(MUSIC) DANCE MOVIES by John Trenz BA in C
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
“INSUBORDINATE” LOOKING: CONSUMERISM, POWER AND IDENTITY AND THE ART OF POPULAR (MUSIC) DANCE MOVIES by John Trenz B.A. in Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, 2000 M.A. Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical and Cultural Studies University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by John Trenz It was defended on August, 8, 2014 and approved by Lucy Fischer, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Film Studies Mark Lynn Anderson, PhD, Associate Professor of Film Studies Randall Halle, PhD, Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies Dissertation Advisor: Jane Feuer, PhD, Professor of Film Studies ii Copyright © by John Trenz 2014 iii “INSUBORDINATE” LOOKING: CONSUMERISM, POWER AND IDENTITY AND THE ART OF POPULAR (MUSIC) DANCE MOVIES John Trenz, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 The dissertation distinguishes the cultural and historical significance of dance films produced after Saturday Night Fever (1977). The study begins by examining the formation of social dancing into a specific brand of commercial entertainment in association with the popularity of Vernon and Irene Castle as social dancing entertainers around 1914. The Castles branded social dancing as a modern form of leisure through their exhibitions of social dancing in public, through products that were marketed with their name, in a book of illustrations for “Modern Dancing” (1914), and through Whirl of Life (1915), a film they produced about the origination of their romance and popularity as dancing entertainers. The chapter emphasizes the way in which the Castles represent their success in romance and entertainment as validated by pleasures reflected back to them by their audiences. The chapter concludes with an analysis of The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers commemorate the Castles’ influence upon audiences to symbolically participate in popular social dancing through consumption of their products. The second chapter looks at the way in which representations of youth dancing in musical entertainment produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s similarly mythologized their power through dominant discourses of the folk musical, surveillance, deviance, and instruction in Blackboard Jungle, West Side Story, and Bye Bye Birdie. iv The last chapter performs a close reading of dance movies produced after 1977. Dancing styles originating from disco and hip hop subcultures in the 1970s are signified in dance movies as a source for representing renewal of community, popular art, and public space by their proximity to audiences, popular song, and artifice. Modern innovations in media technology accommodate these transformations. The dissertation argues that dance movies mimic folk musical rhetoric to validate popular culture as a source of renewal for traditional arts. The dissertation concludes that dance movies are a paradoxical modern genre of folk film musicals that reconstruct traditional relations of folk performance and reception as a consumer process that commemorates cultural progress and social change through symbolic participation in social dancing to popular song. v TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................... VI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION: DANCE MOVIES .............................................................................. 1 2.0 DANCING WITH THE “CASTLE AUDIENCE”: FROM WHIRL OF LIFE (1915) TO THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE (1939) ............................................... 28 2.1 THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE ................................................ 56 3.0 EARLY TEENPICS, 60S YOUTH MUSICALS AND THE DANCE MOVIE ........... 62 3.1 MODERN YOUTH MUSICALS: WEST SIDE STORY (1961) AND BYE BYE BIRDIE (1963) .................................................................................................................... 79 4.0 THE DANCE FILM AS FOLK ART (1983-2006).......................................................... 94 5.0 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 127 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 138 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the dissertation committee for their advice and support throughout the entire process of working on my project on dance films. I am especially grateful to Jane Feuer for directing the dissertation. Her professionalism, humor, honesty, and brilliant style of executing criticism have made a huge impression on me. I am honored to have been her student. From Jane I have accumulated a repertoire of mantras for research and writing, not all of which I have adhered to unfortunately but none of which I will ever forget or stop aspiring to. I would like to thank Mark Lynn Anderson for his insightful examinations of my work and for encouraging me to stick with ideas that were difficult to articulate. I have always felt more driven as a result of your feedback. I would like to thank Lucy Fischer for posing astute challenges to my claims and for drawing my attention to opportunities to better distinguish my work within the fields of dance and film studies. Because of her expert leadership and knowledge of the profession I am better prepared to take this project farther. I would like to thank Randall Halle for encouraging me to take risks, to be exciting, and to engage film study with genuine care for politics, critical distinction, and purpose. I am especially grateful to Neepa Majumdar for generously agreeing to take part in my comprehensive exams on short notice. I am indebted to the Film Study Center at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and its director Charles Silver for providing me unlimited access to boxes of clippings on dance vii in film and Vernon and Irene Castle, for a beautiful setting in which to study materials, and for arranging private screenings of the Castles’ film Whirl of Life on 16mm on multiple occasions. I would like to thank my lovely colleague and friend Kathleen Murray for offering editing advice on portions of the dissertation in the final stages of its completion and for much needed encouragement. I would like to thank Billups Allen for copy editing early drafts of the dissertation. A heartfelt thank you goes to Nancy Glazener, Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department, for keeping me in the game when deadlines or steps were missed. I am appreciative of everything you have done for me. I would like to thank Eric Clarke for having shared incredible stories and laughter and for being a phenomenal teacher and human being. I could not have finished this project without the administrative support of Sandy Russo, Connie Arelt, Fiore Pagliano, Mark Kemp, Denise Thomas, Jesse Dougherty, Jennifer Florian, Alyssa Hesse, Joseph Kluchurosky, and Jesse Burton-Nicholson. I cannot thank you enough. I originally became invested in researching dance in film while working on my undergraduate honor’s thesis on the films of Bob Fosse under the direction of Rick Altman, Lauren Rabinovitz, and Jane Desmond at the University of Iowa. I would like to them and Dudley Andrew for making me feel included in a vital process of intellectual exchange and cultural investigation that was fostered by the communicative relationship between film studies and film production at the University of Iowa. I would like to thank Kathleen Newman for mentoring me through the M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. And a special thank you goes to Marian Aguiar. David Shumway, and Peggy Knapp at Carnegie Mellon for introducing rigorous and careful approaches to doing cultural study. I would like to thank Kerry Mockler, Allison Patterson, and Shelagh Patterson for taking time to read and respond to early drafts of my work. I would like to thank Thora Brylowe for viii being an awesome friend over the past eleven years, ever since we entered the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University together. I would like to thank Kathleen Murray, Llana Carroll, Tanine Allison, Seung-Hwan Shin, Allison Patterson, Kirsten Strayer, Jedd Hakimi, Dana Och, Kristin Fallica, Usha Iyer, and Julie Nakama for wonderful conversations and fantastic fun we have shared. I would like to thank Usha Iyer in particular for sharing with me her research on dance in Indian cinema. I would like to thank all of my friends and colleagues in the English Department and the Film Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh for making me feel like I was part of something bigger. I have learned a lot from everyone. I would like to thank my parents, John and LaVerne Trenz, and my sister, Kristen Trenz, for their love, support, and constant encouragement. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to pursue graduate study in the same city where I grew up, only a few neighborhoods away from campus. My family has kept me grounded and going in the process. To my family, extended family, friends of my family, and friends I have grown to love