Living with the movie Day 68
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
An American in Paris
Director: Vincent Minnelli, 1951
Nanjing, home
In the past, looking for discs in the market, it was interesting to recognize the title of the film. The new films mostly use the translated names of Taiwanese film dealers, "General Mobilization" and "Pursuit Order" for 20 years. The old translations are mostly antique (the 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Shaw's Huangmei films became popular). As far as the films that appear in my row of films are concerned: "Song in the Rain" is called "Ten Thousand Flowers Frolicking Spring", "Meet St. Louis" is called "Fire Tree And Honeysuckle", "An American in Paris" is called "Flower Dance", and "Caravan" is called "Dragon Country Fragrant Car". Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan's first "On the Town" is called "Spring in Jincheng"; Astel and Ginger Rogers' last "The Barkleys of Broadway", called "The Golden Queen", is already full of Chinese opera.
Mr. Li Oufan's "Autobiography of Watching Movies" is first of all the song and dance films he watched in middle school. Mr. Li was studying at Hsinchu Middle School, a boys' school, and a group of wild children in the first and second grades of junior high school were forced by their teachers to go to the cinema to watch "Huadu Dance". Interestingly, this teacher teaches art. It is no wonder that the art design of MGM song and dance films is a visual pleasure even today.
The film was originally titled An American in Paris and is based on the orchestral work of American composer Gershwin. The film also revolves around Gershwin's music, and even devotes a large section to Gershwin's famous rhapsody of blue.
The director is still Vincent Minnelli. But this film with "Paris" and the movie with "St. Louis" seen yesterday are different, and the art and song and dance design have changed from "American pastoral style" to fresher and more "foreign". In particular, the dance of Jean Kelly and the American-French actress Leslie Caron on the banks of the Seine is very light and beautiful.
But the last twenty minutes of long song and dance that made Mr. Li Oufan "fascinated" were simply too long for the current audience. Of course, it is not difficult to imagine how mesmerized people who walked into the cinema more than sixty years ago would be when they saw the characters walking into the paintings and dancing, and the colors and shapes were ever-changing.
There is no doubt that the production of song and dance films relies more on the industrial system and collective creation than any other film genre. The key to MGM's dominance during this period is to reserve a large number of song and dance talent, including star actors, lyrics and composers, art designers, music directors, choreographers and, of course, big directors. And all of these revolve around producer Arthur Fred. The creative team he led was known as the "Fred Group".
Although Vincent Minnelli was the chief director of mgm's cabaret, he himself said that when others pointed out his contribution to the development of the cabaret, he was weak-minded, because the real revolutionary was Arthur Fred. Composer Owen Berlin once said of Fred, "His greatest genius is to discover genius, to discover genius and to put himself in genius." ”
We don't know this character now, but listening to Owen Berlin's words, we can also think about that year. MGM stars abound, fred is in the middle of the galaxy.
Arthur Fred produced almost every Golden Age song and dance classic, including Song in the Rain. Fred's biggest transformation of the song and dance film is to open the narrative space into a song and dance space, so that the song and dance can participate in the narrative. Thus getting rid of the original drawbacks of song and dance films, such as the protagonist's identity must be a song and dance actor, and from time to time to interrupt the narrative, run to the stage to perform a paragraph.
So we see Gene Kelly playing a street painter in A American in Paris, and his heroine is a salesman. But that doesn't stop them from singing and dancing when they're in love.
They no longer dance because of their identity as dancers, but dance because of love.
Paris became the utopia of the Americans. Although most of the scenes were still shot in the studio. But that didn't stop the fictional streets of Paris from becoming the stage for Gene Kelly's dance experiments.
At the very least, the film opens up the teenage Lee to feel what Calvino calls another world, a cinematic world completely different from the life around him. That world, Calvino said, was "more weighty, more fulfilling, more necessary, more perfect." And the world of song and dance is obviously more carefree.
Cabaret is the most daydream genre in Hollywood. These days, watching song and dance movies, I saw the characters drinking coffee, eating, walking, sitting in the car and suddenly began to sing, one person singing, two people singing, everyone singing. I thought to myself, it's like an out-of-body experience. In the song and dance film, as long as you sing and dance, the troubles are gone, which is really a "better world".
It is no wonder that song and dance films were born during the economic depression and flourished during wars and wars. In this world, people are unstable, and it is inevitable that people will want to go to another world to hide. If we want to enter the drama, we must be able to dream.
Week 10 Schedule Where there is singing and dancing, there is love
An American in Paris (1951), Vincent Minnelli, on Wednesday, January 9
Thursday, January 10, The Band Wagon (1953), Vincent Minnelli
Friday, January 11, Les Demoiselles de Rochefor (1967), Jacques Demi
Saturday, January 12, Jazz Spring All That Jazz (1979), Bob Fox
Sunday, January 13, Ballroom Le bal (1983), Etor Scola
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【2016.12.3 - 2017.12.2】