ENGLISH 5060/7053

Film Styles & Genres: The Hollywood Musical

Winter 2018
Monday & Wednesday, 2:30 - 5:00 pm
State 326

Web address for this page:
http://www.shaviro.com/Classes/MusicalsW18.html

Steven Shaviro (shaviro@shaviro.com or shaviro@wayne.edu)

5057 Woodward, Room 9309
Office hours: Monday and Wednesday 1 pm - 2 pm, and by appointment

This class will trace the history of the Hollywood musical. As soon as the movies were able to use synchronized sound, filmmakers became interested in presenting music-making, singing, and dancing on film. Movie musicals originated in the late 1920s, and they have remained popular ever since. Musicals are unusual among popular movie genres, for their high degree of self-reflexivity, and their privileging of spectacle, or “the cinema of attractions,” over plot. In a certain sense, musicals represent an idea of “pure cinema”: they focus on sensory elements of space, time, camera movement, and physical gestures, at the expense of narrative and thematic concerns, At the same time, they are aggressively populist and proudly middle-brow or low-brow, in sharp contrast to high-brow art films that are equally self-reflexive and equally concerned with cinematic materiality. We will look at these issues as we trace the history of Hollywood musicals from their beginnings in the early sound era, where they took the form of either filmed operettas or large-cast extravaganzas, through the rise of the solo and partnered dances (Astaire & Rogers), to the MGM spectaculars of the 1940s and 1950s, and beyond, to the decreasing frequency but wild diversity of musical experiments in the post-classical era, and onwards to today. The class will be largely restricted to one national tradition, that of the United States and Hollywood; though we will also look at a few foreign films that present themselves as being explicitly in dialogue with Hollywood forms.

One book has been ordered for this class: Steven Cohan, ed., Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (HM). Other texts will be made available in the form of PDFs.

Class requirements include regular attendance, participation in class discussion, and completion of writing assignments:

• Two short exercises (1000 words each) (due on Feb 21 & on April 18)
• Final paper (3000 words for undergraduates; 6000 words for graduate students) (due on April 30, one week after the last class)
• All assignments should be emailed to me at shaviro@shaviro.com

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

By the end of the course, successful students will have learned about the history, aesthetics, politics, and influence of Hollywood movie musicals.

In addition, by the end of the course successful students should be able to:

• Demonstrate in-depth knowledge of course topic(s).
• Demonstrate expertise in close reading, analysis, and argument.
• Think creatively and generate fresh perspectives.
• Conduct advanced research by developing a research question; locating, evaluating, and integrating primary and secondary resources; and placing project in the context of relevant scholarship .
• Write with fluency, clarity, and style.

In addition, by the end of the course successful graduate students should be able to:

• Write arguments that are coherent, organized, and consistent.
• Engage in scholarly conversations in the field as part of advanced research.
• Relate course knowledge to issues within English Studies.
• Successfully apply appropriate field-specific and interdisciplinary methodologies to the course topic.

January 8:

• 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros, 1933)
• Steven Cohan, “Introduction: Hollywood Musicals” (HM 1-15)

January 10:

• Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros, 1933)
• Martin Rubin, “Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical” (HM 53-61)
• Patricia Mellencamp, “Sexual Economics: Gold Diggers of 1933” (HM 65-76)
• Pamela Robertson, “Feminist Camp in Gold Diggers of 1933” (HM 129-142)
• Linda Mizejewski, “Beautiful White Bodies” (HM 183-193)

January 17:

• Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, Paramount, 1932)
• Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia” (HM 19-30)
• Jane Feuer, “The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment” (HM 31-40)
• Rick Altman, “The American Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative” (HM 41-51)

January 22:

• The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, MGM, 1934)

January 24:

• Swing Time (George Stevens, RKO, 1936)
• Megan Pugh, “Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Pick Themselves Up” (pdf)
• Steven Cohan, “Feminizing the Song-and-Dance Man” (HM 87-101)
• Michael Rogin, “New Deal Blackface” (HM 175-182)

January 29:

• Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone, 20th Century Fox, 1943)
• Elizabeth Reich, “Resounding Blackness: Liveness and the Reprisal of Black Performance in Stormy Weather,” from Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (pdf)

January 31:

• Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1943)
• Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical (Introduction) (pdf)
• James Naremore, “Uptown Folk” (pdf)
• Adam Knee, “Doubling, Music, and Race in Cabin in the Sky” (pdf)
• Susan Smith, “Race and Utopia”, from The Musical: Race, Gender, and Performance (pdf)

February 5:

• The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, 20th Century Fox, 1943)
• Jeremy Carr, “That’s Entertainment: Close-Up on The Gang’s All Here”, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/that-s-entertainment-close-up-on-the-gang-s-all-here
• Shari Roberts, “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” (HM 143-153)

February 7:

• Meet Me in St. Louis (VIncente Minnelli, MGM, 1944)
• Gerald Kaufman, “Meet Me in St. Louis” (pdf)
• James Naremore, “Third Nature: Meet Me in St. Louis” (pdf)

February 12:

• The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)
• Richard Dyer, “Judy Garland and Camp” (HM 107-113)
• Matthew Tinkom, “Working Like a Homosexual” (HM 115-128)

February 14:

• On the Town (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, MGM, 1949)

February 19:

• An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1951)

February 21:

• Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, MGM, 1952)
• Peter Wollen, “Singin’ in the Rain” (pdf)
• Carol Clover, “Dancin’ in the Rain” (HM 157- 173)
• FIRST SHORT EXERCISE DUE

February 26:

• The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1953)
• Stanley Cavell, “Something Out of the Ordinary” (pdf)
• Stanley Cavell, “Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise” (pdf)
• Robert Gooding-Williams, “Aesthetics and Receptivity” (pdf)
• Further exchange between Cavell and Gooding-Williams (pdf)
• William Rothman, “On Stanley Cavell’s Band Wagon” (pdf)
• Dennis Giles, “Show-Making” (pdf)

February 28:

• Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)
• Nelly Furman, “Screen Politics” (pdf)
• Jeff Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices” (pdf)

March 5:

• The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

March 7:

• Hair (Milos Forman, 1979)

March 12-14: SPRING BREAK

Long films: to be watched on your own over the break:

• West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1962)
• Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968)

March 19:

• Discussion of West Side Story and Funny Girl
• Stacy Wolf, “Barbra’s Funny Girl Body” (pdf)
• Alberto Sandoval Sanchez, “West Side Story: A Puerto Rican Reading of ‘America’” (pdf)
• Frances Negron-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity” (pdf)
• Brian Eugenio Herrera, “How the Sharks Became Puerto Rican” (pdf)

March 21:

• Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

March 26:

• Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
• Mitchell Morris, “Cabaret, America’s Weimar, and Mythologies of the Gay Subject” (pdf)
• Terri Gordon, “Film in the Second Degree: Cabaret and the Dark Side of Laughter” (pdf)

March 28:

• All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

April 2:

• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
• Rodney Hill, “The New Wave Meets the Tradition of Quality” (pdf)
• Anne Duggan, “Fairy Tale and Melodrama”, from Queer Enchantments (pdf)

April 4:

• The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
• Svea Becker and Bruce Williams, “What Ever Happened to West Side Story? Gene Kelly, jazz dance, and not so real men in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort” (pdf)

April 9:

• Window Shopping (Golden Eighties) (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
• Steven Shaviro, “Clichés of Identity: Chantal Akerman’s Musicals” (pdf)

April 11:

• One From the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)

April 16:

• Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

April 18

• Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002)
• SECOND SHORT EXERCISE DUE

April 23:

• La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

There are an additional number of important musicals that I would have liked to show in this class, but that are too long to be shown in a single class period. I recommend trying to watch them on your own:

• A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
• The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)
• On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Vincente Minnelli, 1970)
• Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, 1971)
• New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)
• Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
• Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007)