"Above All Else to Make You See": Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle
1982; Duke University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1/2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/303021
ISSN1527-2141
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
ResumoEarly in Give a Girl a Break (1953), Bob Dowdy (Bob Fosse) goes for a walk with Suzie Doolittle (Debbie Reynolds), a girl he has just met and with whom, as is inevitable in a musical, he has fallen in love. Singing that their unity in love matters more than any other kind of unity-especially political and social-he begins to dance through the park, in a frenetic display of leaps, somersaults, and spins. As he moves through the obviously studio-set park, one sees across the river the United Nations building, here also obviously a set. Against a public realm of politics-on the other side of the river, elsewhere, rendered unreal by a Hollywood magic--Dowdy's song-and-dance pits the world of love, the personal against the social. But beyond the denotated message of love and beyond the opposed message of world politics, there is at work in the scene another force, not really reducible to a message, not completely codifiable as a signified-a force that exceeds the denotational significations of the scene. This force is the virtuosity of performance, the sheer bravura of
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