Film historians who are particular fans of the Astaire-Rogers films often write about them as important mediators for changing gender attitudes at the time of the Great Depression. The argument goes like this: Astaire’s characters always treated Rogers’s characters as equals. Astaire never posed as an aggressive male intending to dominate his partner. He appealed to her through self-depreciating humor, playfulness, and above all the invitation to turn that play into artful grace. Ginger, for her part, never stalked Fred. In fact, her default gender mode was to be suspicious of men in general. She didn’t even have a “Bellamy” — until, that is, she acquires THE Bellamy in Carefree (1938), the film that leaves the Astaire-Rogers myth-world entirely. The dance routines were partnerships of equals. No Apache routines, no showy tangos. Now, it’s true that Ginger never lifts Fred; and it’s also true that Ginger has far fewer solo routines than Fred in their body of work. And it’s also true that Ginger doesn’t lead as often as Fred, although she does lead a lot more than most women do on film. But even in that respect the moves come in the comic dances, not the “show” dances. Still, the comic dances dominate their work — it’s the power of comedy that lets these changes in gender roles play out. Whatever … you can see in many of the dances that they share a sense of fun and joy together as they match their steps. In fact, aside from the beautiful “Night and Day” dance in The Gay Divorcee early in their career, their couple dances aren’t usually seductions; they’re either displays of shared play, recoveries of childhood companionship between pre-sexual kids or adult reconciliations.
Back to the historians. Many consider this modeling of gender partnership an important display of a modern American conception of heterosexual marriage — replacing a patriarchal hierarchy predicated on the family with a compact between gender equals developing skills and mutual respect together. I have no problems with that. This kind of coupling based on ballroom clinches and side-by-side taps is often compared favorably to the monumental choral spectacles of the Busby Berkeley films. Those trippy routines are usually described as “abstract” or “quasi-mechanical,” and the only effect they have for modeling gender relations is to place meters of female flesh on screen for the delectation of male peepers. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
It’s good to recall that the Astaire-Rogers films and the Busby Berkley spectacles overlapped a lot in time. 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 were shown in theaters in 1933, the same year as Flying Down to Rio. Footlight Parade was released the same year as The Gay Divorcee. At the time, no one could have predicted that the Astaire-Rogers model for filming dance would become the norm, not Berkeley’s. They seemed to be two mutually balancing alternatives in the cinematic ecosphere. The success of the Astaire-Rogers model was part of a powerful, if unconscious, cultural movement — who can disagree with the historians about this? — toward idealizing individualism at the expense of collectivism. This was the capitalist agenda, which took on new energy when it was faced with the upsurge of a robust collectivist spirit at the beginning of the Depression. The ideal gender relationship is between two individuals who respect each other’s individuality. Friends who stick together, but not too many of them, and who don’t need to make lots of sacrifices for the good of the group.
I’ve been interested in how this plays out in an aspect of the set-design of these dance films that historians don’t seem to have looked at much: the role of the great circle as a visual motif that organizes the dances. Call it the dance mandala. The mandala is, of course, a specific cultural symbol of cosmic unity, but it’s easy to see how it can operate on a more prosaic level: a circle that organizes and contains the collective actions of a social group, and is, in effect, seen as if from above by the people participating in it. While one is dancing in a collective circle, one can only imagine the circle — but the gods, and the gods in us (not to mention the aristocrats in the balconies), can see it from above.
A lot of social-cultural functions operate within containing mandalas. Town and village squares often include a separate circle in the middle, where collective events can take place and be seen by people on all sides. Among the most important of these in many non-modern cultures is group dancing — sometimes in rituals, but often just for joyful display. This special role of the dance circle remained important in Europe well into the 19th century. Think of the waltz, especially the Viennese waltz. Ideally, the waltz-partners turn in a circle. And in large elegant balls there was often a somewhat ceremonial group waltz, in which couples would form a large group circle, which would make a circuit around the ballroom as the individual couples continued to make their smaller, more personal circuits. Wheels within a wheel. As waltzing replaced the more stilted line-dances of the 18th century courts, this process synthesized the spiritual and the erotic.
This romantic friction between the individual and the collective was a real source of erotic pleasure, and the novelists often turned to it to heighten the circulation. Think of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Think of Gone With the Wind. And film-makers love these moments.
The ball in War and Peace.
You may have noticed that some of the ballrooms in the films have mandalas embedded in the their parquet floors. Here’s a real one from the Czars’ Summer Palace.
Here’s another one, from the Peterhof.
And here’s one from the Lichtenstein Palace in Vienna.
Not all grand ballrooms had mandala designs in their floors, and they probably weren’t embedded just for dancing purposes. But they were going for a synergy, deliberately. Maybe not deliberately for this effect, but maybe so.
Now look at some of Berkeley’s “quasi-mechanical abstractions.”
Personally, I think it’s a pity no one asked Busby to film Doré’s version of Dante’s Paradiso.
Anyway, back to the movies. There are probably lots of rational motives for Berkeley’s many circular designs. My intention here is only to point out that they do not necessarily invoke the gears in a machine. They can also connote dynamic composite unity of an ancient pedigree. What’s more, they require many, many people to compose them. The fact that they are all attractive women, and that they were ordered into these positions by a despotic man, is not to be discounted. But as Doré’s Paradiso engravings show, the erotic appeal can get lost in the sublime kinetic unity. Whatever else they are, they are monumental emblems of collective harmony.
What’s interesting to me is that in the first phase of their work, Astaire and Rogers worked within a similar paradigm. Their breakthrough dance is as soloists in “The Carioca” in Flying Down to Rio. They are foreign — American — interlopers, but it’s clear that the big group dance is closely tied to the floral mandala at the center of the set. It’s important that the group of dancers revolve around the center, and that Fred and Ginger solo at the center, in the calyx so to speak.
There’s a whiff of imperialist arrogance here — how could there not be? The Americans are showing the natives how to do their dance. You could argue that the Americans are not really using the dance for erotic purposes, and so they haven’t touched the “Latin” essence of the dance. In any case, the stars-in-the-mandala thing continues in The Gay Divorcee.
The justly famous “Night and Day” routine establishes the bond between The Fred and The Ginger through their courtship-and-consummation dance. It meanders a bit, like a stage dance, but throughout the number their movements are contained within a design on the dance floor that we might as well call a half-mandala. Their relationship is only half-formed at this point (there are retarding misunderstandings yet to come), but the form in the floor is as obvious as the couples’ black/white, night/day, yin/yang. And the most important move they make in the dance is the waltz-twirl.
By the end of the film, they have completed their arc and their final dance, “The Continental,” is no longer in a half-mandala, but a full one. (Clearly, the stage was constructed to be divided, so that half could be used in one scene, and then the other half could be pushed in to made a complete stage that can be viewed from a crane.) Here, once again they are interlopers, but the surrounding group is American. They are joining a group that is having American fun. The dance may be called “The Continental,” but the group reverts to a Charleston. In any case, whatever their tendencies to reversion might be, the circle of dance remains powerful.
What’s more, the famous set is dominated by dynamic circles beyond the dance floor, circles within the circle, like revolving doors.
And circular mezzanines.
Even the central trick that disarms the watchdog Tonetti is a dynamic circle.
The design motif continues in Top Hat. The big collective dance, “The Piccolino,” is performed on a great Venetian mandala.
After Top Hat, the mandala space begins to evaporate — simultaneously with the idea of collective dance itself. It doesn’t vanish all at once. Instead, it’s invoked, and then disavowed. In a sense, it’s repudiated, as Fred and Ginger become increasingly “privatized.” In Swing Time (1936) — with a different director, George Stevens instead of Mark Sandrich, but the same art director, Carroll Clark — the first couple dance takes place in the circular dance floor of Penny’s (Ginger’s) dancing school. It’s a round enclosure for dance alright, but the form is just a circular fence; the floor itself is empty of ornament. More important, Penny and Lucky (Fred) are dancing alone. In the end, they leave the space never to look back.
Then something striking happens. Their next couples dance, “Waltz in Swing Time,” is a display dance in Ricky Romero’s nightclub. Such spaces in previous films had all been circular, but now the deco design is … let’s call it ambivalent. The two dance in a vaguely defined space that involves curves, but also angular figures, something we don’t see earlier. In fact, the camera following the dancers’ moves on the undefined dance floor catches glimpses of a sharp angle long before a shorter glimpse of a curve that might be part of a larger circle. One could argue that the deco design of the club is somewhat vacant and aimless — but one thing it’s definitely not is a mandala.
When we get to Astaire’s big Bojangles number, the curves are entirely absent, and that odd jutting angle has become the defining pattern of the floor.
Now, it’s not quite fair to take one of Astaire solos as an example. A solo dance should not have to invoke collective purposes. In Top Hat, Astaire shot down every other dancer on the stage with him — which some viewers feel is all about Fred showing that he is different from all the other guys wearing identical suits and top hats. But in Swing Time he’s accompanied by a chorus. And even though the show is in a nightclub, it’s basically a stage separated from the rest of the room, not surrounded by it.
This routine is one of the most controversial in the Astaire corpus because of the blackface minstrel conceit. It’s said that it was supposed to be part of a longer historical homage to Bill Robinson’s career. Maybe so, but what remained, it’s widely acknowledged, doesn’t represent Robinson’s elegant and contained style at all. There’s more Jolson in it than Robinson. In any case, there’s nothing about the space or the deployment of bodies that speaks to collective dancing.
When we get to Swing Time‘s final duet, “Never Gonna Dance,” we’re back to the angular dance floor. The curves that might suggest the mandala have been transported away from the dance space to the staircase — that is, to the avenue of escape from the dance. There is a virtuoso ascent on these stairs to an upper-level dance floor, but that floor hints at being no less square than the one below.
Follow the Fleet (1936) has a similar progression. The first couples dance between sailor Bake (Astaire) and his childhood sweetheart Sherry (Rogers) is part of a dance contest. The space is cordoned off, with bystanders all around, implying a circular space. But the camera does a curious thing. The only moments when we see hints of the curves of the cordon are when the camera watches the other couple. As long as it centers on Bake and Sherry, no curves, only a hint of a surrounding audience, and only one brief, glancing shot of the two couples together on the floor. That may simply be because of crude framing decisions — but its effect is to isolate Astaire and Rogers from the collective. They are the only important ones, and nothing in the design invokes others dancing with them.
The grand finale of Follow the Fleet, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” is a distinct play, a bit like the end of Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935, “Lullaby of Broadway,” with the distinct difference that the latter involves a cast of hundreds, while the former is a dyad drama. Accordingly, the dance space is so linear that it evokes gridwork, which is pretty close to the opposite of a mandala.
The last in the great sequence of Astaire-Rogers films, Shall We Dance (1937), breaks with the trend in a way that I find fascinating. In many ways, the mandalaphobic designs are still in place — as Fred and Ginger also continue the trend toward isolation from any collective art or ceremony, and even from each other. At other times, there’s almost a nostalgic evocation of the old days, thinned out, full of yearning but also confused and anxious.
Shall We Dance includes what is in some ways the most daring and artful routine in the Astaire body of work, the solo in the ship’s engine room that film historians sometimes call Astaire’s “ballet méchanique.” It’s a solo dance, so we have to take it with a grain of salt in a discussion of collective dancing. But its audacity in terms of design is remarkable. Rather than countering the dance circle with a gridwork, Astaire uses big machines to dance with. (There are several conversations with Berkeley aesthetics in Shall We Dance; this is one of them.) In a sense, Astaire would rather dance with machines than other humans, and in this scene, pointedly not with the African-American musician-steamroom workers who are providing him with his core rhythm.
When he finally partners up with Ginger in the “They All Laughed” sequence, it is on the most featureless dance floor they have ever used, and with no glimpses of an audience (let alone fellow dancers) until the final bars.
The roller skating routine, however, seems to hark back nostalgically to the earlier films, especially Top Hat — the rink evokes the gazebo in that film, and the instability of skating corresponds to the thunder. There’s even a mandala, which we catch a brief glimpse of, in the center of the space, and even other skaters. This looks like it might be a collective dance, after all. But the other skaters vanish quickly. So the routine settles into the dyad dance that usually occurs midway through these films. But there’s a difference. Not only has the centering mandala disappeared from view (an artifact of lighting), but the circular space of the rink is defined by its edges. The inner slapstick of the scene makes sense — as in Chaplin’s The Rink, a lot of the pleasure comes from seeing very graceful and controlled bodies constantly approaching a point where they will lose their balance. Like the imp of the perverse, the edge draws our attention and ultimately, of course, the couple careens off it. Needless to say, circles don’t have straight edges. Mandalas are meant to contain.
In the grand balletic finale, a major circle has been reinscribed: the spotlight. It contains things alright, but on a stage. There are other people in the circle, too — but they are ballerina chorines, not fellow dancers.
Even they disappear and only a dyad is left — but it’s not Ginger, of course, so it’s a false dyad.
The surrealist-lite ending of the film is worth watching in motion. It engages a lot of the themes associated with dancing circles and collective dancing. But rather than joining and containing the new people, the collecting circle is for culling them out, until only two are left, the right ones, the only real ones in the middle of all those illusions.
