Singin\' in the Rain Live

SINGIN' in the RAIN

Live on the Soundstage: Notes on Singin' in the Rain

Directed by two dancers, Singin' in the Rain is simultaneously a celebration of dance and cinema. It grounds its thematic interests in film as a hybrid medium somewhere between sound and image (figured as feeling and illusionism) squarely in a technical fixation on performance. The result is a comic but extraordinarily thoughtful meditation on film's limitations and delights, as well as on the relationship between talent and technology.

As with most successful musicals, the film's most dramatic beats -- and memorable comic moments -- are reserved for the musical sequences. From the rhapsodies embodied by Kelly's iconic title solo and the extended Kelly-Charisse ballet to more vaudevillian set pieces like "Moses Supposes" and "Make 'Em Laugh," Singin' in the Rain is at its most vibrant when the characters are free to express themselves through song or, more accurately, choreography. While the dialogue and situations are generally clever, the humor is at its most extended, anarchic, and inventive when the film peels away a generation of Hollywood sophistication to revel in its vaudeville roots ("Fit as a Fiddle"); while the love story is poignant, it is never more so than when rehearsed on a soundstage empty of everything but light and music ("You Were Meant for Me").

In fact, while Singin' in the Rain overtly glorifies Hollywood, it is an anti-cinematic film in many of its technical aspects. True montage is rudimentary, limited to establishing shots and occasional time-lapse transitions of the "spinning newspaper" variety. Most shots are relatively long, center on the performers and cut away only to follow movement or end a scene. This both forces the actors to generate almost all of the interest in their scenes through performance and provides a situation in which performance can be accurately documented more or less in the raw: Singin' in the Rain is less a conventional film than a recording of a performance of some fantastically expansive Broadway musical play.

By contemporary standards, the camerawork is relatively static, which reinforces the film's emphasis on unaugmented native talent. The famous "Make 'Em Laugh" sequence exemplifies this documentary approach. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt recently demonstrated, it is possible for an energetic dancer to reenact this routine in a live context, and in the film version special effects and even "trick" editing are nonexistent. From the moment O'Connor sits down at the piano, he is the center of the action and is the focus of each shot. Each shot holds exactly as much of the routine as the camera can hold. When the camera does move independently, it is often for the purely pragmatic purpose of creating space in the frame for O'Connor's next move, and when it cuts (ten times in four frenetic minutes of screen time), it is usually because O'Connor is moving too fast out of frame to track. The only "Hollywood magic" on display is actually vaudevillian clownwork; if not for the technical limitations of film, this could theoretically have been covered in a single bravura shot, and probably could be today.

The Hollywood musical is often characterized as a triumph of illusionism, but in Kelly's virtuosic world performance is only faked as a last pragmatic resort. (for better or worse, aspects of Reynolds' performance fall into this category.) Like Kelly himself, Lockwood embraces the commercial opportunities that advances in film technology represent, but is not a pure creature of Hollywood in the way that Lamont is. He could have been a song-and-dance man anywhere, and as his extended "Gotta Dance" fantasy reveals, probably would be. Again, except for a showy crane-shot climax and a wind machine, Charisse and Kelly are the living "special effects" here. If anything, the urge to document their performance as fully as possible -- extended long shots and all -- runs the risk of swamping the narrative, but for Kelly, perhaps, the balletic dream was the narrative, or at least, the point of constructing the story in the first place.

Extended detours into pure ballet notwithstanding, the "stage-oriented" economy of Singin' in the Rain does not permit it to linger on the outright repetition of any shot or sequence. However, allied techniques allow it to achieve a certain degree of formal and sentimental unity. In terms of large-scale structure, the decision to bookend the film's action between two theatrical premieres is extraordinary. Unlike a more explicitly flashback-driven story like Sunset Boulevard (a near-contemporaneous but darker meditation on Hollywood's transition to sound), the trajectory here is less circular than spiral in form: The gala debut of the film-within-a-film that closes Singin' in the Rain echoes the launch of the Royal Rascal that began it, but the superficial similarities only demonstrate how much the characters (and our understanding of them) have evolved in the meantime.

This "shot and echo" structure also gives viewers a chance to reflect on the film's awareness of its own illusionistic nature. We enter the world of Singin' in the Rain as moviegoers, as fans lined up for a glimpse of the stars "in real life." We leave as industry insiders well schooled in the way the film's vision of Hollywood behind the curtain functions, having spent time on the soundstages as well as the stars' mansions. When that "curtain" rises to expose the gap between backstage realities (embodied by Kathy, "the girl whose voice you heard and loved tonight") and the glamour propagated by the fan magazines, we (and Don Lockwood) have been prepared for it and know where to place our loyalties.

On a smaller scale, Singin' in the Rain provides some repetitive cues by returning to the production of the film-within-a-film at various points in its evolution from silent period potboiler to time-travel musical. We see the same scene played out in the silent idiom, then with sound, and, after the disastrous test screening, in its final form. This approach is not so much literal as implicitly musical: a "theme" is stated and then tested in its variations. First, the failure of the silent film as a mirror of reality is demonstrated through the silent camera's failure to capture anything but Lockwood and Lamont's romantic mummery. Then, the technical realities of sound production are introduced as a possible solution, but its failures (and Lamont's) are only exploited for comic effect at the test screening. While a hybrid solution is explored, it too is unsuccessful, ultimately allowing the film to make one last argument for legitimate theatrical talent as the ground of authenticity.