Movies, Moves and Music - The Sonic World of Dance Films - Mark Evans
Gone in a Flash(dance): The Estrangement of Diegetic Performance in the 1980s Teen Dance Film
Movies, Moves and Music - The Sonic World of Dance Films - Mark Evans
Kelly Kessler [+]
DePaul University
Description
The American motion picture industry had all but abandoned the integrated musical by the early 1980s. However, teeming with youthful stars and filled with an angst that could only be resolved by dancing it out to jamming underscored beats, non-integrated dance musicals like Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983), Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984), and Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987) helped the otherwise lacklustre musical take hold once again. Focusing on the three aforementioned dance films, this chapter examines both the visual and aural trends in these films and how they ultimately come into play with—and largely eschew—the norms and perhaps resultant ideological goals of what I will term the more classical song and dance Hollywood musicals which found greatest prominence prior to the mid-sixties. While these later films all present feuding social groups which ultimately find some kind of musical and communal harmony their combination of visual and aural choices work against that narrative project. Perhaps made more to benefit the soundtracks and music video tie-ins than their films’ narratives, these stylistic choices produce a disconnect between the aural and visual tracks that works against the creation of an image of gracefully or passionately dancing bodies and the utopic possibilities implicit in the more classical Hollywood musical.