21. Sister Arts: Dance on Camera and “Swing Time” reviewed by Cheryl S.
Last week Master Raro was my guest for a screening of Luchino Visconti’s film Senso downtown at the Metrograph, and in return he arranged a second showing of Swing Time just for me – and him – in the video room at Ebersdorf Tower. In the meantime, Pippa and Sandy and I went to a Dance on Camera evening of short films at Lincoln Center. I have therefore been sitting in the dark watching cinema and video while we wait for Albertine and Paco to end their strike. But, as you will see, the time has not been wasted.
Master suggested Senso to give me some background in mid-nineteenth century European history after I told him how much I admired Balanchine’s third movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. (See my Blog 17.) Visconti’s movie deals with the Austrian occupation of Italy, seen from the Italian point of view, of course, but I think I got the point. The last half of the film became a little over-the-top IMO (battle scenes and female hysteria for days), but I really admired the opening Opera House sequence and the various glimpses of Venice from the canals. As Master said, Senso is a classic. He also insisted that Countess Livia, the heroine (played by Alida Valli), is not unlike a lot of the balletomanes here in New York -- covetous and retributive. (Noted.) The evening made for a satisfying first date, with Master treating me with great respect (perhaps because he sincerely admires my work), as he might treat a younger sister. So I was happy when he offered to show me Swing Time again: a private screening. He also promised to show me how to use the I Ching.
In-between time, Pippa suggested that Sandy and I accompany her to a program in the Dance on Camera series at the Walter Reade Theater. We sat through a number of films that were technically impressive but trite in subject matter and/or stylistically unadventurous. The big disappointment was how primitive the dance itself was in most of the movies both in design and execution and how little trust the films’ directors had in the dance movement to hold the attention of viewers. We were given “cinematic” or “video” bravura in place of intrinsic dance values. Another common weakness throughout the evening was how predictable the musical choices were in collaboration with the choreography, especially in the films that tried to mix folk dance forms with postmodern dance movement. Dance on Camera is undoubtedly restricted in its choices to what is being produced around the world at any given time. It would appear that many of today’s directors see human movement as merely so much grist for the camera’s mill. (If it moves, shoot it.) Perhaps a number of European choreographers are really documentary videographers trapped in the wrong profession.
There was one exception on the program: “Sisters”, directed by Daphne Lucker, from the Netherlands. It deals with a broken home and with three young siblings left alone one night by their absent parent. We watch them pass the time with children’s games, some of which involve formal dance. The dancer-actresses are fascinating to watch. The choreography is by Emma Evelein, who employs a contact-improv vocabulary and a good deal of demanding floor work, the walls of the bedroom used for aural punctuation and reflexive action. (Somewhat Pina Bausch, this.) The camera stays tight on the three girls and their movement rhythms. “Sisters” is only fifteen minutes long, but it captures a fraught atmosphere and a fevered interplay among the girls close to rapture. Sandy said that “Sisters” reminded him of the director Gillian Armstrong from her early Australian years. (He recommends High Tide with my favorite actress Judy Davis.) The camerawork in “Sisters” is so attentive to the children, the editing so rhythmic, and the rapport between performers and filmmakers so intimate, you feel like a participant in the rituals of a secret cult. Pippa said she was reminded of the caught physicality of childhood in the French films of Jean Vigo, and Sandy compared the dance sequences to those in the movies of another French director, Jean Grémillon.
Toward the end of “Sisters” the girls’ parent returns (maybe with a new partner for the night?), and this provokes dance passages that become a little Euro-expressionistic for my taste, but somehow the style works here. After all, children can become spastic in ways you wouldn’t countenance in an adult. What is also eerie is the way the oldest of the three girls begins to look conventionally “grown-up” in her dancing as the feminine rites come to an end, as though we have been witness to a process of forced maturation. The screenplay of “Sisters” is credited to Rosita Walkers, the digital cinematography is by Casper van Oort, and the music was composed by César Lüttger. The three girls were Tara Punt, Delphine Van Garderen, and Lotte Mulder. (Question: Why must IMDb always list choreographers under “Other Crew”?)
Two nights later I joined Master Raro on his home territory for another viewing of Swing Time – our second date. I was hoping that the evening would allow me not only to take more notes on the movie but also to get to know Master better. He joined me on the Ebersdorf video room’s red couch, and I asked him if he would consider replacing Paco if it comes to that in the stand-off A&P are staging over finishing up work on Nekomata. I complimented him on keeping in good physical shape: it shouldn’t take him long to get back into performance condition. Master took my suggestion seriously. When he frowns, he purses his lips and narrows his eyes. Really charming, very presentational. He’s hard to resist – at least I think so. Master said he would consider the possibility of going back on stage, and I told him I was flattered to be the occasion if he agreed to dance for me soon, or whenever. Then we watched Swing Time.
When our screening ended, I mentioned “Bojangles of Harlem”, and Master brought up the approach that Pippa mentioned for confronting the racism in the number: how it may be necessary to grant a serious but problematic artwork its mixed nature. Pippa had recommended a Robert Motherwell essay that deals with a “pluralistic” content in serious works. I looked the essay up. Motherwell, as painter and writer, states in “The Modern Painter’s World” that “artworks contain more than one class of values. It is the eternal values that we accept in past art.” He continues: “It is the values of our own epoch which we cannot find in past art. This is the origin of our desire for new art.” Motherwell argues for acknowledging such interconnected components: magical, social, political, aesthetic, etc. So in certain cases a racist element could provoke us toward something newly truthful for our own time. It can lead to fresh enquiry. I’m thinking of the way Kon Ichikawa made his Tokyo Olympiad as a reply to the Riefenstahl Olympia. Or D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance as a self-claimed corrective to his The Birth of a Nation. Motherwell was big on exploring what he called “the unknown”, as it manifests itself in art-making. I am, too.
At our second screening of Swing Time I concentrated on the climactic “Never Gonna Dance.” It works not only as the song and dance resolution of the movie but as both a summation and extension of the film’s story, something like a ballet d’action, which permits dance to develop fully through a narrative situation. “Never Gonna Dance” recapitulates the meeting and early dance triumphs of Penny and Lucky (Rogers and Astaire) only to culminate in their separation. As Master put it, “Never” is a classic dance of supplication; it is Lucky’s last chance to reclaim Penny – and his appeal fails. What is remarkable is how the number develops a deep emotional charge while remaining so light and poised in its style.
In Astaire-Lucky’s opening song, the Dorothy Fields’ lyrics emphasize the character’s former gambling days. He has lost at the roulette wheel and is left “without a penny”; he has “put down” his feet the way one places a bet on the gambling table; and instead of relying on fate, he promises to be “much more positive” -- more decisive -- in the future. (Master says the lyrics to the song remind him of the poetry of the ancient Roman poet Propertius.) Even Lucky’s dancing itself may have to be given up – as through the physical act of dance movement involves a reliance on chance-taking. But even as he vows to adore Penny in the future rather than pursue a stage career, she leads him back onto the Silver Sandal’s dance floor, and they perform one more time.
John W. Harkrider’s nightclub set design features two monumental black stairways that form separate mirrored curves from that floor up to the club’s entrance-exit. The “Never Gonna Dance” number begins at the foot of the stairs and ends above, after Penny and Lucky have approached the exit by dancing up the divided stairways. Will they leave together when they reach the top? The question creates suspense until the very last moment when Penny abandons her Lucky and he confronts his failure. In the meantime, Harkrider’s double curves describe the ethereal vamp of a 1930s classical “silver sandal”, a type of heeled dancing shoe fashionable during the period. And the set also describes the top curve of a sine wave as seen on modern oscilloscopes. (Radio frequencies were often visualized as sine waves during the period in advertising and popular art.) Swing Time premiered at Radio City Music Hall, where Harkrider’s big Art Deco set would have extended the house interior’s modernist designs onto the silver screen itself -- indeed would have combined the Modern and the classic, the electronic and the Attic – in David Abel’s gleaming black and white cinematography.
In the “Never” dance, Astaire’s Lucky oscillates -- swings -- between his gambling habit and an attempted decisiveness as he partners Penny at the foot of those stairs. I love the way such a simple idea – deciding between an old way of life and a new love, a fiancée back home and a found Penny – can be turned into a complex spectacle and a dance that leaves so many richly contradictory and cumulative images behind.
What became clear during the screening is how important it is to see Swing Time on a large screen, whether in a theater or in an equivalent video room at home. Its visuals are calculated to invite the eye for full immersion in the cinema image. They thus allow you to experience another kind of “realism” than what is usually employed in television dramas today. In a sense, television has reduced the public’s experience of varieties of artistic “reality” rather than expanding it. For many of us, genre filmmaking on television is too constricting, too presumptuous. No one is making an equivalent of Swing Time for today’s small-screen consumption. But sometimes size does matter. In fact, even the best examples of musical sequences in theatrical films today are really made with home television in mind. They become La La Land anodyne. Television is motion smoothies for the mind: Long Live Judder!
I looked carefully at the choreographic composition of “Never Gonna Dance”. At its opening, Lucky simply walks beside Penny to a replay of “The Way You Look Tonight”, as memory itself makes its argument for the couple to realign. Then at an orchestral chord from “Never Gonna Dance” Lucky suddenly spins a retreating Penny to face him. Is this what he means about being “positive” – a subjective force to counter a deep irresolution? And then, to the silvery strains of the “Waltz in Swing Time” the couple begin their final dance together – oscillating from side to side on the dance floor until they begin ascending Harkrider’s stairways, separately and yet with a promise of possible reunion above. But it is not to be. The music of “Never Gonna Dance” reasserts itself up there, and Lucky whirls his Penny like a roulette wheel -- those three implacable spins -- and Penny exits holding one arm across her chest in self-defense, while Astaire-Lucky turns his final pose into an acknowledgement of defeat.
At our first group screening of Swing Time, we noticed the brilliant lighting of the dances throughout the movie. Here, in “Never Gonna Dance”, there is a use of pervasive side-lighting, both below on the dance floor and up above at the foyer. Whenever Ginger Rogers flourishes her gown’s fabric to the side, it always takes and holds the light. And notice that the extraordinary crane shot that transports us from down below to above at the climax manages to center the dancers, just as the choreography privileges Ginger’s figure to the camera lens before those multiple spins. It is Penny’s decision, after all, that will be decisive.
Robert Motherwell writes about sister arts which transmit energies back and forth to one another, as French Symbolist poetry nourished American Abstract Expressionist painting. (Or as dance and film can feed one another.) The living amalgam that ballet allows – music, dance, stage design, lighting, costuming, literature – would represent a feast of such shared energies, as would the AMC (American musical comedy). Swing Time is an example of deeply rooted mutual nourishment in high lyric collaboration. We now know that botanical forms have root systems that communicate with one another for mutual support. As in Nature, so in Art.
This time around, Master Raro said he felt that Penny was being a little too quick to presume Lucky’s utter indifference in the “A Fine Romance” snow scene. I replied that maybe the thing Lucky really admires about Penny is her temperament, the way she stands up for herself. Master frowned handsomely. I’m beginning to wonder if my Master regards all women as showing traits like the madwoman Livia in Senso. (Talk about temperament!) He told me in confidence that his experiences in New York both on stage and on the dating circuit have turned him into a more philosophical person, sort of like a Zen master. Master says he wants to take me to see a new foreign film, L’homme fidèle, about a contemporary French man expertly manipulated by two stylish Parisiennes. (Noted.) He says the movie is a modern version of an eighteenth century play by Marivaux. (Another classic.) Master seems to imply that some things never change. It’s been so hot outside this summer. Movie theaters are deliciously air conditioned.
As he promised, Master ended our evening by teaching me how to generate an I Ching reading. It was: “Keep still. Take no action.” You can imagine what unspoken question(s) may have prompted this advice. I have taken the I Ching’s answer to heart.
C.S.
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