Berkeley and Minnelli: Hollywood Entertainment, Goals, and Motivation

In the classic Hollywood period, it was only within the musical that the emphasis was occasionally 'allowed' to deviate from the primary storytelling process. With Busby Berkeley and Vincente Minnelli, this 'aberration' - through maximalist mise-en-scène - acquired a specific ecstatic quality.

Berkeley is a director of sequences, not films, ecstatic not rounded. When, after doing music sequences for other directors for a while, he switched to making full-length films, nothing changed: the story is more or less a boring pause until the moment when the signifier explosion occurs, the imaginative breakthrough, the discovery of the scene that is ready for the spectacle. While the others tried to more or less 'naturally' fit the musical tracks into the plot itself, Berkeley devoted all his attention to that grandiloquent jumping out of the narrative, artificially emphasizing the very character of the genre.

Given that Berkeley fanatically insisted on the erotic structure of musicals, it is no wonder that precisely with his films, it retroactively became clear that the musical genre and pornography are the most similar narratively, in the sense that the pretext is always only temporary, obviously secondary, banally functional. In those genres, it is best seen that the audience is primarily there for the sex, for the eroticization that the film scene carries in and for itself.

Given that Berkeley fanatically insisted on the erotic structure of musicals, it is no wonder that precisely with his films, it retroactively became clear that the musical genre and pornography are narratively the most similar, in the sense that the pretext is always only temporary, obviously secondary, banally functional

That is why the Berklee musical in the thirties of the last century perhaps most impressively indicated what Hollywood entertainment means, what its goals are, its motivation. It was about the new way in which the (primarily female) body was organized in film, the way in which it was used, pragmatized. Without a particular instruction from the story that would semantically profile the matter more clearly, Berkeley in that very synaestic organization – the arrangement of body 'details', the formation of corporeal symbols – received an erotic mode that could subversively bypass the imposed moralistic canons, although paradoxically the degree of sexual tension here was stronger than in the classic narrative film.

After the principal actors had sung their part in the number, Berkeley would move on to the choristers, many girls, mostly peroxide blondes, who were organized in geometric patterns rather than according to any musical rhythm, creating incredible arabesques, precise ornaments that simultaneously made desire and realistically embodied and abstractly distant, translated into a strange math of desire (as in the director's frequent maneuver when the camera slides between a woman's legs). Eros was ultimately written in geometric language, (dis)located and (de)substantialized.

That is why Berkeley's musical sequences are also privileged moments of his accumulation of meaning, that is why his hallucinatory moment of staging politics, worldview ecstasy, apotheosis of fluttering hedonism is glorified: the celebration of a new social orientation in We're in the Money from Gold Diggers of 1933 (Sponsors 1933, 1933 ), youthful energy in Young and Healthy from 42nd Street (42 Street, 1933), sexual and ethical relaxation in Pettin' in the Park from Gold Diggers of 1933, emancipation that is on the limit of legality in Honeymoon Hotel from Footlight Parade 1933), the very 'material' from which his films were made in the segment Dames from the film of the same name (Women, 1934)... In By a Waterfall from Footlight Parade, on the other hand, it is underlined that Hollywood entertainment is, in fact, a vulgarized Edenic compensation .

After the temporary 'pacification' of the Rooney-Garland phase, most visible in Babes in Arms (Babes in Arms, 1939), Berkeley returned to his earlier licentiousness with The Gang's All Here (Cjela je klapa tu, 1943) - enriched for an additional Technicolor atmosphere , more precisely, to signifier, iconographic lasciviousness, stylistic irritation, above all in the phantasmagorical, surreal, crazy sequence of Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat, which reveals the libidinous background of the director's expression to the level of bold and parodic poetic self-awareness. While Carmen Miranda sings about her 'cheerful' clothes, the 'dramatic' concretisation comes in the form of dancing girls carrying huge bananas: no one has done as Berkeley before to make the phallic signifier in Hollywood cinema so 'explicitly' poke the eyes, to focus exclusive attention on itself , to be so fetishized.

Here, the director breaks with the classic procedure of (artistic) sublimation where instincts and drives are translated into socially approved metaphors, moreover, he turns it upside down, so the intensified symbolic work is the cause of the vulgar desublimation that takes place in this phallic procession. In short, the metaphor is stronger and more obvious than the denotation that doesn't really exist anymore, which is completely lost in the frame, which led the easily readable tropes to an erect 'climax': sexual delirium par quintessence. The Gang's All Here, or: the pornography of metaphors.

Minnelli will accept and upgrade Berkeley's setting of the musical: he is an entertainer, a designer, a 'baroque' director who has always subordinated reality to visual enchantment, the magical potential of cinema. We are talking about an author who tried to saturate his own paintings as much as possible, for whom the decor - striking and 'ornate' background - was almost more important than the characters, for whom the colorful explosion of signifiers was the most fascinating synaesthetic event. Narrative episodes, however, are only necessary pauses before the ecstatic triumph of the interweaving of human body movements, games and sumptuous scenography, all with an intensity that gave the scene the power of a surreal daydream or a geometric obsession that turned into the glamor of abstract beauty.

The ending of An American in Paris (An American in Paris, 1951) had already determined the scope of Minnelli's rhetorical 'excess', the decision to go beyond the territory of mere fictional legality: dance, colors and decor no longer signified anything, represented nothing, stood for nothing rehearsed - everything was left to unrestrained and self-sufficient Luddite extravagance, fireworks that ultimately sought the supremacy of the eye over the mind and heart. The classic narrative mechanism - with the justification that the musical not only could not tolerate, but also encouraged such digressions - was not suspended, but was brought to 'overheat'.

But the phenomenological statement in the case of Minnelli is not enough: we need to look behind the 'magic' to see the specific authorial configuration, we need to see how enchantment is the very topos that signals that disappointment is already at work. Minnelli is sometimes accused of overly 'sweetening' his films: the saccharine imagination allegedly weakens the substance. It is an oversight that ignores the director's crucial counter-strategy that intelligently establishes a balance, reveals a deeper vision, an expanded field of functioning of the cinematic signifier. Namely, enjoying his 'exaggeration', Minnelli went down to the very foundations of the narrative structure, that skeleton on which the mesmerizing veil woven from heightened expression is 'put on'.

Therein lies the answer to the logical question: why are Minnelli's best films those that are, directly or indirectly, connected to the artistic medium, that allow the author's metapoetic consciousness to be developed and applied, that allow fantasy to be given the status of a kind of metatextual tool, that themselves in themselves they become a commentary on the directorial process. Minnelli's 'excessive' rhetoric does not point to the loss of the mimetic vision, but to perhaps the necessary effect of enunciative 'doubling': that additional dimension is the one in which nothing but the film itself is reflected. The opening of that second level is a powerful effect of the director's mise-en-scène.

The masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis (We'll Meet in St. Louis, 1944), a romantic musical that gets its almost 'naturalistic' quality from the director's extraordinary incorporation of musical segments into the development of the plot, is one of the key films for understanding the far-reaching Hollywood poetics, a traditional narrative procedure that brilliantly combines surface with with the depth of the text and subversively reverses the parameters, so that precisely in the epicenter of entertainment and escapism, in the very center of fantasy recuperation, cracks can be seen that, in principle, act as the strongest polemic against exactly what is apparently glorified.

In The Band Wagon (Raise the Curtain, 1953) Minnelli uses the return of an old star (Fred Astaire) to the big stage to modestly postulate his kind of entertainment that is alien to all pretentiousness. But in Brigadoon (1954), the disproportion between reality and fantasy cannot pass without serious repercussions: the artistic price that must be paid is not small, which is also confirmed by the proximity of sexual perversion in such an 'innocent' achievement as Gigi (1958), awarded with an Oscar.

However, perhaps the best indicator of the director's aesthetics is the brilliant The Pirate (Pirat, 1948): the heightened codification of colors in the frame finds an iconographic equivalent in the lively use of choreography, as well as the lively expressiveness of the camera itself. However, Minnelli's musicals, no matter how enthusiastically devoted to genre expertise, no matter how energetically they represent the quality of unrestrained entertainment, always have a metapoetic 'addition', something around which the author can develop his discursive preoccupations, to semantically enrich the concept.

The Pirate belongs to the director's most dynamic and luxurious films precisely because Minnelli essentially focuses on the phenomenon of acting, on the value of performance as seduction, entertainment, but also the expression of true emotions. The peak of such logic is at the very end when Serafin (Gene Kelly) can save his life and finally win Manuela (Judy Garland) only if his acting and singing performance is effective enough, in which Minnelli sees the only possible culmination of the narrative itself in The Pirates, as well as a description of the very telos that internally governs the musical as a genre.