Basic orientation towards visual spectacle

Die Frau meiner Träume (The Girl of My Dreams, 1944) - Georg Jacoby

It is too often forgotten that Nazi cinematography, or more precisely, German cinematography during the NS rule, was fundamentally oriented towards popular genres, and much less towards propaganda.

Moreover, the films of that period were primarily addressed to the female audience, which is particularly evident in the fact that the system at that time overwhelmingly rested on female stars, of which, paradoxically, not one of them was German: Zarah Leandar, Kristina Söderbaum and, on In short, Ingrid Bergman was Swedish and Marika Rökk was Hungarian. (Should it be interpreted as a disturbing or completely frivolous insight that the Germans recorded their best comedies and musicals, and one can argue also melodramas, precisely in this period?)

Rökk was the German variant of Ginger Rogers, which, for a certain lack of dance subtlety, more than made up for it with gymnastic flexibility and acrobatic dynamism.

Her strengths and weaknesses were best exploited by Georg Jacoby, especially in the masterful Die Frau meiner Träume, which works equally well as a clever musical and a hilarious screwball comedy of confusion, not falling behind its Hollywood counterparts in any respect.

Singin' in the Rain (1952) - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly

As the most charming example of escapist philosophy, the musical had to be fundamentally anti-mimetic on the level of prosedeo. Fantasy intonation is not only related to the principled unimportance of narrative articulation (the story is only there to, at least minimally logically, enable the incorporation of singing and dancing sequences for which, after all, the audience comes), but also to the musical's basic orientation towards visual spectacle, towards primacy of rhetoric itself: style is not only in the foreground, but is also an end in itself. Therefore, in the musical as we know it from its golden Hollywood period, especially when Technicolor grandiosity was added to the already present glamour, the so-called dominating. non-representational signs: color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camera work.

Hence, it is no coincidence that one of the most fascinating and good-natured films about Hollywood is a musical, because it is in this field that the metapoetic and self-analytical point can most clearly be discovered. Set at a time when American cinema was transitioning to sound, Singin' in the Rain is a nostalgic, witty, choreographically perfect story, enriched with several anthology music scenes, in which genre and entertainment rules are completely reconciled.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) - Howard Hawks

Misogynistic entertainment spectacle or radical feminist subjugation of phallogocentrism? A token celebration of popular culture or a devastating critique of the new capitalist order? A glamorous embodiment of liberated female sexuality or the most far-reaching criticism of the musical within its genre terminology?

Hawks was fundamentally intrigued by the musical segments in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (although they provided some, primarily in the appearance of Marilyn Monroe, of the most recognizable images of pop mythology), so he concentrated his attention on the extremely polemical description of gender relations within the framework of today's consumerist civilization, which can be also define as 'female'.

Reproducing the spirit known from his comedies and using the form of the musical to subversively manipulate with, among other things, the image and identity of the modern, material woman, the director in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is on the side of cynicism, both towards the object of his nominal interest and towards the genre itself.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) - Jacques Demy

The greatness and deep significance of Demy, especially when seen in the context of European (art) cinema, can be underlined if we point out his courage to deal with naive material thoughtfully and polyvalently: while his writers were attached to the modernist concept of seriousness, this author is - with the help of Michel Legrand's music and songs - based an adequate compensation on the signifier's all-purposeness and the charm of the fictional unpretentiousness.

What was implicitly present in Lola (1961) and La Baie des anges (Bay of Angels, 1962) in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is finally and genre-definingly established: all the dialogue in the film is sung. The concept of a radicalized musical is also transferred to the entire visual design of the film, especially when it concerns the specific codification of pastel colors: Demy immediately accentuates his artificial greyness, which implies a certain fantasy component as a result of intelligent stylization.

With such rhetoric, the director turns Les Parapluies de Cherbourg into a beautiful romantic melodrama centered on Catherine Daneuve as Geneviève, who is pregnant and has to wait for her boyfriend Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) to return from the army. As the second half of the film progresses, the couple in love also goes on different paths: escapism with an excess of emotions turns into a realistic description of what life brings with it. The final sequence when Geneviève and Guy briefly meet again after several years notes the melancholy, but refuses to end lightly in disappointment.

Romanticism is most often naive, but that is precisely why its formal articulation is a matter of very delicate tact, rhythm and visual finesse: only a few have succeeded as Demy in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg to convincingly depict the ecstasy of the birth of love, the despair of losing it and the necessity of reconciliation with with what we have left in life. So romantic, so beautiful, so disarming.

PS. Every time I look at Demy's masterpiece, I have to ask the same rhetorical question: Has any woman, in painting and on film, ever been more beautiful than Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg?

Cabaret (1972) - Bob Fosse

In Cabaret, Fosse tries to directly confront the political issues of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the early thirties of the last century, without neglecting the genre basis. That is why the songs in the film are used almost in a Brechtian sense, as indicators of the entire social tension that is thematized, that is, as precise (re)presentations of the current social constellation, but also of the hero's emotional or worldview attitude.

The success of Fosse's performance is primarily reflected in the fact that the sung numbers are precisely included in the narrative flow, unlike the standard procedure in musicals, where the story itself is just a mere pretext that should ensure that space is regularly opened for music and dance parts.

From a semantic point of view, the songs are very functional, sometimes a decisive factor in the construction of the meaning that Fosse insists on: not fun breaks, but the very element that is there to profile the motivic continuity in the direction of the desired gradation, from the ode to night life and the carefreeness offered by cabaret (carnivalizing) vision of the world, to a conclusion in much darker tones and general resignation with which Cabaret ends.

The way Fosse uses songs as an intriguing illustration is perhaps best seen in the contextualization of the famous track Tomorrow Belongs to Me, sung by a young Aryan. The text of the song combines the basic motifs characteristic of the NS worldview, which are presented in an emphatically unconditional, almost fateful terminology (this is where the explanatory power of a rhetoric is manifested), where the rise of a new ideology is equated with natural forces.

Also, the melodiousness of the track indicates the populism and comprehensiveness of the penetrating discourse, which is able to be noticed by a wide audience. Precisely in the reaction of the audience, which is increasingly accepting the song, Fosse accurately depicts which social and age groups were the first to accept Nazi politics and how and through which channels its spread took place.