Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Dance! Dance!
What I like about dance is that, like music, it is a tremendously unnatural, affected activity that nonetheless makes the performer's personality incredibly open and accessible, rather than distant or hidden. A scene of 4th wall-breaking, obviously choreographed dancing can let you know the characters on screen more than any amount of neo-realist scenes of naturalistic acting. It's entirely fake, but completely real. Art! Woo! Anyway: here's some more of our favourites.
The Fisher King (1991)
d. Terry Gilliam
After the grand (and glorious) folly of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Mr Gilliam played nice with the studios as a director for hire for this, his most mainstream film. It's still excellent, mind, and not only survives Robin Williams in 'tragic character' mode with only a slight veneer of cringing sentimentalism, it also includes a lot of the wonderfully idiosyncratic moments that made Gilliam so beloved in the first place. Like the scene when everyone in Grand Central Station starts ballroom dancing.
Robin Williams plays a lunatic bum in this movie, so hopelessly romantically obsessed with some poor girl he spends his time stalking her. He catches sight of her while walking through the train station and, to externalise both the character's bliss and delusion, everyone picks a partner and waltzes away. The music rises, a giant glitter ball lights the giant hall, and the character is genuinely happy for a few moments. He is, of course, a psycho, but the joy of the scene sells the audience on his basic sweetness and innocence. Manipulative and morally suspect? The cinema would never do that to us!
Anyway, the scene is lovely, though I fear 15 further years of Williams' saccharine emotioneering may have spoiled this film for us all. Try seeing Robin's face tear-up and not want to punch it. Still, the mix of Gilliam and mainstream film-making softened the director's more cynical, anarchic edge to give us this scene of wide-eyed wonder. -- Andrew Clarke
Pulp Fiction (1994)
d. Quentin Tarantino
This scene marks Tarantino's first fully realized use of the ideas the audience brings to the theater to enhance a scene. As Vincent Vega tries to get out of the inevitable twist contest, the audience is being teased with the idea of seeing John Travolta Dancing, an idea that is tantalizing only because of what the audience has felt about John Travolta in the past. When I saw this in a packed theater on opening weekend back in '94, the audience erupted in applause when Vincent eventually accepted. -- Chris Oliver
Bande à part (1964)
d. Jean-Luc Godard
It's funny how Chris' pick above wouldn't actually exist had it not been for Godard and the New Wave (and, of course, Travolta's smooth-moving hips - confluence is such a wonderful thing). I mean, the (now defunct) "A Band Apart" production company is named after this very film. And it's no surprise that a loving cineaste like Tarantino would take reference from such a film, seeing as Pulp Fiction is in so many ways a love letter to the bygone French film movement... but I digress. What makes Bande à part's "Madison Dance" scene among my very favorite moments in film period is its spontaneity and honesty (and that music!). What the New Wave did was break convention and help reshape cinema form to more accurately reflect human emotion and experience in an artful manner. And you see it not only in the impromptu dance sequence above, with its musical breaks and subsequent narration. Stuff like this is old hat now, with so many films vying for similar flourishes of style. But it's always fascinating to see the roots of it all. -- George Merchan
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
d. Tobe Hooper
This movie isn't short on heavy handed symbolism but it's all rendered fairly irrelevant by the sheer viscerality of the experience. Very few films have such a physical presence in the room it is being shown in, and none, I'd argue, are quite so willing to punch you in the gut for 90 minutes. As such it can be difficult to work out the meaning of the film's closing moments as Leatherface does a little dance with his chainsaw on the side of the road.
Is he celebrating a night of carnage? Or stamping out his frustrations at letting the heroine escape? Is it some half-remembered shamanistic rite to symbolise Leatherface as an elemental force haunting the backroads of all America? Or is it just some retard psycho playing with his toy? Who cares? It's this lack of explanation or reason that marks out the film from other horror movies. It's not some cute kiss-off or cynical set up for a sequel, it's just someone dancing un-selfconsciously, to no-one but himself. Is it scary, beautiful or funny? Why not all three? -- Andrew Clarke
Part 1 - Boogie Nights, Last Tango in Paris, The Return of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
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Labels: Bande à part, Pulp Fiction, The Fisher King, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
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