The Film Musicals of Vincente Minnelli and the Team of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen: 1944-1958. (Volumes 1 and 2).

Abstract

In his essay, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures" (1934), Erwin Panofsky argued persuasively for the analysis of films as "moving pictures", thus placing them within the purview of the art historian. In this dissertation, the methods of the art historian are adapted and exp and ed to analyze the film musicals of Vincente Minnelli and the directorial team of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. These mutually influential directors, working together and separately under the enlightened aegis of producer Arthur Freed at Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios, produced a series of Technicolor film musicals that, in their imaginative and inventive exploitation of the still young medium of sound cinema, set new st and ards for this uniquely American film genre in particular, and sound cinema in general. This study subjects fourteen key films of these artists to intensive visual analysis. In addition, an attempt has been made to describe and analyze the distinctive way in which each director integrates sound with moving picture. Thus, special attention has been paid not only to each director's characteristic h and ling of the camera, use of color, light, and frame composition, but also to the way in which each director or directorial team integrates these elements of form with dialogue, music, and dance to convey a musical film narrative. In the films considered here, the directors develop, over time, a shared iconography--a repertory of images that are repeated, with variations, from one film to another throughout the series. One of the tasks of this dissertation has been to identify and examine these "stock" images, and to suggest, when possible and documentable, their sources in earlier films and the other visual arts. Finally, this dissertation documents the artistic relationship between Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly, each of whom exerted a major influence on the other's style.