Swing Time · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The floor of the Silver Sandal is polished until it works like a second sky, and near the end of the picture Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers walk away from each other across it. The camera backs off and lifts to keep both of them whole in the frame while the twin curving staircases of the set pull them apart and then hand them back at the top. Nobody cuts. The architecture does the arguing. What they have come all that way to perform is a farewell.

That number is "Never Gonna Dance," which was for a while the title of the film. RKO went with Swing Time instead, hitching the picture to a national craze the Jerome Kern score had almost nothing to do with.

The rule governing that shot is Astaire's, not George Stevens's: the dancer framed head to foot, the camera traveling with the dance rather than cutting into it, coverage kept so thin the number reads as continuous physical fact. David Abel executed it; the editor Henry Berman protected it, letting the few cuts fall at musical joints instead of inside phrases. The doctrine comes down from Buster Keaton, where a gag only counts if you can watch the whole body do it and the cut never rescues him. It is also aimed at Busby Berkeley, whose 42nd Street had dissolved dancers into overhead kaleidoscopic pattern three years earlier — same studio decade, opposite religion, the meaning living in the joins between shots.

André Bazin later put a rule to this: when the point of a scene is that two things are really in the same place at the same time, cutting between them destroys the only thing worth filming. He was thinking of a boy and a lion. A duet is the same problem. Deleuze supplies the other half, calling the shot a mobile section — a piece of change itself, an alteration of the whole registered while it happens. A cut assembles meaning out of parts. A moving shot lets duration do the work. Berkeley makes sense; Astaire makes time.

Which is why the numbers here feel like events and the plot feels like a mechanism. It is a mechanism, deliberately. Lucky must raise $25,000 before Margaret's father will let him marry her, and the film's real business is to see he never quite manages it, since success would take him away from Penny. He wins too much, too little, or at the wrong moment, the gambler's lucky quarter running through the picture as the symbol that states its terms: chance against desert, the wager against the wage. Deleuze's action-image runs on a plain circuit — you perceive a situation, you act, the situation changes — and Swing Time jams that circuit at the level of story on purpose, then rebuilds it inside the choreography. Each of the four numbers does what the plot is forbidden to do. "Pick Yourself Up" forms the partnership, "Waltz in Swing Time" consecrates it, "Bojangles of Harlem" displays it, "Never Gonna Dance" dissolves it. Everything with consequences happens while the orchestra is playing.

"Pick Yourself Up" is built on a lie told with the feet. Lucky pretends he cannot dance so Penny will keep teaching him, gets her fired for it, then clears the rail and shows what he is. Deleuze has a term for a posture that gives away a relation nobody in the scene can state out loud: the gest. The Production Code's enforcement machinery was two years old and the erotic content of these films had to go somewhere. It went into the legs. Which is what makes faking incompetence the gravest lie available here. These two tell the truth with their bodies and almost nowhere else, so a body that lies is lying at the root.

There is a wrinkle in that contract. The taps were not recorded with the dance — orchestra pre-recorded, dancers performing to playback, tap track dubbed in afterward by Astaire and Hermes Pan, with Pan generally reported to have doubled Rogers. Keaton's rule governs the image absolutely and the soundtrack not at all. A mild power of the false, and it tells you where the film's claim on your belief actually sits.

Deleuze gave the American musical several pages, Astaire among them, and what he took from it is that a dance begins the moment a movement stops belonging to the person making it. The dancer's own motricity passes into a movement of world: the surroundings take up the rhythm and carry the body rather than the reverse. Here that is not a metaphor, it is a construction budget. Van Nest Polglase's white Deco sets were built as photographic instruments, reflective surfaces returning light so illumination could stay high, apertures small, a full figure crisp across an enormous depth of stage. Bernard Newman weighted the hems of Rogers's skirts to extend the visible line of a turn. The exception proves it: "A Fine Romance," staged outdoors in artificial snow, is the one big number in which nobody dances. No floor, no returned light, nothing to carry them. They just bicker, beautifully.

"Bojangles of Harlem" holds the strangest thing in the film. Three enormous shadows of Astaire dance behind him in exact unison, slip out of phase, then quit and walk off, leaving him alone with the step. Vernon Walker's effects unit built it from separately photographed silhouette footage, synchronized precisely enough that the desynchronization lands. Deleuze's crystal-image describes a thing and its virtual double locked in a circuit where you cannot say which is the original; here the double leads, then leaves. This is also the number that cites Bill Robinson — the light, up-on-the-toes staircase attack of The Little Colonel — with Astaire in blackface. His rhythmic vocabulary is substantially a debt to Black American tap, and the number that acknowledges the debt is the one that disfigures the creditor, at a moment when Robinson was working in Hollywood under sharply constrained terms. Technique and offense are welded, and the shadows are where the weld shows: a white performer in burnt cork, out-danced and then abandoned by a black silhouette that had the step first. Nobody meant that. They built it anyway, and it plays.

Against all that machinery, Rogers does the quietest thing in the picture. In the approach to "Never Gonna Dance" her face simply stops. Deleuze calls the close-up an affection-image, feeling that has registered with nowhere to be spent, and its purest form is a still face holding one quality: a qualisign. Rogers holds it, and the film is relying on her to. Kern finishes the job by bringing "The Way You Look Tonight" back and breaking it inside the farewell — the leitmotif method the movies learned from Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight.

What Swing Time did to film is small to state and large in effect. It settled where the camera belongs when a body is doing something difficult, and the answer held; you can follow it through Donen and Kelly out to anyone who has since decided a dance or a stunt should be visible as one fact rather than assembled out of evidence. It also proved a number could carry the drama instead of pausing it. The Gay Divorcee invented the Astaire-Rogers duet as a wordless argument ending in surrender; "Never Gonna Dance" runs that syntax backwards, the only dance in the cycle where dancing is the loss.

So watch it again with one question: where is the cut? Hardly anywhere, and that absence is the ethic — a film insisting that what these two did, they did, in one room, in one stretch of time, in front of you. The finale stacks "The Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance" together, sincerity and sarcasm at once, and the couple can only laugh. A happy ending built out of two songs that disagree. The film lets you decide which one it means.