance, Dorothy’s Kansas home is a one-room farmhouse surrounded by gray nothingness. Baum specifies, “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.”4 In MGM’s film, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farm is a large, sheltering complex, as shown in the courtyard scenes (Figure 1). [End Page 210] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Dorothy has trouble getting back home. The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939). The literal embrace of the farm buildings symbolizes the protective family Dorothy does not appreciate at the beginning of the film. In fact, she experiences danger only when she leaves the protective confines of the farm. Her primary nemeses, Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) and the cyclone, are dangers that come from outside the farm’s fences, and Dorothy’s struggle with numerous gates and doors shows how difficult it is to regain access to the physical and metaphoric embrace of the home after she runs away (Figure 2...

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's <em>Madame Bovary</em>

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary Colin Gardner (bio) Variously known as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse has always been of particular interest to both literary and film theorists because of its identification with the modernist innovations of Gustave Flaubert and the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as well as the narrative properties of traditional Hollywood cinema. Gilles Deleuze, for example, ties it directly to his discussion of what he calls the "perception-image." In film, a perception has two poles, subjective and objective. Thus, "a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts."1 However, it is important to note that the narrative film's scopic economy is not a simple binarism between subjective point of view and objective rendering on-screen (expressed most economically, for example, in shot-reverse-shot editing), but also behaves in accordance with a free indirect discourse that is able to express characters' inner states via the mise-en-scène, while the character is also present within the mise-en-scène. The free indirect discourse therefore suggests the possibility of expressing a first-person focalization (inside), while continuing to present the character in the third person (outside). This complication of the subjective-objective duality is acknowledged by Deleuze in his analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Cinema of Poetry"2 and its relation to the free indirect in Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Here, Deleuze argues that the perception-image is often able to override the intentionality of bodily motility (the vectorial space of Deleuze's "action-image") via a form of camera self-consciousness. "We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images," notes Deleuze; "we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised)."3 Deleuze calls this "a very [End Page 587] special kind of cinema" because it makes the presence of the camera both felt and palpable.4 In this way, the perception-image takes on the guise of a free indirect subjectivity as soon as it manifests itself through an autonomous camera-consciousness. Consequently, the free indirect allows us to get a clearer idea of how a pure perception-image—with its specific roots in bodily affect—might work when freed from the subjective baggage of suturing film language. Earmarked as a direct advance on, and contrast to, the all-seeing, God's-eye objectivist realist novels of Balzac and Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is often cited specifically as the prototypical text of this hybrid subjective / objective style, although Pasolini has traced a variation of its use as far back as Dante.5 Given this general hermeneutic regard for the free indirect as a historicizing, ideologically motivated textual practice, the paucity of discussion concerning its application to film is all the more surprising, especially given the import of Deleuze's analysis in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. With that in mind, this essay thus posits the following questions: What is free indirect discourse? How does it work in the literary context of Flaubert in general and Madame Bovary in particular? Does it translate directly into cinematic terms? If so, how has this affected film adaptations of Madame Bovary, specifically those of Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli, and Claude Chabrol? If not, and this constitutes the crux of this essay's thesis, is there an indirect filmic substitute that can generate equivalent stylistic effects? The short answer to the last question is yes, and it lies, as we shall see, in film's ability to foreground the body's performative ability to express inner states as an outward form of affect or gest. First, let us clear some semantic ground and try to establish a terminological consensus via some specific definitions. In A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince defines "direct discourse...

Race and repression in a dance routine: a response to Ramaekers and Vlieghe

Stefan Ramaekers and Joris Vlieghe’s ‘Infants, childhood and language in Agamben and Cavell: education as transformation’ is an insightful discussion of an important facet of educational experience. In the article, they consider a Fred Astaire dance sequence from the 1953 Vincente Minnelli film, The Band Wagon, in combination with a remarkable article about this same sequence by Stanley Cavell. On the strength of this, they develop an interesting line of thought regarding the experience of language, exploring connections between the ideas of Cavell and Agamben. Rich and thought-provoking though their discussion is, I find that it deflects attention from the most important aspects of the film sequence and the literature that has developed in response – specifically regarding questions of race and praise. The present discussion attempts to address these matters.

Paint your Band Wagon: style, space and sexuality

Despite the queer reputations of it director, Vincente Minnelli, and its production corps, MGM's Freed Unit, The Band Wagon (1953) has been neglected as a queer text. Although it may appear largely heteronormative when compared to musicals directed by Minnelli that have previously been claimed as queer, such as Yolanda and the Thief (1945) and The Pirate (1948), The Band Wagon refers to a way of life in the theatre world of New York City that was foundational for Minnelli and many of the workers in the Freed Unit. Using archival materials related to the film's production, this essay explores the way the film evolved in script form with special attention to a couple of key sequences that reference common queer practices, both sexual and social. The visual world of the film is also explored to point out Minnelli's citations of famous gay New York artists. Drawing on these observations, The Band Wagon functioned as a type of virtual tourism that hailed queer spectators (especially those who had served in the armed forces) as well as the film's makers, enabling a form of travel to a previous time when queer production was valued more highly than during the film's release when the Freed Unit was being slowly shuttered as the public taste for musicals diminished.

Give a dog a bone: representations of Scotland in the popular genre cinema of Neil Marshall

The best-known and most influential cinematic image of Scotland is that which constructs the country as the civilised modern world’s northern boundary and ideological antithesis. This historically venerable representational tradition incorporates Brigadoon (d. Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1954), Brave (d. Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, USA, 2012) and much else in between. The following essay examines what is perhaps the most explicit and extended twenty-first century manifestation to date of Scotland’s classic celluloid stereotype: the oeuvre of British popular genre filmmaker Neil Marshall. Analysis of this director’s Scottish trilogy – Dog Soldiers (GB/Lux/USA, 2002), Doomsday (GB/USA/SA/Ger, 2008), and Centurion (GB/Fr, 2010) – suggests not simply the historical persistence of a particular cultural representation of a particular national culture and identity, but also the varied, and often non-nationally specific, thematic uses to which Scottish cinematic stereotypes can be and are put. That conclusion suggests a number of possible future directions for Scottish cinema criticism more generally. First, the need for a more inclusive critical engagement with popular genre cinema, a hitherto under-examined area with the study of Scotland’s relationship with the moving image. Second, the extent to which critics might usefully approach Scottish-set and -themed cinema in a more multifaceted manner than has frequently been the case in historical terms. Neil Marshall’s oeuvre exemplifies the complex interplay of nationally and non-nationally specific images and ideas that exist within many popular filmic representations of Scotland.

Race and the Feminized Popular in Nietzsche and Beyond

I distinguish between the nineteenth‐ to twentieth‐century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth‐ to twenty‐first‐century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth‐century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, and so on). This move—using racial nonwhiteness to rescue pop culture from white femininity—is a common twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century practice. I use Nietzsche to track shifts from classical to neo‐liberal methods of appropriating “difference.” Hipness is one form of this neoliberal approach to difference, and it is exemplified by the approach to race, gender, and pop culture in Vincente Minnelli's film The Band Wagon. I expand upon Robert Gooding‐Williams's reading of this film, and argue that mid‐century white hipness dissociates the popular from femininity and whiteness, and values the popular when performed by white men “acting black.” Hipness instrumentalizes femininity and racial nonwhiteness so that any benefits that might come from them accrue only to white men, and not to the female and male artists of color whose works are appropriated.

“A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere”: Encounters of Wallace Stevens and Stanley Cavell

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare'sKing Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli'sThe Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of hisoeuvreboth casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Desert Victory (Roy Boulting and David Macdonald, directors, 1943), Koch Vision; Open City (Roberto Rossellini, director, 1945), Image Entertainment; Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, director, 1946), in the Vittorio De Sica Collection Three, Dawoori Entertainment; The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, director, 1945), Warner Home Video; Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, director, 1947), Turner Home Entertainment; Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, director, 1947), Fox Home Video. In my last Chronicle I followed Graham Greene's lead to films that he reviewed in the 1930s and that still seem worth watching today. Here, I'll do the same with Greene's American counterpart, James Agee, who did his reviewing in the 1940s for The Nation and Time. Agee the film critic could be tersely dismissive when confronted with out-and-out trash. In a 1948 review for The Nation ("Midwinter Clearance"), he cleared one silly musical away simply by listing its title and adding four words: "You Were Meant for Me. That's what you think." For that matter, he could be terse when dealing with a flawed masterpiece like Odd Man Out (1947). Carol Reed's film could scarcely be better described than in Agee's summations "a series of passive elegiac tableaux," "uses allegory wrong end to." But the essential Agee was expansive, not terse. The Nation indulged him with a lot of column inches; his mind worked in a naturally allusive way ("as nihilistic as Céline," "as deeply humane as Dickens," he wrote of Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek); he was greatly in love with words and their effects. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is for Agee not just gay, but "inviolably, genuinely, and intelligently gay." The twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet is not just beautiful, but "rapturously beautiful" ("if I may resort to conservative statement," he added). Prose pours out of him, on occasion prose as finicking and alliterative as Henry James's (Lewis Allen's 1945 haunted house melodrama The Unseen "generates sporadic wincing qualms of excitement without ordering them into anything constant and cumulative") or, at other moments, as comically inventive as the orotundity of W. C. Fields, one of his onscreen heroes. Listen to Agee on Till the Clouds Roll By, for instance. This 1946 biopic about Jerome Kern is a little like sitting down to a soda-fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on [End Page 108] butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbet on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream. Some of the nuts, it turns out, are a little stale, and wandering throughout the confection is a long bleached-golden hair, probably all right in its place but, here, just a little more than you can swallow. After this colossal simile the reviewer pulls himself together to find the single word that is unexpected but exactly right for Kern's music in the movie: "nacreous." Whether playing for laughs or writing in deadly seriousness, and whether an enthusiastic approver of some film or a diehard naysayer, Agee brings to his movie reviews the passionate eloquence which fills the pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his great documentary report (with Walker Evans photographs) on the lives of dirt-poor cotton sharecroppers at the end of the Depression. Bourbon-soaked eloquence, one is sometimes tempted to say about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: language toppling over itself or being heaped into gargantuan lists in the effort to be loving enough to those appallingly damaged families in north Alabama. Agee the film reviewer is more controlled than Agee the documentary artist, more aware of what language can and cannot do, and more conscious of ordinary readers' needs; he was of course a little older when he wrote the reviews. Eloquence in his film criticism is usually unforced, and arises from both attention to detail and an awareness of what the art of the cinema might actually be expected to accomplish. The creative imagination, he commented in one review, is "merely an intensification of good sense to the point...

A hundred or more hidden things: the life and films of Vincente Minnelli

A hundred or more hidden things: the life and films of Vincente Minnelli