ABOUT GENRE IN PARTICULAR
Classical musical
The expression ’musical’ arrived from theatrical
circles. In American theatres, where this genre first developed
(around 1900 on Broadway) and those of Great Britain (around
1930s) the term ’musical comedy’ represented... ’a light,
entertaining show with singing and dancing’ (Hornby, Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, Oxford,
1986). Evidently, sound film did not take over only the
name; it took the basics of the formula too — the important
and a significant presence of singing, music and dancing.
Nevertheless, film soon transformed the theatrical formula
in accordance with its specific expressive repertoire.
It created its own poetics of genre that developed, for
as long as 30 years, almost as long as the viewers showed
inclination towards such films.
What were then, the basic
features of that genre, of the classical musical, and what
constructed its poetics? Beside the passing affection for
all forms of ’sounding’ in sound movies, musicals incorporated
a particularly hedonistic urge, an expectation of pleasure
in the escapist potentials of singing, dancing and music,
an aspiration towards temporary freedom from a number of
problems. Having this in mind, the genre was evidently
marked by an art-for-art’s-sake dimension: film musical
was, more than any other genre, intended to be an artwork
marked by its pure aesthetic quality unencumbered by the
tiresome aspects of the context outside the film. The story
and its aesthetic were both oriented towards producing
pleasure. Such receptive goal presented particular problems.
At first glance, it seemed that in order to achieve this,
one had just to transfer the music, singing and dancing
into the movie itself. According to the oldest and an almost
infallible receipt, the musical numbers had to be incorporated
into the story (taken from a theatrical musical). A problem
appeared how to incorporate singing and dancing, keeping
in mind the realistic motivation that dominated American
movies of that period, and how to avoid making it completely
unbelievable. The most appropriate solution was to construct
a hybrid connection with comedy, either comedy of situation,
or comedy of character. Comedy included a factor of differentiation
between film and real events and people’s behaviour so
that, in this manner, one stylistic component served as
support to another.
Furthermore, in order to make this
world of singing and dancing believable, its environment
had to be believable too. During the first period of the
development of the genre — far more frequently than in
theatrical musicals — the action took place in theatrical
circles, most often on the stage or any other place where
one would encounter singing and dancing even outside the
movies (for example, luxury hotels, as in several movies
with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire). The heroes, had to
be performers, authors, producers, promoters, or any sort
of theatre personnel striving to make the show successful.
After various trials and tribulations threatening the success
of the show, the story had to come to a happy ending. Success
in business had to be paired up with success in love, while
success itself typically evoked pleasure.
The next step
in the appropriation of genre by the film industry was
purely aesthetic and artistic: musical numbers acquired
a new ’hyper dimension’; they were played out with especially
constructed equipment, and set. More importantly, the movies
began using specific visual possibilities of film: film-makers
started carefully choosing the distance at which camera
was placed, the shooting angle, while film’s structure
was constructed in the editing room — this eventually made
musical numbers visually and artistically extremely spectacular.
This induced Busby Berkeley to use bodies of performers
to ’build’ pyramids and rosettes, or group formations that
thrilled with their artistic form as if they were some
unusual architectural creations. The musical aspect, thus,
produced a possibility of constructing a new rhetoric,
new means of communication. In other words, musical’s formula
was defined, on one hand, by the elements that were as
convincing as the film context in the USA needed them to
be, and on the other hand, by elements connected to beauty,
art, and joy — serving to achieve pleasure. All the elements
that contributed to this aim (highly skilled performances
of dancers and singers; rhythmical, as well as visual and
stylistic elaboration of numbers; introduction of colour)
were introduced gradually following the hedonistic and
art-for-art’s-sake principles.
Finally canonized in the
1950s, the genre began to expand: it broke out into the
nature in search for the elements of pastorals, and here
it encountered stronger competition; the Western (in the
1930s singing and dancing were integral parts of westerns).
Western offered to the viewers a much more believable pastoral,
while the detective movies of the 1940s and the 1950s introduced
a contrasting urban setting. The opening up of musicals
was a signal that it was losing its receptive appeal. It
is interesting, however, that a systematic, detailed and
scientifically based researches have not started until
the 1970s — when classical musical was already at its last
gasp.
Ante Peterlić |
