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Singing essay home
Singin' in the Rain has, within film writing and genre studies, garnered a preeminent place for itself as a key text. While the terms of this eminence may vary substantially, usually around an axis provided by whatever critical methodology is being employed, these arguments can be usefully summarised in terms of generic excellence and formalist sophistication.
The close reading that this hypertext wishes to perform will concentrate on one emblematic song and dance sequence from Kelly and Donen's Singin' in the Rain. In doing this the essay will suggest that the sequence specifically inscribes the general arguments and concerns of the film, in the process illustrating not only the textual 'solidity' of Singin' in the Rain but the virtues of such close reading practice for film analysis and theory.
Of course, within genre studies, one of the major strategies for validating the musical is precisely in terms of its generally celebratory self-reflexiveness, an argument that runs the risk of becoming dangerously circular.
What remains unstated, though clearly required, in this argument is structuralism's celebration of the narratologically defined formalist text, so that any text that appears to knowingly engage with its own processes of production, ipso facto, warrants mention. This is clearly the strategy that has allowed the musical some critical legitimacy and has also led to some of the more substantial developments in writing on the musical in recent years (see, for example, Altman's canonical anthology).
It is a truism of the film musical as a generic practice that its most intensive moments revolve around those almost unmotivated displays of excess that simultaneously become enfolded into its own disursive surface yet also 'leak' out of these discursive boundaries.
It is also perhaps a truism of film theory as a generic practice that such intensive moments can never be excessive because of the nature of writing on the cinema. This essay's use of hypertext is a preliminary attempt to combine a developing academic genre with more established film theory.