Dance in film:

between the logic of musicals and the irrationality of unmotivated gestures

Authors

Keywords:

film and dance; musical films; Béla Balázs; Jean-Luc Godard.

Abstract

Through a panoramic analysis of the presence of dance in cinema, from the beginning to the contemporary
production, we realize that it can emerge sometimes as an integral and structuring part of the film, in the musical genre, and sometimes as a contrasting and disruptive element, in non-musical films. While sketching an aesthetic of corporeal movements in audiovisual works, we assume that sound cinema, in a way, silences the body dynamics on the screen, by focusing onspeech and the meaning of words, eliminating or considerably reducing all the
visual and semantic powers contained in the incredible expressive rhetoric of bodies. Can dance, the natural shelter of a certain irrational gestural impulse,
serve, as Béla Balázs proposed, to make us be affected by a film in a direct and unequivocal way, as if it were music?

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Published

2023-09-18

Issue

Vol. 48 No. 1 (2023): Galáxia

Section

Artigos | Articles

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