Saturday Night Fever

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Saturday Night Fever Source: Diener-Hauser While Disco music was already popular in 1977, the film Saturday Night Fever, released in December of that year, turned it into a mass cultural phenomenon. The film centers around the life of Tony Manero, a working class 19-year-old from Brooklyn who finds local stardom as a dancer at a neighborhood discotheque. The film made John Travolta, who played Manero, a superstar, and the soundtrack album, featuring music by the Bee Gees and other groups, became the best selling album of 1978. The vast commercial success of the film and album helped secure Disco’s place as one of the era’s most popular forms of music. Below are two quotes about the film, from noted film critics Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael: “[Saturday Night Fever is] a dark tale about a dead end kid who seeks glory on the dance floor.… This movie kinda shook free from the general depression and drabness of the political and musical atmosphere of the seventies and remembered that was what music was really about, especially if you’re young. It’s having a good time, going out there, and dancing. It’s Saturday night.” -- Roger Ebert, quoted in Ralph Giordano, Social Dancing in America, 2007 “Inside the giant disco hall, the young working-class boys and girls, recent high-school graduates who plod through their jobs all week, saving up for this night, give themselves over to the music.… They dance the L.A. Hustle ceremonially, in patterned ranks -- a mass of dancers unified by the beat, stepping together in trancelike discipline.… At its best… Saturday Night Fever gets at something deeply romantic: the need to move, to dance, and the need to be who you’d like to be. Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary.” -- Pauline Kael, “Nirvana,” The New Yorker, December 26, 1977 WWW.TEACHROCK.ORG.

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The Elusive Utopian Vision in Dance Films
2015 HAWAII UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES ARTS, HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCES & EDUCATION JANUARY 03 - 06, 2015 ALA MOANA HOTEL, HONOLULU, HAWAII THE ELUSIVE UTOPIAN VISION IN DANCE FILMS WOO, MISEONG YONSEI UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Dr. Miseong Woo Dept. of English Language & Literature Yonsei University, South Korea. The Elusive Utopian Vision in Dance Films Synopsis: This paper is an attempt to analyze dominant patterns embedded in the dance films as a genre different from musicals and music videos. I attempt to read the optimistic closure of the narrative in dance movies made in Hollywood between the 1970s to the 2010s as a utopian vision derived from Western art and body philosophy. THE ELUSIVE UTOPIAN VISION IN DANCE FILMS Miseong Woo Associate Professor in Department of English, Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) [email protected] Hawaii University International Conference Jan.3-6, 2015, Honolulu, Hawaii Conference Presentation Paper The Elusive Utopian Vision in Dance Films Miseong Woo (Yonsei University) Why bother to analyze and find meaning when everyone knows dance films are meant for sheer entertainment? As Robin Wood pointed out, “genre cinema today—deprived of the sustaining base of the star/studio system, replaced by a set of businessmen sitting around a conference table asking ‘Well, what made the most money last year?’ and constructing a ‘package’ resembling it as closely as possible but going a little further—obviously survives only in an extremely debased and impoverished form” (310) 1 . From the audience’s perspective, the viewing pleasure of watching the dance movies is similar to watching music videos but with more developed dramatic stories that offer voyeuristic pleasure.
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