20. Complex Beauty: “Swing Time” in Blu-ray reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Our employer, Louise Ebersdorf, is regularly hosting nighttime celebrations with two friends (Madame Sesostris and newbie Belle W.), so I decided we younger folk needed a party of our own in the midst of work. The great 1936 musical comedy film Swing Time has finally appeared in a Blu-ray version from Criterion -- the first of an Astaire-Rogers series, we hope -- so I suggested our own get-together in the 39th Floor video room of Ebersdorf Tower. Louise gave her permission, and I invited Cheryl and Sandy to watch the film last Friday, with Master Raro as our techie, supervising the big image on the 8K screen, with upgraded sound. My party was a smash success, if I say so myself. Cheryl and Sandy are still waiting for the A&P strike to end downstairs so they can video the pas de deux Cheryl has choreographed. As she put it, resignedly, “We are doing time with Albertine and Paco.” I was certain that F&G (Fred and Ginger) could make it pass more quickly. Sandy and I are fascinated with the art of filming dance, and Swing Time is a master lesson. I popped the popcorn, and The Master agreed to supervise the machinery and keep us company during the screening.
C&S arrived early (5:00 p.m.) and asked where their Master Raro was. I had to explain that Louise had sent him out for more libations but that he would be back soon. They were clearly eager for his company. Watching the two calm themselves down in his eventual presence demonstrated just how impressed they are with him. Young Cheryl wants a boyfriend and maybe a male dancer to work with her. Sandy and Master are close in age and in dance backgrounds, so they have a common professional interest. (C&S are vulnerable to Master, but I can only wish them luck in that department since he has often been burned – picked up and dropped unceremoniously – where romance is concerned.) Swing Time is the ideal treatment for the healthy craziness of falling in love. I’ve seen the film several times in various formats, but interestingly my three dancer-friends had never encountered the movie. Imagine! I put them together on the big red sofa, Master in the middle, three bowls of popcorn on the island tables. And on with the show!
The director George Stevens devotes almost a half-hour to setting up the situation (Astaire’s Lucky as a small-time vaudeville song-and-dance man and Ginger’s Penny as a big-city dance instructress), and the film is a good example of the virtues of providing a fully cinematic topography within which a dance can occur for maximum resonance. And what an opening number: “Pick Yourself Up” is my favorite couple tap-dance of all time! As Sandy pointed out, Astaire and his co-choreographer Hermes Pan use a heavy landler rhythm (step-hop-hop) and then work dozens of light variations on it, turning an um-pah-pah pattern into filigreed syncopations both aural and visual. The dance captures the moment Ginger’s Penny falls in love with her Lucky, so there is a vivid backstory at work in addition to a display of virtuoso tap and ballroom dancing. (Penny initially doesn’t know about Lucky’s skills or past, but we do thanks to those first thirty minutes of the movie.) Top Hat is another A&R film that illustrates the virtue of showing the situation that leads into a dance on film; remember how in that movie Astaire’s nocturnal tapping disturbs Ginger abed in a room below his floor?
“Pick Yourself Up” also illustrates the way composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Dorothy Fields would write a musical number so that it is cross-grained to the romantic design of the story, summing up ironic obstacles to love, introducing complications to amorous success, delaying gratification both for the lovers and the audience. In narrative complicity, Stevens and his screen writers introduce so many such impediments in the plot that the movie acquires an Alice-in-Wonderland illogic through the multiple farcical interruptions. It’s as though musical comedy (especially this one) takes as its subject the bumbling craziness of everyday life in contrast to the focused, pure compulsion of an erotic sway: how a being sensitive to matters of love must swing back and forth between poles of intense emotional commitment and complicated experiential doubt, just as the movie’s Lucky must deal with his aborning love for Penny and his promise to his fiancée back home. Love seen in this way is a gamble. You can see the trope expressed in twentieth-century popular art in such works as Kern’s musical Show Boat and Jacques Demy’s film Bay of Angels. The roulette wheels keep on spinning, but Penny focuses on her love for Lucky.
Stevens has been criticized for the slow pace of the narrative scenes, but he is clearly dedicated to showing how ordinary time (not Swing Time) complicates romantic fulfillment and how such complexity is both surreal and hilarious in comparison to the timeless, deeply shared vision of the lovers, which is here communicated profoundly in dance thanks to Fred and Ginger. Stevens allows us to see what lies beneath the surface, especially in Penny’s emotional transparency and Lucky’s ardor in their dance partnership. The deliberate narrative pacing is not only necessary to communicate the challenges that the lovers face, but I also think it was a sign to audiences in the 1930s of the stubborn inertia of the everyday in contrast to the lovers’ swift, lucid vision of an eternity in each other’s arms.
There is a kind of persistent erotic suspense at work throughout this director’s romantic comedies. And here, Stevens hit upon a musical comedy film style that communicates both frustration and fruition: Swing Time’s la belle, la perfectly swell romance. (If you want more of Stevens’ heady mix of recalcitrant reality and erotic compulsion – and it can become addictive -- see his non-musical Vivacious Lady, also starring Ginger Rogers. Stevens is a film poet of the felt immediacy of romantic demand, especially as experienced by the women in his films. Like the rom-coms of Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and Gregory La Cava, Steven’s movies need to be seen on a really large screen and with a live audience, like my dancer cohorts at our party.
Both “Pick Yourself Up” and the “Waltz in Swing Time” are filmed in one-camera, full time-lapse shots. In “Pick Yourself Up” the lighting is subtle, the camera keeps the dancing pair center-screen, with floating moves (both dollies forward and back and lateral pans left and right) to keep the couple centered. From the dim multiple floor shadows, you see how illumination spills from above onto the sound stage. There is a discreet back-lighting to give a haloed outline to the silhouettes of the dancers and also to model them on top of the sculptural qualities in the dancing. Whenever the the two move back, away from the camera, they enter a slightly brighter lighting field, so the modeling continues despite the retreat. When they move toward us, or as they circle the dance floor, the effect is a subtle shimmer of changing light, shifting around and about them. The illumination adds more visual data to the dance movement, creating that dazzle. It compensates for any loss of focused energy through the interposed celluloid medium. Stevens was an experienced cinematographer before he was a director. This visual emphasis is evident in all of his films.
The “Waltz in Swing Time” is not only a masterpiece of ballroom-and-tap choreography, its camerawork and lighting are contributive to its achievement. Once again, after an initial cut on the dancers’ entrance, the performance is captured in one continuous shot. There is a dramatic follow-spot from overhead and the rear, pouring a pool of light on the couple, as though they are thrown together by the very air in addition to their virtuoso partnering moves. Cheryl points out that the back of Ginger’s white dress registers as therefore brighter than its front. Sandy noticed that the choreography not only emphasizes turns and circles, it regularly advances and retreats, playing with the dancers’ proximity to the camera. He pointed out their bourrées and pull-backs away from the lens as well as the several dance combinations forward and then in reverse. Master adds that the tossed turns for Ginger accent the swirl of her gown; they model her silhouette while catching the light. And there is that wonderful section where Ginger turns and places one leg before her as she bends back and Fred jumps over her extended limb; then she turns again and points her back leg, over which he again leaps. Very Balanchine. (Check out his Concerto Barocco for what may be a tribute to Astaire.)
The dance thus makes the camera and the lighting part of its calculations, which are both complex and precise. It has been choreographed for the lens. Those Robert Russell Bennett musical decorations on Kern’s waltz melody advance and recede as well, sometimes horn-bright, sometimes so delicate that the dancers’ tapping can be clearly heard over the band. So many of these choices in recording dance on film are the result of the close collaboration between Astaire and Stevens, between sight and sound. Astaire clearly thinks in film terms when inventing a dance, just as Stevens’ musical staging of the movie’s “A Fine Romance” is itself a piece of choreography. Stevens would go on to use a version of full time-lapse photography to document performances in many of his subsequent movies. Together, Astaire and Stevens remind me of the way the great Buster Keaton would invent his every move with the camera in mind.
Astaire’s blackface “Bojangles of Harlem” is now categorized as a racist statement by some audiences for older films, and it must be admitted that the jungle drums and Dorothy Fields lyrics (especially in the choral lead-in) evince the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of an era’s sometimes deeply prejudiced popular entertainment. We forget (although cultural critics don’t) how much racial stereotyping figured persistently in vaudeville comedy, as well as in something as universal as Sunday newspaper comics, the “funnies” as children called them. (Swing Time includes an early scene with a stereotyped Jewish tailor.) On stage and screen, Astaire sometimes exploited such characterizations for his dances, for example his Chinese incarnation in the “Limehouse Blues” section of The Goldwyn Follies (1938). And blackface minstrel acts are now seen as particularly loathsome pointers to slavery, Jim Crowism, and centuries of condescension. How to watch without cringing? It is hard to maintain a Nabokovian “perfect detachment” (as that writer recommends before James Joyce’s persistent sexual details in Ulysses) when confronted with blatant bigotry in movie spectacle.
There are two points that should be made for “Bojangles” beyond its high level of rhythmic invention and cinematic showmanship, its phantasmagoric visuals and memorably jangly Hal Borne musical arrangement. (How many of today’s bigots could fashion a “Bojangles of Harlem”? Of course, it could be argued that such crafted brilliance only makes the underlying message more virulent.) First point: Astaire-Lucky slaps on his blackface in his dressing room just after having received his first kiss from Ginger-Penny (her lipstick decorates his lips), so both facial applications involve something mightily cherished. The number is not only a tribute to beloved show business convention, to black entertainers (like Bill Robinson and John W. Bubbles), and to African-American culture in general, but it is also Astaire’s full confession of his own career-long indebtedness to jazz music and jazz dance in the practice of his art. In a sense, those towering silhouettes that he performs below in the most mind-expanding FX section of “Bojangles” represent Astaire’s fealty toward living and past jazz masters in compositional technique and performance style. Only after the lesson has been “learned” is he able to tackle that stunning, slap-happy coda that finishes the dance. This is not to apologize for the racist component of the spectacle but to indicate how carefully an audience may have to discriminate in watching a period song-and-dance and how complex our full response to popular entertainment may sometimes be.
Second point: one version of aesthetics holds that modern art is “pure” only in its most immediate, simple effect and that a more considered response must be a complex one where beauty is concerned. Perhaps its most intense residue is merely a by-product of a complicated illumination beyond the first impression. Maybe to the serious eye the brightest flame is multicolored. And perhaps conceptual flaws should lead us to a more engaged relation to individual examples of artistic production rather than summary dismissal.
We encounter such choices where certain “problematic" works are involved – D. W. Griffith’s form-creating The Birth of a Nation and Leni Riefenstahl’s aesthetically ripe Olympia being obvious specimens. The disturbing elements of such works inevitably render their effect today as no longer unified. Their racist and political components show a partial or large unconsciousness on the part of their makers, revealed blatantly as public sensitivities have changed over time. Can we guardedly accept such aesthetic “dilution” or does the flaw interpenetrate the individual form so as to constitute artistic fatuity? This is the kind of question we ask ourselves about “Bojangles”: does the dance function as its own auto-critique (those giant silhouettes) in aesthetic and social terms or do the prejudices in details and conventions finally corrupt its integrity? The fact that Astaire’s and Stevens’ movie raises such questions may therefore align it with modern thought which would advocate a “complex” view of the artwork over a simplified or “puristic” one, a questioning response rather than a thoughtless vulnerability before the individual example’s most immediate sway. We will see if the upcoming Gelb-Luckett Jazz Singer at the Abrons Arts Center is granted a considered reception.
The four of us – Cheryl, Sandy, Master and I – agreed as one after the screening that we are in awe of Ginger Rogers in Swing Time, the way she and Stevens put a modern woman on the screen, including her instincts, confusions, and changeableness. Her Penny has a tender emotional reality rare in movies. She is all there. Stevens allows Ginger to suggest so much through subtle touches -- how she holds her chin and shoulders, a more or less sternness in her spine, that decisive pivot on the vast stairway to face Astaire when he has begun to sing “Never Gonna Dance”. (That small half-turn is breathtaking; so is the subsequent shot of Rogers looking down at him.) If “Lucky” is performative surface, “Penny” is the interior life in excelsis. The final farewell in “Never Gonna Dance” is not just choreographically devastating -- Ginger rules!
And Astaire -- dancer, choreographer, and consummate filmmaker! With a little help from Hermes Pan, George Stevens, Ginger, Kern, Fields, and just about everyone on this movie. Sandy and I have to watch it again. Maybe next week. Where is its equivalent today?
At the end of the screening, beyond the laughter, the final interlaced duet, and the lovers’ sun-blessed embrace, Master Raro had tears in his eyes and a husky voice. Aesthetic intensity can do that. Cheryl just sat there stunned (I think), and Sandy said nothing for the longest time. Even I was affected, and I thought I knew this movie! The great series of laughing jags that ends the film (so radio-inspired, so Laurel and Hardy) can’t dissipate the lingering impact of “Never Gonna Dance”.
So it was a good thing we had visitors as a nightcap. Belle W. wheeled our dear Louise into the video room and accompanied her on a concertina (La Belle officiates at a megachurch outside Palm Beach) as our employer sang her just-written update of a song from Kiss Me, Kate. The rewrite is intended to lure a certain member of the First Family into Louise’s projects (reviving the Ebersdorf Ballet and a possible personal participation in the making of a Demon Cat film). The song was well received and shifted our mood, ending the evening on a final upbeat note. I append Louise’s re-composition:
“Ivanka” (sung to Cole Porter’s “Bianca”)
While following Ivanka
(The Advisor I adore)
Off-shore I found
She gets around,
But I still love her more and more.
So I’ve written her a love song
Though I’m just an amateur.
I’ll sing it through
For all of you
To see if it’s worthy of her.
Are you listenin’?
Ivanka, Ivanka,
First Daughter, will you be mine?
Ivanka, Ivanka,
Six years from now you’ll take the Casa Blanca!
To please you, Ivanka,
Foreign residence just will not do.
Better here than in a far Lubyanka,
Casa Blanca, Ivanka, for you!
P.H.
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