Going Behind the Scenes

We watched Me and Orson Welles yesterday and I enjoyed it thoroughly (Yes, there's a High School Musical connection in Zac Efron and there were giggling teenage girls in the row behind us who were probably there for Zac: but our desire for Shakespeare and Orson Welles works through circuitous routes, so ...). Anyone who has spent some time with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or sat through Orson Welles' cinematic work (both as director and actor) would appreciate this film, because it examines how staging Shakespeare as an anti-Fascist political tract was really revolutionary in the 1930s, how Welles' megalomania often overshadowed his art, and how his stubbornness drove his creative vision.

It led me to think about some things that I've watched recently and how they deploy the "movie about the play" trope quite differently. My big generalization: More recent representations of a "behind the scenes" sensibility are more willing to think about the creative process as fraught with risks that place the production in some kind of jeopardy whereas older films about the "show biz" tend to keep the creative process in the sphere of rarefied perfection.

So, some of the things that I've been watching (Me and Orson Welles, Nine, A Midwinter's Tale, Slings and Arrows, and if one thinks about a sports event as a kind of orchestrated performance, Invictus) use our fascination with the "behind-the-scenes" production of a film / play to create the suspense and tension. With numerous hiccups in the production process, the question "Will the play go on?" lingers over these films.

On the other hand, there are the Fred Astair-Ginger Rodgers films that we've been watching. We've watched three so far -- Top Hat, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance. We started watching them because we were intrigued with Astair's dance virtuosity and the original dramatic contexts of songs that have become staples in this household. But a constant in each of these films is Fred Astair's role as a performer, usually (and predictably) as a talented singer-dancer who stars in some Broadway / West End extravaganza. The song and dance numbers that are "staged" within the film thus sit awkwardly as show-pieces that have little impact on the plot (much like how "feature artist" numbers in Bollywood films work). Unlike the newer movies that dramatize the creative process as fraught with anxiety (will the show go on?) and tension (conflicts between directors-admin / actors-directors / actors-other actors), Astair's movies always show him gliding through his role as a performer; instead, the dramatic tensions lie in comedic complications that arise outside the creative process.



[On another note: My love affair with "Cheek to Cheek" has another filmic connection: that wonderful scene in the English Patient where the denizens of the villa take the dying, stretchered Count Almasy out for a romp around the house and into the rain ... can't find a quick vid of it though ... ]

So, having made the observation, I recognize that I don't really have an explanation for this difference. I guess historical distance allows movies about productions to be more cynical and savvy about the creative process. Perhaps societies that are post-industrial (and thus somewhat divorced from the processes of "making") are more interested in the psychic dramas that haunt the making of films and that this is best presented by exploring what can go wrong in the production process. Or, as Edna suggests, no longer is it taboo in valorize the angst involved in the creativity in an "everyone needs a shrink" culture. Surely there are also socio-political realities that influence this mode of fictionalizing the creative process: though I'm too ill-informed to even suggest these. At any rate, the 1952 musical, "Singing in the Rain" is now something that I've got to watch (apart from catching short segments on TV, it's never held my attention) as it's about movie making and promises to be more cynical than the Astair films.