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Vincente
Minnelli by Joe McElhaney Joe McElhaney is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. His book At the Breaking Point: Lang, Hitchcock, Minnelli and the Decline of Classical Cinema will be published in 2004 by Temple University Press. |
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Just Look at It! Vincente Minnelli was fond of words like “beauty” and “magic”. They crop up in interviews and in his autobiography, to the point where these words become an aesthetic principle or even a philosophy from a director otherwise notoriously incapable of being articulate about his own work: “The search in films, what you try to create, is a little magic.” And one searches for and creates this because it is also what the spectator desires: “the main search is for a little magic in our lives” (1). Minnelli's cinema contains many moments designed to enchant the spectator, such as the spectacular “Coffee Time” number in Yolanda and the Thief (1946) in which Johnny Riggs (Fred Astaire) and Yolanda Aquaviva (Lucille Bremer), dressed in gold and white, dance on a floor designed in flowing, hallucinatory black and white waves; or there is the moment in Father of the Bride (1950) when Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) enters the bedroom of Kay Banks (Elizabeth Taylor) and sees his daughter in her wedding gown, an otherwise simple, ritualistic moment elevated to the realm of the magical when Kay's reflection is caught in a three-panelled mirror and she looks lovingly at her father while his voice-over narration tells us: “She looked like the princess in a fairy tale. I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd held out her hand for me to kiss.” To be a filmmaker for Minnelli, then, is to be a type of magician or enchanter. Indeed, many of his films very broadly assume the form and mode of romance: the world of fairy tale and myth, of the gothic and melodramatic, but just as strongly the comic, and a world dominated by the possibilities of metamorphosis and transformation. But these modes are most often given a contemporary or at least twentieth century setting in which the ongoing cultural weight of romance is implicitly measured against the modern and the psychological. The cinema has given us many filmmakers, from Georges Méliès to Orson Welles, who have been taken for (or taken themselves to be) magicians, making films which, through the magic that they create, implicitly or explicitly strike at some of the fundamental aspects of cinema and in which cinema itself becomes the ultimate form of modern technological magic. Minnelli made two films which directly show us the world of filmmaking, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), the second of these a film which Jean-Luc Godard, in Introduction à une veritable histoire du cinéma, has linked not only with his own Contempt (1963) but also with Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1928). But how different are Minnelli's methods from Vertov's! Vertov's journey in The Man with the Movie Camera is one from (as Annette Michelson has phrased it) magician to epistemologist, in which Vertov's documentary strategies, achieved largely through montage, both enchant and reveal the structural and material basis of that enchantment. Minnelli's journey, on the other hand, is achieved largely through all the state-of-the-art resources of a studio-created mise en scène. But it is also a journey in which a director/magician goes deeper and deeper into the core of the initial attraction to magic itself, in which bewitchment often gives itself over to the most voluptuous forms of enchantment or, conversely, to states of nightmare. (A separate essay could be written on Minnelli's use of stairs as marking the passage into and out of the world of enchantment or metamorphosis.) In the most frequently quoted attempt to pinpoint the limitations of Minnelli's cinema, Andrew Sarris writes: “Minnelli believes more in beauty than art” (2). Beauty, according to this line of reasoning, becomes a way of decorating over the reality which great art is presumably meant to reveal. “I don't think Vincente ever understood middle class,” claims Keogh Gleason, Minnelli's frequent set decorator. “He…thought everybody dined with candles and a crystal chandelier” (3). Gleason's comment might lead one to conclude that the images which Minnelli created in film after film (many of them, in fact, meant to be images of middle-class small town or suburban American family life) are, on some fundamental level, false, or at the very least fantasy images of the middle-class which Hollywood and mainstream capitalist culture in general so regularly offer. These middle-class characters in Minnelli do sometimes dine by candlelight or with a chandelier hanging over their heads and their homes are often improbably filled with vase after vase of beautifully cut fresh flowers carefully positioned amidst plush, colour-coordinated décor. “Just look at it!” Gene Kelly's Jerry Mulligan in An American in Paris (1951) exclaims in his voice-over narration at the “star” that he calls Paris. Just look at it! Implicitly this is what a number of Minnelli's films say to the spectator of the lavish worlds that they show, from the 1903 neighbourhood street that magically springs to life from its Currier and Ives-style print at the beginning of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) to the stunning opening sequence on the Bois du Boulogne in Gigi (1958). A cinema consecrated to beautiful but ultimately decorative and false images? Initial appearances to the contrary, I would say no and instead prefer to follow Thomas Elsaesser when he makes the claim that Minnelli's films are not simply exercises in style but address some of the ethics of mise en scène itself (4).
Chris Marker has stated that when he, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet were in London in 1952 filming Les Statues meurent aussi they began every day by attending a 10am screening of An American in Paris. An American in Paris: a film which, apart from a few second-unit shots, recreates Paris entirely on Hollywood soundstages and the back lot; Les Statues meurent aussi: a documentary short on what happens to African art when it is exhibited in museums where it loses its relationship to the folk culture from which it sprang and as a result becomes lifeless, part of the “botany of death that we call culture.” In a larger sense, the short is also about the nature of art and what it (along with science and religion) means to us in our fight against death, becoming the “instrument of a desire to seize the world.” There are, of course, many ways for an artist to seize the world and consequently many ways for the artists we sometimes call filmmakers to do so as well, through the most rigorous of documentaries to the most stylised of musicals. Marker does not go into detail as to what it was he and his collaborators got out of this daily ritual of watching An American in Paris except to note the “lightness” that they felt watching the film (7). Consequently it may have been nothing more than a refuge from the seriousness of the work on their own obviously very serious film. But let us suppose for a moment that what these three French filmmakers saw in the faux French world of An American in Paris was a cinematic universe parallel rather than antithetical to their own, one equally possessed with a desire to seize the world and equally concerned with its own version of the “truth” but paradoxically articulating it within the realm of artifice. In the midst of a review of Francis Ford Coppola's musical One from the Heart (1982) Serge Daney describes Coppola as working within the Minnellian idea “that a good illusionist does not 'break' the illusion, but constantly multiplies it, ad infinitum. The truth of a mask is not the face but an excess in the mask…Two minuses make a plus. Two falsehoods make a truth” (8).
A Working Life Vincente Minnelli, born Lester Anthony Minnelli, was the fifth child (and the only one to survive infancy) of Vincent Charles Minnelli and Mina Le Beau. His father was the co-impresario of a tent show company, the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater, and his mother acted in these productions which regularly toured Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana during the summer. As a child, Minnelli also acted in some of these productions which were typical of tent shows of the period – melodramas or unauthorised versions of hit Broadway shows. During the winter, his parents usually separated in order to find scattered work in vaudeville while their child was sent to stay with relatives, mainly those in the small town of Delaware, Ohio. It was in this town where the Minnellis eventually settled after their tent show was driven out of business by the success of silent films and Minnelli's father began to make a small living as a freelance musician. Minnelli has characterised his adolescence as one in which he was prone to “flights of fancy”, attracted to literature and art, dreamily sketching in solitude (11). After graduating from high school, Minnelli moved to Chicago where his sketches landed him a job as a window dresser at Marshall Field's department store. It was also in Chicago where (in self-transformation) he changed his name from Lester Anthony to Vincente. Eventually Minnelli's sketches got him the job of chief costume designer (and later set designer as well) for the Chicago movie theatre chain of Balaban and Katz which staged, on a weekly basis, ornate revues to accompany their films. When Balaban and Katz merged with Paramount-Publix in 1931, the company moved to New York and Minnelli went with them. It was in the New York of the 1930s where Minnelli's theatrical reputation was firmly established, as he also began to design for Earl Carroll's Vanities and for Radio City Music Hall spectaculars, the latter of these eventually leading to the job of not only designing but directing these monthly shows. After leaving his job at the Music Hall, Minnelli performed similar designing and directing duties for some of the most notable Broadway revues of the period, including At Home Abroad (1935) and Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Eventually, Minnelli's success brought him to the attention of Hollywood. After one aborted attempted to work for Paramount in 1937, Minnelli was firmly lured to Hollywood in 1940 by MGM musicals producer Arthur Freed. Minnelli remained under contract to MGM for over two decades. As with his work on stage, Minnelli was quickly recognised for the distinctive quality of his visual style: a highly mobile frame marked by complex tracking and crane shots and a frequent use of long takes, a choreographer-like attention to the staging of action, and an expressive sense of décor and colour. Minnelli married four times, most notably to his first wife, Judy Garland. Their famous daughter, Liza Minnelli (the first of two Minnelli daughters), was also the star of his last film, A Matter of Time (1976). More recent print and television biographies of Garland have either implied or explicitly stated that Minnelli was homosexual or at least bisexual although so far (outside of sniggering comments about Minnelli's less-than-conventionally-masculine behaviour) none of this material has offered a satisfactory and entirely coherent picture of Minnelli as a sexual being. Until a full-scale and reliable biography appears, we could say that a person who married four times and had two children was one whose sexuality was, at the very least, complicated. However, queer studies has more recently opened up new possibilities for understanding Minnelli's work, in terms of both the visual style of the films and their particular perspective on sexuality and gender relations. While detailed attention to this aspect of Minnelli's work is not possible here, the very fascination with transformation of the self and the world in Minnelli no doubt derives much of its basis from a certain kind of anxiety about the potentially repressive nature of the family and bourgeois marriage as well as anxieties about carefully prescribed gender roles which one often finds in his films.
Clearly we have a life permeated by theatre, from the “lowest” forms of popular entertainment via the family tent shows (which, Stephen Harvey points out, undoubtedly influenced Minnelli's affectionate depiction of the itinerant theatrical world of the 1948 film The Pirate (14)) to the comparatively elite world of the ornate and fashionable Broadway musical (a world depicted with equal affection in the 1953 film The Band Wagon). Minnelli not only situates many of his films within the world of theatre or filmmaking but he also draws attention to the theatrical nature of everyday life, in which anything from a wedding to the designing of the curtains in a sanatorium can take on a decidedly theatrical quality. This is also a life just as clearly permeated by art, fashion and design, and a fundamental need to turn all manner of experience and perception into visual spectacle. If Minnelli's characters theatricalise their environments they also just as often turn them into sites of visual display, as Minnelli himself does through the mise en scène. The placement of actors and use of décor has a precision to it undoubtedly formed by someone immersed in the world of both “high” art and fashion and someone accustomed to arranging figures within the frame of the canvas, the proscenium arch, and the shop window. “Not one little frame [of a Minnelli film] is haphazard,” claims Gleason, “everything is studied” (15). And yet these precisely arranged frames may also overflow with detail, as in the Smith family home in Meet Me in St. Louis, about as enveloping an interior space as any film has given us, every room of the house filled with items of décor which draw the eye towards them. Special mention should be made here of The Cobweb (1955), its complex ensemble staging and use of the CinemaScope frame to show multiple points of action within a single shot anticipating Robert Altman's films of the 1970s.
Minnelli's own characterisation of himself as a dreamy adolescent seems intended to draw parallels with some of the protagonists of his own films who likewise are prone to dream states or subjective visions. While such a parallel is (as we shall see) accurate enough, neither Minnelli's own biography nor the basic drives of his own characters can be completely explained by such a simple formula. For clearly we have a life devoted to hard work, to intense productivity, from the musical revues of the 1920s and '30s, in which show after show would be turned out on a weekly or monthly basis, to his days in Hollywood in which his status as a contract director required him to make at least one film a year, often two or even three. One cannot dream such a huge body of work into existence. In his autobiography, Minnelli stated that he would like his tombstone to read: “Here lies Vincente Minnelli. He died of hard work” (16). To die of hard work: the phrase here suggests less the romantic conception of dying for art and even less the Promethean idea of work as toil and sublimation than it does a sensibility which takes active pleasure in work. Minnelli's characters are not simply dreamers but workers, people who need and want to work, and who do indeed often take enormous pleasure in what they do for a living. It is not worth being serious about work or even showing it unless it can become a form of play. The milkman Al in The Clock is someone we never see deliver milk since he is quickly injured by a drunk (Keenan Wynn). We do, however, see Joe and Alice deliver the milk for him since showing these two amateurs doing it for one early morning run allows the film to make work seem like play, divorced from any real economic necessity on the part of Joe and Alice. We never see Mr. Smith (Leon Ames) at his law office in Meet Me in St. Louis, we only see him come home, exhausted, and complaining about losing a case. His function is to provide the income by which his family can happily live without significant material needs, oblivious or indifferent as to how or why this money is acquired. (In this regard, the Smith family members are model capitalist consumers.) Utopia in this film is a world of material abundance without work. Only the father repeatedly interrupts this fantasy.
If to die of hard work is one extreme of the pleasure to be had from the act of labour in Minnelli, the other extreme, that of misery, is the absence of work when it is desired: Karen McIver (Gloria Grahame) in The Cobweb, who has no job and no outlet for her need to express herself outside of an excessive fixation on designing the curtains for a sanatorium in which her husband is a doctor; or characters like Dave in Some Came Running or Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) in Two Weeks in Another Town who have reached particular moments of crisis within their lives in which they can no longer create and simply drift into alcoholism, dissipation, insanity. Only a character like Wade Hunnicut (Robert Mitchum) in Home from the Hill (1960) is exempt from these needs and drives since Wade essentially functions as an aristocrat within his small Texas town, a man who doesn't even wear a watch because, as he notes with pride, time waits on him. What links all of these characters (working or not) is the degree to which they are singularly possessed with an idea, an obsession which they pursue relentlessly. The mad, obsessive desire of Tacy Collini (Lucille Ball) in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) to be a devoted new wife to her husband (Desi Arnaz) plays itself out for her through a much stronger devotion to their obscenely large mobile home, the care of which gives her the kind of aesthetic outlet that marriage does not. When her husband proposes selling the home, her horrified response is, “I won't give up my trailer. I love it, I love it.” More than her husband, it is clear. However, the most exemplary characters in Minnelli are those who have a desire to not simply to aestheticise the world but transform it and they do so through a variety of methods. Transformation and Metamorphosis
“I'm not very interested in anyone but myself.” It is Stevie (John Kerr) in The Cobweb who says this but it could have come out of the mouth of any number of Minnelli characters. These dreaming aesthetes tend to be deeply narcissistic and Oscar Levant's “Concerto in F” number from An American in Paris, in which he serves as pianist, orchestra conductor and finally adoring spectator of his own performance, stands as a supreme example of this tendency. Within this narcissistic world of display and expressive décor, the mirror so often serves as the privileged emblem and tool of these impulses: Emma Bovary who, as she says, “must have a mirror” and who momentarily stares transfixed at her own image at the ball before she is forcefully pulled away to dance; or Charlie Sorrell, who becomes sexually aroused at the sight of his/her own nude body in a mirror in Goodbye Charlie. While the world of Narcissus is traditionally thought of in relation to infantile sexuality (and often a pre-condition or extension of homosexuality) it may also become, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “the germ of a different reality principle…transforming this world into a new mode of being” (18). In this regard, narcissism is not necessarily a negative in Minnelli but may serve as an important step in the path towards the creation of new worlds, new identities. The Contessa (Ingrid Bergman) in A Matter of Time is a ruin of narcissism but is also responsible (if only indirectly) for transforming the chambermaid Nina (Liza Minnelli) into a film star. It is precisely her narcissism which allows her to perceive the world in the way that she does and which strongly connects her to a kind of life force. When her ex-husband (Charles Boyer) asks her how she can still retain what are, to him, foolish ideas her reply is, “Because I'm alive.” Transformation itself in Minnelli essentially takes two related forms. One involves a process of education in a body of work filled with teachers of some type or another, always instructing on matters of aesthetics, a word which can have very broad connotations referring not only to the creation of art but also to the creation and aesthetics of the self. How does one make an entrance into a room and, once there, how does one move across it? This is the type of “problem” which many of Minnelli's characters face and treat with the utmost seriousness. The mastery of social behaviour is crucial here because we are essentially dealing with a world without privacy, in which not only décor but human beings are always on display and in which one can never fully escape from the demands of the social world. “I must say it's difficult for anyone in this family to have any privacy,” is the complaint of Rose (Lucille Bremer) the oldest sister of Meet Me in St. Louis and this type of complaint can be extended to the social environments of everything from Madame Bovary to The Reluctant Debutante (1958) to Home from the Hill, worlds built strongly around spying, eavesdropping and gossip and in which, as that great teacher Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) says in Gigi, bad table manners break up more households than infidelity. And this kind of “education” that we find in Minnelli is not trivial since it determines how the characters are to be received within their respective social orders. In Tea and Sympathy (1956) the failure of Tom (John Kerr) to be an acceptable masculine classmate for his fellow students at prep school is largely related to problems of Tom's methods of dress, gesture and behaviour and the misinterpretations which arise out of these: Tom is thought to be gay and must be coached by his roommate Al (Darryl Hickman) in the “proper” way to walk so that Tom will be perceived as heterosexual. Such a mastery of social behaviour is not simply one of accepting the cultural order as it stands. Rather, such mastery must first take place – one must successfully negotiate one's way through that world – before it can ever be transformed. The Courtship of Eddie's Father is a film filled with characters who instruct or who teach themselves lessons in everything from bowling to Spanish to public speaking. All of this culminates in the extraordinary sequence near the end of the film when Eddie (Ronny Howard) instructs his father (Glenn Ford) on the proper way to court the neighbour across the hall, Elizabeth (Shirley Jones). Here Eddie is both metteur en scène and actress, assuming the role of Elizabeth while also directing his father, calling him “darling” and “sugar” and “my excellent strong man”. It is a sequence utterly charming and “innocent” but which also derives much of its force from the undercurrents of incest and homosexuality which exist beneath it, not as the source of trauma but as the source of potentially liberating comic celebration.
One can see this clearly in the two films which deal with hypnosis explicitly: The Pirate and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). In both films we find female protagonists who are such willing subjects that they fall under hypnosis immediately and deeply. In The Pirate, Manuela succumbs to the allure of the spinning hypnotic mirror of Serafin (Gene Kelly), an actor claiming to have studied with “the great Mesmer” and who hopes to seduce Manuela through his hypnotic powers. But under hypnosis, the “pure soul” and “prim exterior” of Manuela shatters as she literally shoves Serafin out of her way and reveals her passionate attraction to the pirate Mack the Black to an audience, singing of her fantasy (essentially a rape fantasy) of being taken away and sexually submitting to him, this submissiveness clearly serving as a mask for the more strongly active and aggressive sexual life she desires. While initially taken aback, the intensity of Manuela's sexuality only increases Serafin's attraction for her, culminating in his impersonation of Mack the Black. In On a Clear Day, the psychoanalyst Dr. Marc Chabot (Yves Montand) places Daisy Gamble (Barbra Streisand), a passive woman with “no character of any kind”, under hypnosis to help her stop smoking. But the hypnotic state is so deep that under it she reveals her prior life as Lady Melinda Tentrees in Regency England. Within the massive space of Chabot's office and under hypnosis she repeatedly assumes this role of Lady Tentrees, causing Chabot to fall in love not with Daisy but with Melinda. Daisy's hypnotic states become a type of space which these two characters mentally inhabit in different ways. Minnelli often shoots these sequences in Chabot's office in such a manner that they seem to be neither simple flashbacks nor simple subjective images but images which are being projected, as though on a screen, and which are viewed by Chabot and Daisy-as-Melinda. Minnelli's own publicly stated fascination with inconsistent personalities (19) makes explicit the degree to which his characters are caught within contradictory drives, between “total fulfilment” and repressive or destructive tendencies, the latter of these the result of social and cultural pressures as much as they are innate psychological problems. Furthermore, the senses which are attempting to achieve fulfilment here are at once sexual and aesthetic. The ideal realm for Minnelli is one in which the aesthetic is given free play and in which sexual identity and desire are fluid rather than fixed. The Pirate is arguably the fullest realisation of this tendency since what Mack the Black represents to Manuela is sexual satisfaction outside of bourgeois marriage and monogamy (her fantasies involve the pirate sexually conquering many women at once, of which she is just one) as well as the excitement of travel and urban life, symbolised by Paris. What she ultimately gets instead, through Serafin, is a narcissistic actor who can assume the role of a sexual conqueror for Manuela and brings with him the excitement of travel, but who also functions as a buffoon and who is finally no less attractive for that reason. By the end of the film, Manuela escapes from her small town and from bourgeois marriage into Serafin's world of theatre, dressed (like Serafin) as a clown of indeterminate gender and singing “Be a Clown”. But the hypnotic spell is only partially broken. Minnelli does not take us (or Manuela) to “reality” but to the theatre, in which reality is in a state of constant negotiation. A world in which work is also play, a world of narcissism but also one of laughter and freedom as well as beauty and magic in which one is constantly being offered the possibility to transform oneself and one's immediate surroundings through performance, costuming, décor. Only temporary transformations, perhaps. But sometimes, that is more than enough. © Joe McElhaney, February 2004 Endnotes:
Filmography Cabin
in the Sky
(1943) Busby Berkeley directed the “Shine” number when Minnelli
was ill. 
Bibliography Vincent
Amiel, “Madame Bovary: l'arrière-pays”, Positif,
no. 295, September 1985.
Articles in Senses of Cinema The
Band Wagon
by Joe McElhaney
Web Resources Vincente
Minnelli
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