1) “Between the 1930s and 1950s the music of
HSM conforms to this convention.
Appeal to audience?
2) “Aside from the western, the musical may be the most characteristically American genre in the history of film”
More on historical context:
IN ORDER TO CLARIFY THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MUSICAL GENRE ONE MUST EXAMINE THE VARIOUS TRANSITIONS THE MUSICAL HAS UNDERGONE THROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY.
Early musicals:
"..thinly veiled stage productions portraying the goings-ons of show folk behind the scenes" HSM vaguely conforms to this characteristic, has HSM taken on this convention and moulded it to suit a modern audience? Restyling and using this characteristic.
The films were "extravagant productions".
"The films' stories tended to disappear into the ever-present glitter and gold" HSM is not a very extravagant and glitzy production, possibly to cater for a different audience? A different set of audience expectations?
Key people : Fred Astaire (actor), Busby Berkeley (Director and Choreographer) 'Bright Lights' (1935) , 'Gold Diggers of 1935' (1935)
Musicals come of age
1940s and 50s, a change in musicals as they became more “lavish “integrated” productions”. “performance numbers were woven into the storylines themselves”
“Would burst into song at the slightest dramatic provocation”
“MGM (among other studios) exploited audiences’ affections for the genre by regularly putting out box office successes”
“MGM’s mid-1950s song and dance extravaganzas were energetic, athletic masterpieces”
Gene Kelly , Judy Garland , Arthur Freed(producer) Vincent Minnelli (director)
End of the decade there was much speculation that the musical genre was going to disappear due to “rising cost in film production” and a “shift in popular taste”. This didn’t happen but the face of the musical changed significantly by the 1960s
1960s: JFK, civil rights,
Became “more bigger, more expensive, and more of a risk for studios” “The last of the great box office success stories …[was]… The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise 1961). Other big-budget musicals such as “Funny Girl (William Wyler 1968)”, “Doctor Doolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967)” failed at the box office, suggesting that the demise of the musical was in sight.
The demise of the musical
1970s – Genre was nearly destroyed by various successions of box office busts. The genre tried to reinvent itself by becoming more “socially relevant” and conscious with films such as “Cabaret (1972)” and “Milos Forman’s Hair (1979)”
1980s suggested that the musical would be taking on the form of “music video-inspired romances” such as “Flashdance (1983)” and “Footloose (1984)” “which were big on sound and flash, and light on content and interest”
Source: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/education/pdfs/f_h_guide12.pdf
Teenpics
‘Social policies, practices and institutions…have increasingly treated those under twenty as both distinct and separate from adults’ (TheCinemaBook.p.218).
According to Maltby a ‘“self-conscious subculture” of the young developed during the 1920s and 1930a as a largely urban white middle-class response to the increasing leisure opportunities afforded by changing social attitudes’ (Maltby, 1989,p.140)
‘But as himself goes on to argue, the first fully commercialised, cross-class, transnational though for the most part equally white forms of teenage culture emerged in America in the 1950s, as significant numbers of young people with increasing amounts of disposable income and leisure time comprised for the first time in the west both an increasing proportion of the population as a whole and an expanding sector of the market for services and goods’. (TheCinemaBook.p.218).
‘The teenpic itself is normally held to emerge, like modern teenage culture, during the course of the 1950s’. (TheCinemaBook.p.218).
Audience research in the late 1940s indicated that ‘age [was] the most important personal factor by which the movie is categorized and that ‘the decline of movie attendance with increasing age is very sharp’ (Lazarsfield, 1947, pp162-3)
Coming at a time when the industry faced unprecented challenges and changes in the form of divorcement and divestiture, competition from television and other leisure pursuits, suburbanisation, a shift in audience demographics, a precipitous decline in ticket sales and audience attendance, these findings reinforced the growing importance of the teenage market for films and of targeting this market by drawing on aspects of teenage culture and by catering for teenage interests, tastes and concerns. (Doherty, 1988,pp.20-5 and 45-66).
The idea of the juvenile delinquent continued to colour films of all kinds made about teenagers in the 1950s and early 1960s including musicals such as Jailhouse Rock (1957) and West Side Story (1968)
…. . Other films drew on pop and rock ‘n’ roll. Sam Katzman produced the first rock ‘n’ roll musical, Rock Around the Clock. Rock Around the clock was, as Doherty points out, ‘the first hugely successful film marketed to teenagers to the pointed exclusion of their elders’ (Doherty, 1986,p.74, emphasis in original – talk about how Grease does this but HSM does/doesn’t.
…….
‘In the clean teen’s baroque phase, AIP’s Beach Party cycle (1963-65), parents were banished altogether,’ he writes. ‘As compensation though, there was little in this portrait of teenage life that would disturb a worried father. Adults were usually absent, but their values were usually present. Fulfilling the best hope of the older generation, the clean teenpics featured an aggressively normal, traditionally good-looking crew of fresh young faces, “good kids” who preferred dates to drugs and crushed to crime’ (Doherty, 1986,p195)
“Rebellion and deviance as hallmarks of teenage authenticity” (TheCinemaBook.p.219).
Gradd points out, despite ‘ striking legacies, images and myths to the contrary’, there are numerous ‘paths’ to growing up, not just one (Graff, 2996, p.xiii)
As Lewis points out, ‘When we are talking about youth we are talking about a fundamentally mediated culture, one that continues to re-present itself in terms of the products it buys, the art that defines it, and the art that defines it as its own’ (Lewish, 1992, p4)
“teen culture in the 1950s”
Hay points out that teen films often ‘co-opted, parodied or resisted’ the preferred genres and ‘narrative practices of US film culture’ (Hay, 1990.p.336)
Teen pics: some had ‘rites of passage’ narratives, in narratives, in stories which placed their protagonists ‘betwixt and between’ (Hay, 1990.p.336) and adulthood and childhood which explored issues of autonomy, identity, allediance and difference in the context of the teenage peer group on the one hand and adult society the other, and in the ways in which – and the extent to which- hitherto dominant generic norms were inflected or reworked in the process;
“teen culture in the 1950s”
Hay points out that teen films often ‘co-opted, parodied or resisted’ the preferred genres and ‘narrative practices of US film culture’ (Hay, 1990.p.336)
Teen pics: some had ‘rites of passage’ narratives, in narratives, in stories which placed their protagonists ‘betwixt and between’ (Hay, 1990.p.336) and adulthood and childhood which explored issues of autonomy, identity, allediance and difference in the context of the teenage peer group on the one hand and adult society the other, and in the ways in which – and the extent to which- hitherto dominant generic norms were inflected or reworked in the process;
These films in some fashion involve narrative conflict both over finding one’s place within a relatively autonomous society of youths and over defining, negotiating and resisiting differences between youth and adulthood. In the sense that teenpics were given to modelling conflict in this manner and through generic conventions that also deterritorialized and reterritorialized the conventions of traditional Hollywood genres, they can be said to define doubly the relation of ‘the minor’ to a ‘parent’ culture (Hay,1990.p.336)
Doherty describes a ‘palpable desire for parental control and authority’ in post-1960s teenpics (Doherty, 1986,p.237) and by the fact that so many teenpics were marked by what he terms ‘double vision’. Need to do a section on the idea of double vision: Grease has the double vision as it was originally catered towards parents looking back in their old days and to their children. Whereas HSM is simplistic film aimed primarily at tweens, it is only through its large unexpected success that it is also doing well amongst older generations.
Musical Drama
Tendency to use what Delamater calls ‘“big” voices’ (Delamater, 1974, p.123) (Use this quote in the section on the use of music/song/dance in musicals)
Key elements of the musical drama ‘Derive[d] from operetta’:
- The significance of a narrative/storyline which could incorporate ‘Pathos, dramatic conflict and even on occasion an unhappy ending’
-‘it’s attention to situation and character, and the ‘sharply integrative’ organisation of its music, its singing and dancing’ Integration of this type became an ideal not only among those who wrote, directed and choreographed musical dramas, but also among critics, theorists and historians.
