Research Statement

Research questions

1. What is the relationship between dancing, montage, and consumption?

2. How can montage reveal (and revel in) excess (of bodies, money, movement)?

3. How can filmic dance sequences both depict dancing bodies and 'dance' themselves (via editing and structure)?

Context

Colleen Laird’s 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa' (2022) visualizes and categorizes the 146 shots that make up the opening of Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012). The second half of the video essay juxtaposes Ninagawa’s film with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). For the fourth exercise in Ariel Avissar’s Parametric Summer Series, 'Laird’s Constraint' (2024), participants were asked to create a video essay in conversation with 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa,' making use of a film montage and juxtaposing that montage with another film made fifty-four years before or after. 

In the text of 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa,' Laird writes that the opening sequence of Helter Skelter shows us that the film is about 'bodies, beauty, branding, consumerism, image industries, aesthetics, excess, gender, voyeurism' (Laird 2022). For my own video essay, I focused on excess: excess of consumption, excess of commodities, and excess of bodies in motion. 

Asked to choose a montage from a film, my first thoughts were of 1980s and 1990s shopping montages, as well as films that featured characters hanging out in suburban shopping malls, those 'common denominator(s) of our national life, the best symbols of our abundance' (Jackson 1996, 1111). The first shopping montage that came to mind was from Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990), in which Julia Roberts’ main character gains respectability by spending 'an obscene amount of money' on Rodeo Drive. But my thoughts also turned to lesser-known movies like Goddess of Love (Drake, 1988) in which Wheel of Fortune host Vanna White’s Aphrodite goes on a spending spree; The Never Ending Story III (MacDonald, 1994), which features a pre-teen shopping spree via a magical amulet; and Blank Check (Wainwright, 1994), in which an adolescent boy spends a bunch of mafia money (a rare example of a shopping montage featuring a male character). These shopping montages were almost always set to music, frequently took place in malls, and often represented a character’s shift from shy to confident. 

Commercial filmmaking seems to use montage primarily to show the passage of time—from childhood to young adulthood, from project beginning to completion, from clumsy newbie to star athlete. In the shopping montage, though, the sequential and sometimes overlapping shots (different outfits in front of a mirror, the pile of gift-wrapped boxes cutting from one to three to ten) show an increasing excess of consumption and a glorification of commodities. The shopper might begin cautiously, but by the end of the montage they have fully embraced this new version of themselves: draped in expensive clothes, weighed down by boxes and boxes of purchases, joyful in the power of buying things to transform their lives. The structure and editing of the montage itself—match cuts, repetition with a difference, a build from longer shots to shorter ones—serves to underline how much the character is consuming, and their increasing joy at having consumed so much. In the rom-com specifically, Thomas Doherty calls these 'retail orgy' scenes, in which the female lead 'cruises the aisles and ransacks the racks, flitting in and out of dressing rooms, modeling for mirrors, twirling, preening, and primping in a jump-cut swirl of of posh outfits before bursting through revolving doors, glowing, laden with shopping bags of many logos' (Doherty 2010, 25). 

The montage I have chosen from Mannequin (Gottlieb, 1987) is an interesting twist on the 80s shopping montage. The characters aren’t shopping, they actually work in the department store and are having fun after dark, when all the customers are gone. This was surely a fantasy of mine as a child (being able to hang out in a mall or big box store after it closed), and indeed this very scenario shows up in more than a few films and TV shows (Where the Heart Is [Williams, 2000], Career Opportunities [Gordon, 1991], The Last of Us [Mazin and Druckman, 2023-2025]). The abandoned shopping mall is a staple of zombie films and TV shows—before The Last of Us, characters went wild in the mall settings of Dawn of the Dead (1978, 2004) and I Am a Hero (2015), revealing a 'tension between the pleasure and the violence of shopping (that) set the tone for a lot of later films that framed the mall as a place of gleeful excess as well as danger' (Bernstein 2022). The characters in Mannequin don’t shop, but they do revel in all the department store goods at their disposal—dresses, suits, hats, jewelry, high-end stereo accessories, lingerie, cigars, fur coats. The sequence is meant to show the two characters falling in love, but what they seem to be enjoying the most is their chance to get up close and personal with signifiers of wealth. Doherty notes a similar focus in Pretty Woman, in which 'not conjugal bliss but conspicuous consumption' is what seems to excite Julia Roberts the most (Doherty 2010, 25). 

This connection between dancing, montage, and consumption led me to my choice of a second sequence from 42nd Street (Bacon, 1933), surely one of the most iconic depictions of dance ever captured on film. Where Mannequin’s characters struggle to fill the giant space of the department store, Busby Berkeley’s perfectly in sync bodies fill the screen entirely, moving with the precision of gleaming cogs and gears in a factory machine. Arms, legs, delicately heeled feet, and white-capped heads bob back and forth in perfect time to jaunty music, filmed from above in a crane shot that reduces them to a dizzying network of geometric shapes. 

There is excess and a glorification of consumption here too. Rubin writes that, because Berkeley’s song and dance sequences were so often separated from the film’s plot, 'spectacle in Berkeley’s numbers becomes an end in itself. Of crucial importance to the creation of Berkeley-esque spectacle is a sense of gratuitousness, of uselessness, of extravagance, of rampant excess, of over-indulgence, of flaunting, of conspicuous consumption…' (Rubin 1993, 41). In 42nd Street, the audience is invited to revel in a joyful scrum of bodies decked out in fur, diamonds, and gleaming white tuxedo vests. Here the bodies dance, but the film dances as well, with choreography viewed from an astonishing variety of angles that give us a sense of both grand scale and intimacy, revealing Berkeley’s most significant contribution to cinema: that he 'made the camera dance' (Rubin 1993, 2). Like the dream of limitless and joyful consumption depicted in the Mannequin montage, here Berkeley offers up an 'equation of women’s bodies with riches and abundance' and 'a democratic kind of classiness, available in fantasy if not in fact, to replace stiffly hierarchical notions of class' (McLean 2010, 73-76, Dickstein 2009, 507). Though Mannequin’s montage features only two performers and much simpler choreography and camera work, we can see a through line from Berkeley to Mannequin in choreographer Vincent Paterson, whose prolific career includes Broadway musicals, music videos, and hundreds of commercials. Music and dance spectacles of the 1930s connect to 1980s shopping montages through the depiction of dance, a focus on lavishly dressed bodies, and images of conspicuous consumption. 

Methods

In dividing Mannequin’s montage into groups, I focused on actions, locations, numbers of bodies, and shot types. One collection is a group of the sequence’s widest shots (in which the cavernous space of the department store truly dwarfs the actors), another two feature each actor alone, while another takes place in a freight elevator. After grouping these shots together, I noticed that they were often naturally divided by color, given the bright yellows, pinks, and leopard prints that the actors occasionally wear (different outfits in each collection of shots).

Having chosen the Mannequin sequence first, my choice of the accompanying 'Young and Healthy' sequence from 42nd Street was informed by a thematic connection. Both Mannequin and 42nd Street are stories of young people in love and exuberant (though the latter film is more concerned with depicting a love of theater and dance). Mannequin’s shopping montage also epitomizes the 'young and healthy' world of 1980s yuppies, who showed their joy and success through conspicuous consumption. 

In inserting shots from the Mannequin sequence into the 42nd Street sequence, I wanted to reveal certain visual and choreographic connections between the two films. In the spirit of Berkeley’s camera movement, I also wanted, through editing, to make images from Mannequin 'dance' in the manner of 42nd Street’s large groups, and to make the Mannequin and 42nd Street sequences 'dance' with one another. The second half of the video essay includes multiple clips of the same sequence moving in a circle, a grid composed of sequences from both Mannequin and 42nd Street, and groups of two and three shots circling one another. The final shot bridges the gap between 1933 and 1987 by overlapping two almost-kissing pairs.

Outcomes

Like the other video essays in this collection, mine offers an opportunity to expand on and unpack the visual, thematic, and technical components of 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa,' and the parameters of 'Laird’s Constraint.' By breaking one shopping montage sequence into groups based on movement, color, shot type, and number of figures, we can see a clear rhythm and structure in the glorification of commodities that these characters engage in. Pairing this sequence with a similar exercise in excess—42nd Street’s collection of elegantly clad bodies in motion—suggests a through line between Depression-era dreams of distant wealth and 1980s-era dreams of transformation through conspicuous consumption.

Bibliography

Avissar, A. (2024). 'Parametric Summer Series,' https://www.arielavissar.work/the-parametric-summer-series 

Bernstein, S. (2022). 'Tis the Season: What 80s Mall Movies Tell Us About an Enduring Site of American Tension.' Literary Hub, December 2, https://lithub.com/tis-the-season-what-80s-mall-movies-tell-us-about-an-enduring-site-of-american-tension/

Dickstein, Morris. (2009). Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.

Doherty, T. (2010). 'The Rom-Com and the Shopping Gene.' OAH Magazine of History, 24 (2), pp. 25-28.

Jackson, K.T. (1996). 'All the World’s a Mall: Reflections on the Social and Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center.' The American Historical Review, 101 (4), pp. 1111-1121. 

Laird, C. (2022). 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa.' [in]Transition, vol. 10, issue 2, 17 (June), https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11328/

McLean, Adrienne L. (2010). 'Flirting with Terpsichore: Dance, Class, and Entertainment in 1930s Film Musicals.' In The Sound of Musicals, ed. Steven Cohan. BFI/Palgrave, 67-75.

Rubin, Martin. (1993). Show Stoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle. Columbia University Press. 

Filmography

Blank Check (Rupert Wainwright, 1994, U.S.A.).

Career Opportunities (Bryan Gordon, 1991, U.S.A.).

Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978, U.S.A.).

Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004, U.S.A.).

42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933, U.S.A.).

Goddess of Love (Jim Drake, 1988, U.S.A.).

Helter Skelter (Mika Ninagawa, 2012, Japan).

I Am a Hero (Shinsuke Sato, 2015, Japan).

The Last of Us (Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman, 2023-2025, U.S.A.).

Mannequin (Michael Gottlieb, 1987).

The Neverending Story III (Peter MacDonald, 1994).

Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990, U.S.A.).

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, U.S.A.)

Where the Heart Is (Matt Williams, 2000, U.S.A.)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

Should one read the author’s accompanying statement before or after watching the audiovisual essay? Personally, I prefer to begin with the video itself, approaching the work as openly as possible, without being guided toward a specific interpretation. Since I was already familiar with Colleen Laird’s 2022 audiovisual essay 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa,' I quickly recognized that the '(Laird’s Constraint)' in the title referred to the way 'Dance with Me' connects to Laird’s video through its aesthetics and structure. However, in this case I did need to read the written statement to fully understand what this audiovisual essay is about. 

As a self-described exercise, 'Dance with Me' fits within the tradition of the Middlebury workshop. As Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell write: 'We have found that producing work according to often arbitrary formal parameters will reveal something about your object that would be hard to discover through more typical analytical means' (http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/scholarship-in-sound--image?path=contents). The 'Laird’s Constraint' works as such a parameter. Exercises are productive as they tend to teach us something new, about what 'works' but also about what 'does not work.' This is also the case with 'Dance with Me,' an exercise that can be divided in three parts of which some work and other do not.

The first part takes the famous 3:10 minute montage sequence of Mannequin (Michael Gottlieb, 1987) in its entirety and speeds up the image, while the soundtrack (Alisha’s 'Do You Dream About Me') remains the same speed. This follows the first part of Laird’s 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa,' in which she speeds up the image of the opening sequence of Helter Skelter (Mika Ninagawa, 2012) and adds an alternative soundtrack. Yet the effect is quite different. The opening sequence of Helter Skelter is an eclectic montage of shots, many in extreme close-up, some already sped up in the original film. Laird’s audiovisual essay thus reinforces the rapid and eclectic editing of the original and enhances the excessiveness of its imagery by speeding it up. The speeding up of the Mannequin montage sequence does not amplify the original but distorts it instead. While the speeding up (1000%) in Laird’s video make the rapid editing even more rapid, the speeding up in 'Dance with Me' looks like fast-forwarding, evoking (at least to me) a sense of slapstick rather than a highlighting of excess. With only the image of the dancing couple sped up, the image and sound become asynchronous, which enhances the distortion. Although this part does not 'work' in highlighting the excessiveness of 1980s commodity culture (as discussed in the written statement), it does raise other relevant questions about, for example, the differences between the continuity editing of Hollywood cinema and the staccato style montage in avant-garde cinema.

The second part follows Laird by presenting the total of the sequence’s shots in one frame. Here another difference between the two sequences becomes clear. Laird’s screen shows 144 shots, 'Dance with Me' shows 36 shots, while both the original sequences have almost the same length. This part does 'work' as the division in 'actions, locations, number of bodies, and shot types' indeed enables the viewer to notice patterns otherwise easily overlooked. It also shows how the method of presenting all shots on screen and then subsequently highlighting those that are in some way similar is an effective videographic technique of film analysis.

The third and final part follows Laird by making a connection to a film of classic Hollywood, here 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). This part was to me the most aesthetically pleasing. The author has done a wonderful job connecting the two films and in this way places Mannequin in a tradition of classic Hollywood. While the author (rightfully) writes that in this way she is able to 'effectively turning [the Mannequin characters} into good dancers through the power of editing,' she does much more than that. This intertextual connection highlights the way Mannequin, as 1980s Hollywood, builds on classic Hollywood in a true 1980s postmodern pastiche style. 

Overall, 'Dance with Me' is a very productive exercise to help us look differently at conventional Hollywood film. 

Review 2: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Nelson creates a compelling juxtaposition between Mannequin and 42nd Street; the justification for the dance connections across the two sequences is logical, and the contrast reveals how choreographed movement in Hollywood has changed (and hasn’t) over half a decade. The categorization of the first section of the video essay is clear and develops well in the video essay. Overall, the author could videographically push the central relationships between the two films further to strengthen the scholarly contribution and nuance of the argument. This could be further developed in the written essay to refine the larger historical argument being made about dance on screen, but primarily in the video itself. 

The first segment, through its categorization of shots, establishes a rigorous repetition of screens positioned in various, precise shapes, which effectively teases the introduction of the 'Young and Healthy' number. The video essay parametrically plays with applying Berkeley-style choreographic principles to the Mannequin sequence; I found myself wanting these choices to match even more the intensity and sheer scale that drives such abstracted choreography of bodies. The second half could further match that intensity through an expansion of the piece’s videographic playfulness, for example: Could the author match the number of Mannequin 'screens' to the number of chorines performing in 'Young and Healthy,' for example? Could the danced 'duet' at the end further develop the pattern of movement through the frame to parallel the movement of the camera or shapes shown earlier? Could the specific graphic contrasts from the Berkeley number (angular body shapes and lines versus soft curves of circles) be further heightened in some videographic way? Pushing the parameters further would match the ambition of the Berkeley choreography, which seems to be a central goal of the author in this piece.

The combination of the chosen shots from Mannequin with the 'Young and Healthy' images serves to heighten for me the difference between the numbers’ composition and choreography, another element that could be interesting to further clarify and refine. The statement highlights a difference between 'good' and 'bad' dancing, concepts that are historically contingent, as Adrienne McLean emphases in her work on dance in Hollywood. It’s also worth pointing to the big choreographic differences between the two: a large ensemble versus a duet, abstract shapes and long shots versus faces in tighter framings, etc. The superimpositions effectively create abstract shapes from Mannequin to parallel the abstract top shots from 42nd Street, but it’s striking how we see the faces of the characters in Mannequin and (usually) not those in 42nd Street, for example.

Given the focus of the 'Laird’s Constraint' parameters on emphasizing historical contrast, I found myself wanting additional context for some of the work’s claims, on dance in Hollywood in particular. The 'Young and Healthy' number is clearly a personal favorite of the author, and the affection for it comes through in the video essay. Given the affective qualities of the videographic work and the parametric nature of the selection, this context is all that is needed to justify its inclusion. If the author wants to argue for its broader significance in the history of dance on screen, however, it would be useful to expand the context for why this is. 42nd Street is remembered for its early introduction to Berkeley-esque choreography, but the argument that Hollywood musical choreography peaked in 1933 needs a bit more expansion and refinement. Martin Rubin’s scholarship on Busby Berkeley’s work in Hollywood and Adrienne McLean’s work on dance in Hollywood of the period would help to further contextualize some of the author’s claims. Mentioning the name of the choreographer for Mannequin, Vincent Paterson, and his relationship to commercialized choreography in his work for Michael Jacskon and Madonna, as well as more independent films like Dancer in the Dark, would also emphasize interesting links to Berkeley and the extractability of his numbers from the Warner Bros. film plots of the 1930s. This work reminds us of how Hollywood often refers to its past (intentionally or not) and how the musical genre’s reflexivity and links to commodification and consumption live on in Mannequin’s montage aesthetics. 

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response