As I look back on my film viewing and film ranking habits one of the things that stands out to me from the vantage point of today is how much what I like, what I don’t like, and all points in between has changed across time and space. It is called, growing up with a reflexive mind, I guess
When I was a teenager I watched every film I could on television, at second run theatres, and at art cinemas. I particularly sought out films that were regarded as classics and as quality films by film critics like Leonard Maltin, whose film guide was my film bible in the early years of my film viewing life. Today I am much more choosy and much more persnickety about which films I would put in my film pantheon and which directors I would put in my director pantheon. I would, for example, number Doctor Strangelove and Casablanca as two of my pantheon films and number Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer as two of my pantheon directors.
Recently I have been rewatching a number of films that critical consensus among film critics would rank as classics. I have recently rewatched, for example, Gigi, Meet Me in Saint Louis, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain. Though I know that most critics would not agree with me, and the younger me would probably not agree with old me, I would not list, at the moment at least, any of these films among the best films ever made though I did quite like Gigi and Meet Me in Saint Louis the second or third time around.
I blame a lot of this change in my film viewing aesthetics on Joss Whedon’s television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have long been fond of parody, satire, and dark or black comedy (yes, Virginia, black does not only refer to the colour of skin) but Buffy revealed to me how much I love genre blending, tonal blending, allegory, metaphor, and existentialism (that last actually makes Buffy kin to the works of Bergman and Kieslowski). A.B., after Buffy, I find it hard to watch films and television shows that don’t blend genre, tone, and social ethics. They seem mundane and banal to me now.
Now don’t get me wrong there were still things I found interesting and quite impressive in many of the films I rewatched. The visuals of the Vincente Minelli films and the John Ford films, for example, were and are impressive, really impressive. As a whole, however, the films by these directiors simply did not move me as they once did.
Paradoxically I was quite moved—moved intellectually—by Peter Wollen’s monograph Singin’ in the Rain (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I have known Wollen’s work since I read Wollen' seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. If memory serves, I read the first edition of this monograph which is now in its fifth edition, sometime in the 1970s. At the time, Signs and Meaning was a mind blowing experience for me as it revealed to me a more semiological and contextual approach to the film auteurism I had become devoted to.
Wollen’s Singin’ in the Rain was just as impressive as Signs and Meaning in the Cinema had been to me some fifty or so years ago. Wollen does an excellent job of exploring the production aspects of the film including its production by MGM’s Freed Unit and the fact that the film was built around songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown that MGM already owned. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a few additional songs for the film at Gene Kelly’s insistence as Wollen notes. He does an outstanding job of exploring the roles co-directors Stanley Donen and Kelly played in the making of the film. He does an excellent job of exploring how Kelly, who was also one of the stars of the film, worked with others to choreograph the dance, camera movements, and transitions in the “Singin’ in the Rain" segment of the film. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, regards Kelly as the general, the conductor, the author who led his forces in the making of the film. He does a superb job of conceptualising Singin’ in the Rain in the history of modern dance and in exploring Kelly’s approach to modern dance. He does an outstanding job of placing Singin’ in the Rain within the subgenres of the film musical, sub-genres enunciated by Rick Altman in his book on the American film musical: the Show Musical, the Fairy Tale Musical, and the Folk Musical. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, argues that Singin’ in the Rain is all three. He makes an interesting argument that Singin’ in the Rain is, with its realism—its story arc, character arcs, and exploration of the transition from silents to sound in Hollywood—and its artifice—the ballet sequence in the film—a kind of filmic version of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. The film musical, as Wollen and others have noted since at least since the 1970s, foregrounds their construction making them similar to what Bertolt Brecht was trying to do in the theatre.
Recommended.
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