Dance in cinema: between the logic of musicals and the irrationality of unmotivated gestures

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 on speech 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?

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