Musical films

[Michael Kerpan]

If one is willing to look at non-musical films depicting contemporary life, it seems like a fair number of the (surviving) films of the very late 20s, early 30s and late 40s, featured couples dancing.  The earliest I can recall would be in Shimizu's 1929 "Fue no shiratama" (where it is cast in a somewhat negative light). One interesting variation, Naruse's White Beast from the late 40s depicted young women in a reformatory dancing to phonograph records.

MEK

--- On Wed, 11/5/08, Aaron Gerow <aaron.gerow at yale.edu> wrote:

> From: Aaron Gerow <aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
> Subject: Re: Musical films
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2008, 12:47 PM
> Lorenzo was emphasizing a special case of films with couple
> dancing,  
> not just musicals in general. I have an upcoming article on
> musicals,  
> and I can attest there certainly are a lot of musicals,
> broadly  
> defined. There are fewer full-blown musicals where the
> narrative  
> practically stops and people start singing and dancing, but
> there are  
> still quite a few. But most of those feature singing with
> limited  
> choreography.
> 
> That doesn't mean there was not history of couple
> dancing. The  
> Rokumeikan was famous for dancing in the early Meiji (and
> thus social  
> dancing today is not just the result of the influence of
> Hollywood),  
> and you can see couples dancing in a number of even
> pre-1960 films:  
> Tokyo Rhapsody (where in one scene it is two women
> dancing!), Anjo-ke  
> no budokai, and even Utau tanuki gassen (where a more
> "Japanese- 
> style" dance between two characters is narratively
> important).
> 
> Of course, one of the biggest representations of social
> dancing in  
> the last ten years in Japan was the Urinari Geinojin Shako
> Dansu Bu,  
> where geinojin trained and entered real dance competitions
> (long  
> before Dancing with the Stars).
> 
> 
> Aaron Gerow
> KineJapan owner
> 
> Assistant Professor
> Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Yale University
> 
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