The World Is the Stage: Musicals!

The series opens with an early minor masterpiece by Almodóvar: a musical comedy, set to the beat of bolero, rumba and alternative rock, about heartbreak and passion with Derribos Arias singer Poch as the protagonist, as the fugitive lover, Bibiana Fernández as the femme fatal, and Sonia Hohmann as the forsaken housewife. The film is followed by Luis M. Delgado’s Diferente, the first feature-length film with a homosexual lead in Spanish cinema. It tells of the frustrations of a virtuoso choreographer and dancer, played by Alfredo Alaria, who, through (upper class) family pressure, must swap the stage world for the family business, perhaps, in the eyes of his relatives, to redirect a “deviated sexuality”. The way in which the film managed to overcome censorship under the Franco regime, and at the height of the Law of Vagrants and Miscreants, which criminalised homosexuality, remains one of Spanish film’s great mysteries; a fusion of big Broadway hits with Spanish flamenco tradition and musical scenes as a record of the subconscious impulses of the repressed artist.

Zero Patience, written and directed by John Greyson, examines and refutes the urban legend of the supposed introduction of AIDS to North America by one individual, Gaëtan Dugas (1953–1984). Dugas, known in AIDS history as patient zero, was labelled in the popular imagination as the person responsible for spreading the disease in the USA and Canada due to Randy Shilts’s book on the origins of the pandemic: And the Band Played On (1987). The film tells the story in the context of a romance between the anachronistic character of Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), displaced in time, and the ghost of “Zero” — not identified as Dugas in the production — while an exhibition is organised on the origins of the disease. This is a pivotal, and relatively obscure, piece of work in New Queer Cinema.

A film that explores the flipside of success, the drive towards self-destruction and beauty as liberation, as well as the grand history of the musical and the triumph of artifice over realism. According to magazines such as Sight & Sound and Film Comment, Annette is one of the twenty-first century’s essential pictures. It narrates a love story, with echoes of Beauty and the Beast, between a provocative stand-up comedian, Adam Driver, and an exquisite opera singer, Marion Cotillard, and what happens when both have a daughter and their careers move down opposite paths. With mammoth synthetic pop tracks played live by Californian band Sparks, who proposed the idea of the film to Carax, Annette spotlights a common theme from Hollywood’s Golden-Age musicals: rich and beautiful folk surviving the machinery of the spectacle.

The classic Hollywood musical characterised by the affirmation of entertainment values above any obstacle or eventuality. The film focuses on the theme of cinema inside cinema, or the musical inside the musical, in which an ageing dancer, played by Fred Astaire with echoes of himself, returns to Broadway via two old screenwriter friends and a theatre entrepreneur with cultural airs and graces and an obsession with an outmoded expressionist version of Goethe’s Faust (1808). The relinquishment of this artistic pretence for musical forms and popular genres, the organisation of the group in the face of the businessman’s demands and the chemistry between the dancer in crisis, Astaire, and the young ballerina, Cyd Charisse, manage to save the show.

One of the zeniths of Indian and world cinema, the film’s director, actor and producer Guru Dutt died at just 39 after defining an Indian model of musical melodrama and acting as a major reference point for the most illuminating and original era of Bollywood. Dutt’s film-making is based on a dazzling visual style using original camera angles and movements coupled with themes around the protagonist’s melancholy and non-conformity in the face of an insensitive world. Equally, Pyaasa manages to synthesise musical, commercial and popular elements that would define Bollywood cinema and see it widely regarded as a classic of Indian film. It is the story of a misunderstood poet, played by Dutt, who experiences love, failure and betrayal as he fights for his work to be recognised.

Kubánksiye kazakí (Kuban Cossacks) is a Soviet version of the Golden-Age Hollywood musical, situated between film entertainment at the height of Stalinist terror and a peasant epic, with songs devoted to the land, the tractor and five-year plans. Sometimes considered a work of propaganda, the film has gained cult status in recent years, constituting the most concerted blockbuster in the Soviet musical comedy, and with Marina Ladynina, the film-maker’s wife, as its major star. Opposite jazz, the night and the great Broadway show, the centre of this genre was life in the kolkhoz, community farms in the Soviet Union.

Zouzou is the first feature-length film with a Black leading actress and is even more remarkable given that she transcended themes and film casts to represent herself, marking an entire era in the process. Such was the case with Afro-American actress, dancer and singer Josephine Baker, a symbol of the Belle Époque and an icon for avant-garde artists, who saw in her a synthesis between modernity and exoticism. The subject of the film is a love story between stepbrother and sister Jean (Jean Gabin) and Zouzou (Josephine Baker) and her rise from humble worker to queen of Parisian night-life. Baker evinces her own style of singing and dancing, a combination of dance, comedy and voluptuousness in a mix of spontaneity and sophistication that would break the “primitivist” framework the film develops.

Med Hondo sought to produce national pan-African cinema that was at once independent from the occidental film industry and combative and aware of the exploitation between Africa and the West. Recently restored, this film is one of the most original musicals ever made and shows the history of colonialism through a slave ship, built in an abandoned Citroën factory, the grand stage for different numbers and songs. The film is made up of different historical sequences, from the cultivation of sugar cane in Antilles by African slaves to contemporary Afro-Caribbean emigration to France in the search for a better future. “I wanted to liberate the same concept of the musical comedy from its American imprint and show that every people on Earth have their own musical comedy, their own musical tragedy and their own thought formed through their own history”, Hondo said about the film.

Two feminist musical comedies made by two women film-makers as an end-of-degree project — with modest resources and huge value. Both films use the ostensible lightness of this film genre to speak of feminist protests such as labour equality for women and divorce in Francoist Spain. In Gigi (From 9 to 5) anthropologist and film-maker Joanne Nucho explores the gruelling working day of the young female lead. In Margarita and the Wolf, a historical and paradoxically forgotten film until recently, Cecilia Bartolomé presents an independent and brave woman artist who decides to file for divorce and restart her life. A sung critique of the hypocrisy of the upper classes, the connivance of the Church during Francoism and the sexism of a supposed Left at a time in which divorce was still prohibited. It constitutes another high point in new Spanish cinema, and was made by the first woman, along with Josefina Molina, to graduate in Film Directing from the Official Film School of Madrid.

A little-known work within the filmography of pre-eminent documentary film-maker Agnès Varda. A fictional feature film with huge dramatic weight and powerful performances; a militant film which sees Varda swap traditional innocence for a position of protest; and an original mix between realism and the musical genre, a priori antithetical discourses. The film narrates the friendship between two women over more than a decade: Pauline (Valérie Mairesse), a 16-year-old girl, and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), a 22-year-old mother. Underlying it are the struggles of the feminist movement, particularly the right to abortion, bringing them together in different vicissitudes of life. A portrait of two friends and the feminist movement in musical form.

One of the biggest box-office hits of the Second Republic, the film is screened during this popular event still held in Madrid every summer: La verbena de la Paloma, or the Fair of the Virgin of Paloma. The film adapts the zarzuela to the musical, offering a traditionally Spanish and naturalistic version of a love story, youth and social class. La verbena de la Paloma represents popular culture, pushing to recreate the language of the street and the typical houses of Madrid’s working class: las corralas (courtyard housing). It also stresses the historical representation of a broad street populated with extras, trams and architecture as a large stage of public life in Madrid.

A delirious film of Surrealist inspiration which turns to flamenco to formulate a musical centred on passion above reason and any other feeling. Artists Lola Flores and Manolo Caracol are a couple surviving on small actions. The discovery of the huge talent of La Faraona by a music businessman leads Caracol on a downward spiral of jealousy that will result in their break-up. As Lola Flores rises to fame, Caracol descends into alcoholism. Amid this elemental narration are oneiric flamenco-based musical numbers which also bring back the Surrealist imagery of avant-garde art in Francoist Spain.

Berlin, 1931. A young teacher arrives in the city to improve his German at the height of the rise of Nazism and the start of persecutions of the Jewish community. At the guesthouse where he is staying, he meets Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), a young American girl who is full of life and makes ends meet in the Kit-Kat Club. The musical won eight Oscars, for best director (Bob Fosse), best actress (Liza Minnelli) and best supporting actor (Joel Gray), among other awards — seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes. Cabaret is set in a night-club, another world and a place for endless enjoyment while the outside world shatters. Director Bob Fosse, moreover, demonstrates his talent as a choreographer with legendary musical numbers like Willkommen and Money, Money that steal the show.

The trashy and underground version of Cabaret by film director and LGBT activist Rosa von Praunheim. A group of actors and actresses play themselves in an updated version of Cabaret’s Kit-Kat Club, now converted into a burger bar with a ubiquitous American influence. In The Hamburger Queen, run by black drag dancer Angie Stardust, an unusual medley of people converge: Gary, a dancer enamoured with magic; Tara O'Hara, an ex-nurse proud of his androgynous charms; Joaquín La Habana, a singer who acts as a man and a woman at the same time; Judith and Tron, trapeze artists preparing an erotic and wild number; and Lía, who meets an officer in East Germany that will manage to turn her into the most famous rock star in the country. The film is testament to the city’s counterculture and is a cult musical.

Resulting from the protracted financial, political and social crisis in Europe over the past few decades, this film surveys like few others working-class malaise and the hope of imagining and leading another way of life. Screened at the Directors’ Fortnight Section at Cannes in 2017 and winner of the Gold Giraldillo for best film at the 14^th Seville Film Festival, the film portrays a Portuguese factory grinding to a halt, the lay-off of its workers and the start-up of self-management in its manufacturing space, while also reflecting on the suffocation of the economic system. Shot in 16mm, it melds political documentary, dramatic fiction and the musical. Dance and song start when the factory is first governed by a community logic. What can it be other than the happiness the musical has always promised us?

A no-nonsense musical melodrama shot on a hand-held camera, in the same vein as the Dogma 95 movement, which revises the canon of the Golden Age American musical canon. Selma (Björk) is a Czechoslovakian emigrant and single mother who works in a metal factory in the USA. A hereditary illness is making her lose her sight and, given her son faces the same fate, she is saving money for an operation for him when a dramatic event occurs. The seven songs that compose the film are made up of noises and sounds from daily life and surface in moments when she is looking for escapism, stating at one key point in the film: “I used to dream I was in a musical ‘cause in a musical nothing dreadful ever happens”, an affirmation that explains the antithesis between the realist misery and musical dreaminess that sculpt the film. It won the Palme d’Or for best film and Björk the Best Actress Award at Cannes in 2000.

Chantal Akerman is known for making biographical essay films, although she would spend a large chunk of the 1980s focusing on this exuberant musical comedy. Golden Eighties explores the world of shop windows, goods and fetish inside a shopping centre, the film’s big stage. Within this space, and with a group of lead women, among them Delphine Seyrig, stories of love and heartbreak occur. A storyline which engages in dialogue with the musical film-making of Jacques Demy, a pivotal director in the French New Wave. Akerman maintains the charm and refinement of the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) to speak to us of human beings who live in continuous heartbreak and search for how to feed their passion.

Dorothy Arzner was the only woman to work as a director in Hollywood’s Golden Age. With a unique style and subversive feminist gaze, she directed this musical melodrama on the ins and outs of the world of stage. The Hollywood musical deals with her favourite theme: the logics of spectacle, but from a gender perspective. The film tells of the rivalry between two chorus girls: the discreet and prudent girl who dreams of success as a classical dancer (Maureen O’Hara) and the sexual and unabashed girl who dominates the male environment of the musical magazine (Lucille Ball). The competition between the two, another recurring theme in the musical, leads the way for reconciliation between equals upon understanding what O’Hara makes clear to a male audience in an iconoclastic scene: “I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look at your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you”.