42nd Street (1933) directed by Lloyd Bacon, choreography by Busby Berkeley
“Between the understanding that knows and the reason that desires, the faculty of judgement is thus a formal “composition,” a subjective “equilibrium” of imagining and understanding. It has the form of a pleasure, relative to an exteriority, but to a mode of exercise: it puts into play the concrete experience of a universal principle of harmony between the imagination and the understanding.” - Michel De Certeau
“Between the understanding that knows and the reason that desires, the faculty of judgement is thus a formal “composition,” a subjective “equilibrium” of imagining and understanding. It has the form of a pleasure, relative to an exteriority, but to a mode of exercise: it puts into play the concrete experience of a universal principle of harmony between the imagination and the understanding.” - Michel De Certeau
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A spectacular film which dramatizes the making of a Broadway musical, this film is often thought of as the archetypal 'backstage' musical film.
What’s particularly interesting here, is the operation of a kind of commercial nostalgia, a Hollywood proof of concept film, in which the spectacular cinematographic and montage attributes of film powerfully display film’s great advantages of spectatorship in the form of the closeup and the kaleidoscopic special effects which render the dance numbers as something much more fantastical than could be perceived from the audience of a live stage. This film is a kind of swan song homage to the primacy and power of Broadway, with its backstage intrigue, sexual politics and insights into the commercial ”realities” involved in creating a great American musical. Here is a film which celebrates and exploits the glamour and mythology of the Great White Way, while it ever so cleverly performs a Hollywood displacement of its cultural primacy over the great American dance musical.
- S. T.
