Hollywood’s Choreographic Genius, Busby Berkeley from “Becoming Film Literate” by Vinnie LoBrutto Before there was Bob Fosse, or Joe Gideon, his on-screen persona in ALL THAT JAZZ, there was Julian Marsh and Pretty Lady in the black-and-white musical 42ND STREET (1933). Marsh (Warner Baxter) is Broadway’s greatest musical/comedy stage director. He signs a contract to direct Pretty Lady, a deal the producers make because they’re convinced Marsh’s name on the dotted line will insure a hit. Marsh is edgy, short-tempered, and desperate. He should be rich and living off the wealth of his success, but Wall Street has drained all his cash. It is the early 1930s, The Great Depression has taken its toll on the country. The Broadway musical distracts Americans from their pain and is an escape for a nation in despair. Pretty faces, leggy blondes, catchy tunes, snappy dance numbers and uplifting fantasies are just the ticket. 42ND STREET was directed by Lloyd Bacon (1890-1955) (KNUTE ROCKNE ALL AMERICAN, GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY) who handled the dialogue scenes. The Julian Marsh behind Julian Marsh’s extravagant, glitzy, and delightfully excessive vision was Hollywood’s choreographic genius, the one and only Busby Berkeley (1895-1976). Berkeley was a stage baby, his father was a theater director and his mother was an actress of the boards and the screen. At age three Busby’s family moved to New York, at five the boy made his debut as a stage performer. Schooling at a military academy and service in World War I as a field artillery lieutenant instilled in Berkeley the discipline and precision he would later bring to his innovative work in film. By the end of the Roaring Twenties Busby Berkeley was known on Forty-Second street as one of Broadway’s best dance directors – a reputation he shared with the fictional Julian Marsh. Samuel Goldwyn brought Berkeley to Hollywood in 1930 to choreograph musical sequences featuring the mogul’s star Eddie Cantor. In 1933 he began to work at Warner Bros. where Berkeley was empowered with the technology and the technicians to realize his vision of that seminal American decade. Two major forces pulled America out of the misery of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Hollywood dream factory. For the suffering, public entertainment was a powerful healer. On the giant screen they could see glamour and beauty and for a few hours could escape from poverty, joblessness, soup kitchens, and a broken economy. During the 1930s Busby Berkeley seized the time and did more than just distract his countrymen. His delirious, extravagant, sexy, frenetic, and decadent concoctions raised the spirits and contributed to the delightfully vulgar American pop culture. His metaphor was a celebration of the populace. The production numbers in 42nd Street are filled with a procession of humanity, configured in rows and circles moving in every direction of the compass. Going beyond the individual, past the pair to the masses was part of Berkeley’s more is more philosophy. The “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” number in 42ND STREET is set in a sexually provocative context . The young marrieds are on a honeymoon train to Niagara Falls. As they skip through the cars, the packed train of the initiated smirk, and chirp at the innocents knowing what will come next. The number appears to be light and innocent, but there is erotic intensity when from behind the curtains of their berth the bride extends her arm to put her shoes out onto the train hall floor. With her arm up and fully extended, holding her shoe, Berkeley intimates the sexual rapture behind the curtain. Berkeley is most associated with female dance configurations in abstractgeometric patterns. Here his concept is stark black-and-white and a circle in an inverted V formed by the spread-eagle gams of the dancers. The women are linked arm-to arm and circle on a turntable to the music of Young and Healthy. The camera moves in between their legs and finds the juvenile and a platinum blonde lying down on the shiny reflective surface heads up and smiling. The abstraction of the limbs transcends the potential tastelessness of the visual image. This is the point-of-view of an abstractionist who uses live flesh as his medium, not the perverse daydream of a dirty old or young man – maybe it is both. Berkeley ends the play within the film with social commentary. The musical dance number that concludes 42ND STREET may be his masterpiece. The man who was Broadway’s hottest dance director in the 1920s with a record of 21 hit shows returns to the Big Apple without leaving the Hollywood soundstage to present the street as microcosm of high and low life. The elite and the proles intermingle. A society of rich and poor, the rich own the town and pick all of its riches, but the underclass survives here too, off the wealth of the upper class. They can thrive in spite and because of the rich. The street is democracy. The street is desire and fear. Decades before Sam Peckinpah, Busby Berkeley turns horror into ballet. A woman’s leap to the street, an act of desperation is also a moment of courage and bravery – she for getting to safety, her rescuer for his strength and command. Life is fleeting though, as the knife in the back proves, and as in life, both the high and the low pulse by without a turn of the head from the masses. Ironically, Berkeley’s radical application of formation, syncopation and Dadaist absurdity still maintains the sanctity of the proscenium stage. In traditional musicals before and after Berkeley, the camera stays on the audience side of the view to maintain the relationship with the stage and its performers. Movie musicals were designed to be theater-on-film with a modest breaking of the rules regarding dividing line between the audience and on the stage. This was mostly done through composition and camera movement. Not until Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ was the line totally broken down. The viewer was hurled inside the dance through cinematic means. Berkeley turned the text and aesthetics of the musical through his choreography of dancer and camera but his roots on the Broadway stage didn’t allow violation of the old rule. He would create a circle and turn it, but not circle the camera so it became the POV of performers on the stage. Berkeley did transcend the 180 degree rule with the top shot where the camera looks straight down on the choreography in a kaleidoscope view with a vista of new possibilities he explored in much of his work. The top shot became part of the contemporary cinematic idiom when Martin Scorsese, who grew up worshiping Berkeley and the American musical, applied the idea boldly in TAXI DRIVER. D.W. Griffith may receive most of the credit for the close-up and other aspects of movie grammar, but the top shot, also know as God’s P.O.V. or an overhead, is pure cinema.                 Under the Influence of Busby Berkeley by Kriota Willberg Busby Berkeley was a great director/choreographer in his day, but what has he done for us lately? Turns out . . . a lot! Berkeley’s penchant for crazy camera moves, sex, elaborate staging, geometry and stream-of-consciousness editing style still influences artists today, and has been used to sell cigarettes, music, household appliances, food, and pharmaceuticals. How many choreographers can claim such a impact? The following array of independent and studio films, music videos, and television commercials demonstrate Berkeley’s influence on cinematography and choreographic styles over the last 70 years, as presented in Frieda & Roy Furman Gallery during Dance on Camera Festival 2009 at Lincoln Center. Homage: Big Budget 1. THE BOYFRIEND (1971) Dir. Ken Russell, Choreographer Christopher Gable 43 sec 2. INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) Dir. Steven Spielberg, Choreographer Danny Daniels 36 Sec 3. TEESRI MANZIL (1966) Director Vijay Anand 1:32 min Homage: Independent Shorts 4. SUNSCREEN SERENADE (2009) Dir./Chor. Kriota Willberg Music Carmen Borgia 36 sec 5. FUNF’N’TWIST (2008) Dir. Anna Brady Nuse, Score J Why, 37 sec 6. SOS – Singer/Songwriter Gin Wigmore, Director Daniel Reisinger of Straighty180, Chor. Richard James Allen 38 sec 7. COFFEE TIME Director Kat Green 45 sec Commercials 8. Lucky Strike commercial (1948) 39 sec 9. Nip/Tuck commercial (2008) 20 sec 10. Nuvaring commercial (2008) Reproduced with permission of Schering Corporation and N.V. Organon. All rights reserved. Nuvaring is a registered trademark of N.V. Organon. 2min The Million Dollar Mermaid Homage 11. THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PT 1 (1981) Director Mel Brooks, Choreographer Alan Johnson 51 sec 12. THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER (1987) Director Jerry Rees 44 sec 13. AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (1999) Director Jay Roach, Choreographer Becky Dyroen-Lancer 47 sec 14. THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER (1981) Director Jim Henson, Chor. Anita Mann 1:10 min Crotches, Sex, and other parts 15. THE BOYFRIEND – Dir. Ken Russell, Chor. Christopher Gable 30 sec. 16. THE BIG LEBOWSKI (2003) Dir. Joel Cohen, Chor. Bill and Jacqui Landrum 1:10 min 17. PAGE MISS GLORY (1936) Director Fred Avery 1:01 min 18. WHO’S THE TOP? (2005) Dir. Jennie Livingston, Chor. John Carrafa, costume designer, Donna Zakowska 1:10 min 19. TOE JAM (2008) Director Keith Scofield, Music The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal 1:18 min Post-Postmodern Influences 20. SLEEP (2007): Dir. Jonathon Rosen, Sleeper: Danielle Abbiate Music: Tom Recchion, excerpt from “The Elephant God”1:41 min 21. SYMMETRY (2008) Dir./Chor. Jess Curtis, Video Kwame Brown 1 min Finale 22. LET FOREVER BE (1999) Director Michel Gondry, Music Chemical Brothers, Chor. Keith Young, Dir.of Photography Lance Accord 3:41 min Kriota Willberg’s choreography credits include GRASSHOPPER (Todd Alcott), ON THE ROAD WITH JUDAS (JJ Lask), and her feature THE BENTFOOTES. She received an EMPAC grant for her Berkeley film parody Bodies – Movies by Claudia Rosiny The following is the second half of an article, part one of which was published in Dance on Camera Journal November-December, 2008 Mass Movement and Emotion in D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance With INTOLERANCE (1916), David Wark Griffith re-wrote history. His three-hour masterpiece of silent film is recognized as a milestone in the evolution of the cinema. According to IMDB, during his tenure at the Biograph Company from 1908-13, Griffith produced more than 400 short films ranging from 9 to 15 minutes, in different genres such as film adaptations from literature, comedy, crime movies, drama and westerns. Members of the Denishawn School were cast as actors and dancers in INTOLERANCE and other works – and some of Griffith’s early short films even took dance as a subject. In BEHIND THE SCENES (1908) a mother works as a dancer to support her ailing daughter. OIL AND WATER (1912) stars Blanche Sweet as a dancer torn between career and home, in a performance that reminded one critic of Isadora Duncan. Griffith is best known for his choreographed crowd celebrations, his differentiated approach to acting in silent movies, his refined use of close-ups, and for pioneering the use of complex montage (from the French word for “putting together”) to tell a story. Of course, Griffith didn’t invent these film technique, but his use of close-ups and montage in short film set a new standard for the transformation of literary narrative to cinematic narrative. In 1915, Griffith completed THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Despite later criticism for its support of racism and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, it was the most successful box office attraction of its time, and is recorded as the first feature-length work in American film history. Even more sophisticated than THE BIRTH OF A NATION, was INTOLERANCE,subtitled A SUN PLAY OF THE AGES or LOVE’S STRUGGLE THROUGHOUT THE AGES. It showed four complex, interwoven narrative lines, each with its own set of characters and – in the original print – each story tinted in a different color. “It is the most incredible experiment in story-telling that has ever been tried,” Julian Johnson wrote in Photoplay in December 1916. For many historians, INTOLERANCE was Griffith’s response to the enormous negative criticism leveled at THE BIRTH OF A NATION, which remains controversial today. The film deals with mankind’s intolerance during four ages in world history: the Babylonian period, the Judean era, the French Renaissance and modern America. These four stories are paralleled and interwoven through crosscutting, and unified by the recurring image of Lillian Gish, as Eternal Motherhood. Her iconic image, rocking the cradle of humanity, serves as a symbol of continuity for the entire history of the human race, and a representation of the cycle of life and death. Dance scenes occur in INTOLERANCE only in the modern and Babylonian sections. But many of Griffith actresses were dancers, or actors with dance training, among them Lillian Gish, who took classes at the Denishawn School when it opened in Los Angeles in 1915. Griffith had shot films already during his Biograph years in California, where he first wrote of discovering “Hollywood, a nice little village with beautiful flower gardens and friendly people” in 1910. According to Elizabeth Kendall, scrapbooks of actress Carol Dempster reveal that Griffith had visited classes at the Denishawn School before creating INTOLERANCE. There he met dancers such as Dempster, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, and there he was inspired to develop the elaborate dance scenes in the Babylonian story. Because of his own background as an actor, he was sensitive to a style of acting that would distinguish him as a director of silent films. Instead of the strongly expressive representations from the German Expressionism that permeated German film culture after World War I, Griffith preferred a more subtle form of acting. Such unobtrusive but poignant facial expression became synonymous with cinematic acting, and is best seen in the acting style of Mae Marsh as the Dear One, throughout the modern story. “Although to us Griffith’s acting looks stylized, to his audiences it was boldly realistic,” says Kendall. The majority of the dance scenes in both stories are choreographed crowd scenes. In the modern story, the dancing is in the context of ballroom scenes: one at the beginning among high society, and another, later, in a scene of mill workers at a party. These two scenes are intercut frequently, contrasting rich and poor, surveillance and exuberance. A short dance of two nurses blithely dancing is shown in the nursery where the Dear One’s baby is kept. Neither of these dance sequences have any particular relevance to the story. They are a merely used as a moving background or added as an interlude to embellish the situation. But the presence and grace of the Denishawn dancers in the Babylonian crowd scenes create an atmosphere of fluidity and exoticism that was typical for the dance style of Ruth St. Denis. There are some shorter dance scenes which serve as a side effect – as in the modern story – and employ the modern dance style of the time: performing light steps, barefoot, wearing transparent tunics. In the mass scenes the Denishawn dancers are convincing as crowds with a vibrant physical presence is highly stylized. The most impressive scenes are those on the stairs of the temple in Act II of INTOLERANCE. A huge crowd moves up and down the stairs in choreographed rows and patterns, while the camera slowly moves from a wide angle shot taken from above, to a closer and lower view, revealing the Egyptian-like positions of the dancers’ arms. Griffith carried this out with his own construction: an elevator mounted on a railroad car. In the next shot of the stairs, a few minutes later, the camera moves upwards, giving us the sense of having joined the dancers in their ascension. Another spectacular scene is the longest dance scene of the whole film. It begins with an intertitle announcing: “In the Temple of Love. The sacred dance in memory of the resurrection of Tammuz.” After the image of a waving crowd, the moving camera again pans above the stairs. But this time Griffith cuts between shots of different solo, couple and small group dances that show again these stylized temple dance movements, demonstrating an exacting combination of body and camera movement, which creates choreography. This collaboration between camera and choreography was absolutely new, and resulted in a more intense experience of movement for the viewer. Despite its ambitious scenario and the sophistication of its editing, the film didn’t match the box-office success of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. In fact, it was a financial disaster for Griffith, who produced it through his own company, bankrolled by the profits garnered from . With production costs of nearly two million dollars – of which the Babylonian segment devoured a third – Griffith ran into debt. Even today,the plot itself – with its many strands – can be difficult to follow. The two main threads of the Modern and the Babylonian Story, with the intense acting of Mae Marsh as the Dear One, and Constance Talmadge as Mountain Girl, have a more consistent storyline. The distinguishing marks of this masterpiece of the silent movie era remain: its unorthodox editing, its acting style, and its use of body movement combined with camera movement to choreograph large crowds in all four stories. The influence of INTOLERANCE on further film aesthetics – particularly among European and Soviet filmmakers – was fortified by Griffith’s later compilation of the Babylonian footage into a separate film, THE FALL OF BABYLON (1919). The analogy of the stair scene in INTOLERANCE and the Odessa staircase in Sergei Eisenstein’s THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) is apparent. Surely Griffith also had an influence on Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic treatment of mass scenes in his films of the 1930s – at least aesthetically, Berkeley’s aerial views noticeably resemble Griffith’s temple scenes. Terpsichorian storytelling in THE BLUE BIRD Maurice Tourneur (1873–1961) Whereas in Griffith’s INTOLERANCE dance scenes can be clearly extracted and described, at first glance Maurice Tourneur’s 75-minute film might seem to have less obvious reference to dance. But THE BLUE BIRD – made in 1918 and based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s fairytale of the same title – is another good example of the affinity silent films share for dance and movement. In its use of timing, movement and mimetic expression, it employs a style of acting that is more like dancing. Although not as well-received as Tourneur’s best-known 1920 work THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE BLUE BIRD – like Griffith’s INTOLERANCE – is now preserved by the National Film Registry as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. In this allegorical fantasy Tyltyl and Mytyl, brother and sister, accompanied by the fairy Berylune, are searching for the Bird of Happiness. At every turn of their journey they learn another life lesson, ending with the insight that love and happiness is something found inside oneself. Tourneur, born in France, began – like Griffith – as an actor and stage director before directing films. After working for Éclair and World Pictures, he arrived in the United States in 1914, starting his own film company in 1918. Tourneur was an admirer of D.W. Griffith, acknowledging that Griffith had invented all that was important to make good fantasy films. His intention was to create “quality” instead of “quantity” films. With his new Paragon Studios, located in New Jersey, he set out to emphasize “the acting, thus obtaining the coveted prize of director and actor alike.” His aim was to use the artistic possibilities of film, elevating theater into art throughout collaboration. “To me,” wrote Griffith, “neither the play, the acting, the star, the director, nor the presentation is the thing. It takes all of them.“ He was against the evolving star system and more interested in conveying psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. The acting qualities in THE BLUE BIRD show this sensitivity to movement qualities. Tourneur’s sense of lighting and depth in framing are extraordinary: for example, in the scenes in the Palace of Happiness, who’s red-tinted images somewhat resemble Griffith’s Babylonian stair scenes. Throughout the following scenes, in which the emotion of happiness is visualized, Tourneur shows large groups of actors in Duncan-like transparent tunics, which refer to the era’s new romanticism with its return to natural movement. The dancers move in a terpsichorean habit, embellishing their simple stylized arm movements, sometimes with veils in each hand. These group scenes in their choreography and direction owe a debt to Griffith’s crowd scenes. We see circle dances, and lines that flow in and out of the mass, converging with a subsequent scene, acted by the main characters. These characters include the children and the fairy, symbolic characters such as Light, Night, Water or Fire and objects brought to life such as Bread, Milk or Sugar. Tourneur himself describes this highly symbolic cast of characters: “I endeavored to apply stylization, in the best of my ability,to my production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s THE BLUE BIRD. Here I tried to sound the note of fragile, symbolical phantasy.“ Aesthetically, such fantasies in film and ballet can be found in later works such as the film THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) – especially in the 1940 version – and in L’ENFANT ET LES SORTILEGES (1925), an opera which became a ballet and was later frequently re-staged as a fairy ballet, in which objects come to life. Like Tourneur’s next film, PRUNELLA (1918), the theatrical style of THE BLUE BIRD combined a painted set with shots on location, artistically anticipating the expressiveness of Robert Wiene’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919). But, despite good reviews, neither of these two films sold well. THE BLUE BIRD was shown only in few locations in New York City. Disappointed with its limited success, he attempted a return to the more naturalistic style of his earlier works. Disillusioned with the Hollywood production system of the 1920s – at MGM, for example, a director’s artistic vision was completely subordinate to a producer’s control – Tourneur returned to Europe. Today THE BLUE BIRD is a document of early movie direction that is worth rediscovering. Like INTOLERANCE, THE BLUE BIRD is a clear example of two historical developments linking film and dance: the evolution of film language and narration, and the gradual creation of a cinematic acting style that could express emotion through the rhythmic flow of motion – dancing. The very early films of Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès favored popular dances made available – through the new medium of film – to spectators in the theaters and amusement halls of the turn of the century. Later films like those of Griffith or Tourneur refer rather to modern concepts of movement drawn from the subjective expressivity developed by Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. These threads illustrate the inter-relationship, at the turn of the century, between the rise of Modern Dance and the birth of film. The early interaction of the two forms – moving pictures and movement pioneers – marks the beginning of their shared evolution. This shared history continues today, as different forms and fusions develop, from experimental film to video dance, from movie musicals to MTV. Finally, from that earlier “cinema of attraction,” we arrive full circle to a contemporary “frame of attraction” – Youtube, similar with its one-camera shots, its employment of simple movements, as it documents the daily. Dr. Claudia Rosiny, based in Bern, Switzerland, born in Cologne, Germany, has been involved with the dance on camera community for over twenty years as a critic, curator, and author.                   Review: NORA by Maximillion Hunter NORA, a story of both personal and political liberation was a major standout in 2009’s Dance on Camera Festival. Based on the life of its eponymous choreographer, Nora Chipaumire, NORA is a collaboration between three inestimably talented artists. In the 35-minute film, Directors Alla Kovgan and David Hinton have crafted a poetic memoir of choreographer and dancer Chipaumire’s experience in the Zimbabwean war of independence. It is a narrative of struggle, passion, loss, and ultimately, of hope. The three artists share views on dance film which speak poignantly to the nature of the medium. David Hinton, who has not collaborated with another director since 1989, has noted that film and dance are very similar activities in that “they’re both about giving structure to action.” He explores this principle in his dancer-less short dance films that choreograph rhythmic images instead of bodies. These films come to mind during several scenes in NORA, where light and shadow are choreographed as intentionally as any dancer. Chipaumire, too, is sensitive to the similarities between dance and film. After leaving Zimbabwe, she delved into film before discovering her calling as a dancer. Film attracted her as a person who was “drawn to images and thinking in pictures.” Chipaumire worked with Alla Kovgan on MOVEMENT (R)EVOLUTION AFRICA, a riveting exploration of nine African choreographers using movement to manifest a portrait of the continent. Kovgan has noted the ability of dancers on camera to transcend ordinary narrative, lauding their ability to “communicate what I can’t really express with words.” While NORA’s narrative takes place in Northern Zimbabwe, political instability caused the filmmakers to shoot on location in neighboring Mozambique. The tropical evergreen and hardwood forests that surround the set provide a lush, verdant backdrop for the dancers. The dancers themselves are dressed in vibrant costumes of Chipaumire’s design, turning some scenes into euphoric symphonies of color. Although Chipaumire’s life during the revolution was a complex narrative with several intersecting plotlines, the actors in NORA manage to dance her story without a single spoken word. The only dialogue is displayed inbold-face print against a black backdrop, in the style of early-20’s silent films. Even those few sentences seem, at times, to be superfluous. There is no mistaking the clarity of message rendered by Chipaumire’s choreography as she tells the story of her struggle. As mentioned above, the struggle for liberation portrayed in the film is twofold. Directors Kovgan and Hinton seamlessly interweave the story of Chipaumire’s battle for independence as a woman with Zimbabwe’s battle for freedom as a nation. This is driven home in one of the film’s most riveting sequences, which splices shots of Chipaumire twirling defiantly at a club with scenes of rebels dancing the Toi Toi, a march-dance of protest against the white minority rule. In the Toi Toi shots, the dancers run in place, chanting songs of unity, stretching their arms forward towards a seemingly inevitable victory. Kovgan and Hinton use several daring techniques in telling Nora’s story, one of the recurrent motifs being the juxtaposition of light and shadow. This sometimes fails. In one scene, for example, the light of a welder’s arc at night blinds us and obscures our view of the dancers. But when this technique succeeds, it does so spectacularly. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the film’s climactic scene. Nora stands at one end of a dark corridor, flanked by a line of scowling aunts. The women of her family expect her to settle down, to marry, to have children. The weight of their demands is palpable, and it seems to be physically dragging Nora down. Her movements are tenuous at first as she half-steps, half-shuffles across the darkness of the hallway. The camera pans out, then, and we see a rectangle of brilliant light spilling through the doorway at the end of the hall. Her movements grow braver, louder, until at last she leaps out into the light. She has begun her life as an independent woman. The work leaves you on a note that only the best of dance films can reach. You come away from NORA with the feeling that, in some small way, your own life has been infused with the spirit of the lead dancer’s motion. Seeing Chipaumire out in the bushveld, spinning riotously in a marigold dress, you cannot help but feel a bit more free. Maximillian Hunter lives and writes in Berkeley, California