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This chapter discusses recent independent films that reference the audiovisual techniques of film musicals but juxtapose these elements with other stylistic means. The two case studies are Sally Potter's Yes (2004) and Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud (2005). Potter uses an audiovisual language that falls between cinematic realism and the fantasy of the musical number to suggest a mode of “becoming” that imparts a reparative message (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). The dominant modality in Tsai's film is more deconstructive of existing genres; namely the film musical and hardcore pornography. Theoretically, the chapter addresses the affective nature of audiovisual flow and the consequences of its interruption through theories of performativity and camp aesthetics. Flow is theorized as well with reference to Deleuzean aesthetics, Raymond Williams's idea of media flow, Csikszentmihaly's idea of psychological flow, research on musical repetition, and surrealist theory on “automatic writing.”

Besides its role as a narrative agent, music has been featured in television to pleasure its audience, creating what Carolyn Abbate would call a “drastic” experience. However, the pleasures of television music are often highly mediated and restrained, permitting the audience to derive culturally based pleasure (what Barthes would call plaisir) from the music but not a more visceral, primordial pleasure (jouissance). This chapter surveys the musical variety show and situation comedies that employ music. While musical variety shows have served as promotional vehicles for artists whom TV audiences find amenable (Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams), throughout television's history many situation comedies have been presented as mini‐musicals in which the narrative action of the program is interrupted by a musical presentation on‐screen. Programs produced by Desilu Studios in the 1950s and 1960s, such as I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Andy Griffith Show, often imitated the Hollywood film musical by featuring musical presentations of a show‐within‐a‐show to showcase musical talent. Such scenes would interrupt the narrative flow of the episode, and so some narrative pretense would be made to accommodate the musical interruption.

Examining the points where dance and film meet both historically and aesthetically leads to an analysis of the moment where the everyday body moves into dance in the film musical. While the musical number is traditionally seen as an interruption within the fiction film narrative, the musical star is refigured in this chapter as the unifying element, holding together shaky plotlines and outrageous scenarios with pure corporeal force. Through the body of the dancer, the movements of everyday life and dance spill into and across each other, challenging the centrality of the linear drive in these classical fiction films. So here as elsewhere, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image brings together avant‐garde and popular dancefilm traditions by identifying strategies common to both. Furthermore, in a move to redress the dominance of male dancers in discussions about film musicals, the book focuses on female stars such as Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, and Liza Minnelli and the kinds of moves they made.

The book starts by placing the musical film and its audience into an overall historical/social context, setting forth the prime importance of the first musicals. It proposes the ways to reclaim these films from years of cultural/historical neglect through historical data as well as the use of reception theory to view the films within their proper context. The parameters of the book — time lines, genres, premises — are all established, as is the book's distinctive tone and style. The main vantage points are threefold: (1) Background and history; (2) A viewer's changing perceptions; (3) These works' precarious relationship with their audience.

This book is about musical performance on film, the use of music within film and film musicals: a triple focus that articulates the complex relationship that exists between music and the cinematic text. While the film musical has always been seen as the main vehicle for cinematic musical performance, it is by no means the only place where singing, dancing, jazz bands or even on-screen orchestras are featured. Indeed, the sheer range of musical performances or what we call ‘musical moments’ that have appeared throughout cinema history, together with the extraordinary procession of featured stars and performers is remarkable.

Peter Chan’s 2005, Perhaps Love, depicts the filming of a musical film, and serves as a prime example of mise-en-abîme metacinema, or in other words, the metacinema of production. Close reading of the film reveals the circulation of musical genre conventions from Bollywood to Hollywood to Hong Kong and China. Key among these conventions are the display of spectacular images of singing and dancing in combination with dazzling editing speeds reflecting the influence, particularly, of Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge! Gender relations, always an important focus in musical film, here point to postcolonial formations linking (and distinguishing) mainland China, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, and which, in the end, abandon the female lead.

This chapter examines Zouzou (1933) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1934) as cinematically ambivalent in their portrayal of Baker as both a “primitive” performer and a glamorous chanteuse. The productions play up pseudo-ethnographic fantasies of Black subjects while their narratives subjugate Baker’s characters. And yet their ambitious musical numbers associate her with Eurocentric notions of beauty in an attempt to establish her as a film star. In so doing, they provide Baker with a level of cinematic authorship, visibility, and glamour inaccessible to Black women in 1930s Hollywood. Consequently, Baker should be recognized as the chief author of her musical numbers as she uses these scenes to create a multifaceted and self-referential screen image, negating simplistic readings of a performative Black womanhood.

This chapter examines Dunham’s interventions in World War II-era U.S. cinema. Focusing on three of Dunham’s Hollywood films, Carnival of Rhythm (1941), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather (1943), the chapter recovers Dunham’s groundbreaking contribution as a Black woman choreographer to midcentury U.S. cinema. Establishing that Dunham was the first Black choreographer to gain onscreen credit for her work in Hollywood, it shows how her performances represented a negotiation of studio-era racial codes but also how she mediated such codes and was able to assert her authorship by presenting a vision of Black dancing womanhood in Hollywood that was pioneering its open engagement with sensuality, cultural diversity, and choreographic allusions to ballet and modern dance.

The Introduction posits the book's guiding question: How did popular songs influence the industrial organization and narrative form of Hollywood cinema during the conversion to sound, from 1927 through 1931? A case is presented for studying the use of songs in non-musical films, a loose category of genre consisting of films that tended to showcase, motivate, and integrate songs in ways that could not always be explained by appealing to the conventions of Broadway musical genres. Over the course of the transition to sound, the status of the popular song performance in non-musical films shifted from modular attraction to integrated narrative device. A study of this shift and its industrial context illuminates a rich period of heterogeneity of film form and style. The Introduction closes with brief summaries of the book's five chapters.

Chapter 1 offers a case study that illuminates how norms of studio-era film production came to be negotiated with the multimedia context of the 1950s and early 1960s. In exploring the production of “Elvis movies” from 1956 to 1961, this chapter examines how Hollywood transformed Presley the rock ’n’ roll star into a singular screen attraction. Producer Hal Wallis, a veteran of the studio era, sought a balance between the cyclical, generic structure of the former star system with the new opportunities for cross-platform promotion portended by the media landscape of the 1950s. Presley’s rebel-oriented 1950s films put on display what modern media fame meant in the second half of the 1950s and suggest a hierarchical relationship between television and film. Subsequently, Presley’s 1960s work enacted an assembly-line integration of feature film and LP record production, demonstrating how Wallis’s star-making formula during the studio era translated to a cross-platform context. In this way, Hollywood adapted to the “electronic age” of the 1950s while maintaining strict control over the output of a star’s labor, reconfiguring the power structures of the star system by aligning media industries into the synchronous production of a multimedia star image.

The nationalised DEFA (Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft) was East Germany's only film company. As in other areas of industrial production in the GDR, the annual output of films was planned many years in advance by the DEFA management, the aim being to produce a balanced package covering a variety of genres including musicals and comedies. This chapter focuses on how the communist authorities in East Germany attempted to compete with Western popular culture by producing socialist musicals that celebrated factory life and farm collectives in the period between 1958 and 1968. Interestingly, as the chapter points out, the conventions of escapism and fun remained central to these films, although Western ‘decadence’ was rejected in favour of a strong emphasis on women's emancipation, especially the right to work. This chapter looks at two film musicals directed by two East German filmmakers who specialised in entertainment films – Gottfried Kolditz's Revue um Mitternacht (Midnight Revue, 1962) and Joachim Hasler's Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968) – both of which were domestic box office hits.

Rock ’n’ roll was initially regarded as a threat that combined aesthetic and social delinquency. Its energies were, however, primary to utopianism of the emerging cultural movements. Just as rock ’n’ roll displaced the hegemony of the Great American Song book, the rock ’n’ roll musical both displaced and recreated the classic film musical. In developing new techniques for representing musical performance, the fans and entire cultural gestalt that the new music sustained, cinema became second only to records in the creation of a rock ’n’ roll culture. But even as cinema developed audio-visual compositions based on the music—forms of rock ’n’ roll visuality—it also had to confront the competition that rock ’n’ roll posed to itself and other components of the established culture industries.

This chapter analyses the highly successful Hindi film, Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (Who am I to You…!, 1994), and situates it within the context of Bollywood's emergent global importance. It argues that the enormous popularity of the film can be partly ascribed to its successful combination of ingredients. All films from India incorporate music and spectacle into their narratives, although they do not necessarily integrate them in the style of the classical musical, since in Bollywood cinema music plays an ‘organic’ role that exceeds Western conventions in important ways. The appeal of Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! seemed to lie in the particular way in which it achieved this, while also addressing contemporary anxieties around the relationship between tradition and modernity in Indian culture. The traditional Western forms of the film musical no longer dominate and the diversification of the musical performance in film therefore suggests the need to expand the range of critical approaches to particular modes of popular culture.

Fred Astaire worked on a relatively small scale, trying always to stay within what he once called the “welcome limit.” Part of the task of routine making involved forging a unified, original structure that combined musical, choreographic, and cinematic choices into a satisfying whole. Astaire solved the question of cinematic unity by framing his dancing figure in its entirety, from head to toe, in a full shot and only rarely allowing cutaways from the dance. He stuck to this approach across his entire career and thereby made his routines legible, first and foremost, as dances. This chapter analyzes three idiosyncratic routines from the late 1940s—a period of aesthetic and commercial uncertainty in popular music, jazz, and the film musical alike—from three successive films: The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), Three Little Words (1950), and Let's Dance (1950). This triptych demonstrates Astaire's ability to work without the formal “net” of conventional song forms.

Several companies producing musical films, such as Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros., were hit by the Great Depression, although not driven to bankruptcy, and their response to this was to cut back on the production of musicals. Instead, Warner Bros. produced films that reflected the Great Depression, such as Public Enemy and Little Caesar, which are gangster films. Darryl F. Zanuck, second-in-command to the studio head of Warner Bros., knew that they needed a tough story to revive the backstager musical. Zanuck assigned a team of screenwriters to adapt Rope's novel, which is a story that involved a homosexual love affair between a director and a leading man. To provide songs to such particular numbers, Zanuck brought Harry Warren and Al Dubin in as their new songwriting team. They were assigned to Hollywood to write new songs for a film version of the Broadway musical Spring is Here.

Popular music has almost always been dance music. The dance bands' primary economic role was playing for dancing, and the film musical—especially during the era of the band pix—reached out to dancers in particular. This chapter considers how Fred Astaire's films bridged the gap between dancing couples on-screen and real social dancers moving to the changing beat of popular music. This connection is easiest to see and hear in the named partner dances Astaire created and introduced across his career. Named dances embody a specific marketing strategy: create a buzz around a new dance that generates interest in a new film. In this light, named-dance songs fit into the patterns of Hollywood's standard promotional efforts. Astaire, who made his own named dances, participated directly in studio promotion efforts. The chapter looks at Astaire the maker of partner dances, and explores links between Astaire and his various partners in the idealized realm of the film musical and real-life couples in actual American ballrooms.

This chapter discusses the director’s approach of re-locating the songs and giving them a new context within the narrative of the piece. It focuses on the gender reversals that Taymor introduced in the performance of Beatles songs in Across the Universe (2007), and explores the performativity of songs that are remediated, re-gendered and relocated into a new dramaturgical context. The analysis is completed by considering the more spectacle-based scenes of the film, and suggesting how reading them in new meta-theatrical contexts creates a hyper-reality that contributes to the complex and textured dramaturgy of the work. Selected songs/scenes from the musical is discussed in detail to exemplify the challenge to integration of technologized dance, puppetry, liveness and constructedness.