11 Dec Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Folded Eye Jazz

This is a nearly perfect film from my perspective: It feels naturally improvised. Its episodes are radically discontinuous, but feel like fluid transitions. It has some great numbers, including the incomparable Cyd Charisse.

But what really puts this on my `must see’ list is the deep self-reference. Superficially, it is a movie about a movie, but actually the folding is a whole lot more complex, even psychedelic. The narrative structure is flashbacks, flashforwards, about the movie, IS the movie, about the fooling behind the movie (oddly, Debbie’s non-movie songs were dubbed by someone else!). It has nested abstractions, and encompassing ones. It has several manner of annotative features. And the internal movie itself grows while we watch to have internal nesting of different types: the original costume drama becomes a vision from a modern newcomer whacked on the head. And further, there is the Charisse number which is another abstraction.

There were precessors: ‘Kane’ (41) introduced the use of many parallel narrative devices,’Children of Paradise’ (45) had conflated reality and performance: `Red Shoes’ (48) took it to dance, and those are must see as well. But here, the technique becomes visual jazz improvisations on reality. Thrilling.

None of the people involved ever came close on other projects. Odd.

Posted in 2002

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB