I am enamored with cinematic frenzy; I relish the feeling of a film spiraling out of control. Rapid cuts between slightly (or drastically) disparate elements, a disconnection between sounds and images, and almost comically exaggerated faces—all are simply irresistible to me. Examples that come to mind are Nicolas Cage’s most delirious ambulance ride in Bringing Out the Dead, with its violent strobe lighting, frenetic music, and Tom Sizemore’s viciously jubilant face; a moment in Eisenstein’s October when the cuts between a dancing Bolshevik, architectural and cultural emblems, and a celebratory crowd reach such a dizzying pace that the images are almost blurred into abstraction; and the final car ride in Rififi, with its cuts between the grim visage of a wounded Noir hero, shots of careening streets as seen from the car, and silent images of a boisterously laughing child. In many cases, these moments of frenzy elevate an entire film by offsetting or pinpointing themes suffused throughout it. Which brings me to Sidney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
The film is an allegorical depiction of a 1930’s dance marathon. Often lasting for weeks or even months, these contests were a popular spectacle of misery during the Depression. They allowed their desperate contestants only 10 minutes of rest each hour and periodically subjected them to grueling mini-events to entice the crowds. Pollack presents this grim spectacle as a world unto itself, with virtually the entire film sequestered within the dance hall. The marathon is made into a microcosm of the whole of the Depression (and even of the whole of human desperation), in which the jubilant ballroom trappings of a spotlight, confetti, and music, and an emcee’s constant evocation of America’s never-say-die spirit all starkly contrast with the degradation on display. Indeed, the film’s imagery and allegory are almost simplistic (what with the horses and all); and it virtually wallows in its gloom, which might make one accuse it of being just as exploitative as the marathon organizers. But the film more than justifies this with its mood of exaggeration, its angles that seem to make faces leap forth from the frame, its performances by Jane Fonda as a terminally bitter, despairing woman and Gig Young as the repulsively charismatic emcee, its iconographic use of Henry Fonda look-alike Michael Sarrazin to craft a figure of everyman idealism—and beyond all these things, its sublime moments of frenzy.
Acting as the culmination of the film’s endless gloom and desperation, these moments of frenzy come in the form of a race, a “heel-to-toe derby”, that the contestants must run on the dance floor. In a cacophony of mirror-ball lighting, jaunty music, wild-eyed, grimacing faces, and limbs flailing in a grotesque march, the competitors are stripped of any remnants of their dignity and reduced to pure frantic desperation. Perfectly evoking this frantic desperation in its careening lights and sounds, each of these scenes is a masterwork of cinematic frenzy. But what is most impressive about them is how they balance their frenzy with a thoughtful humanism. Rather than letting us get completely caught up in the mood of the moment, they hold back ever so slightly and, via short panning shots, eye the event with a thoughtful melancholy. (Nothing is so counter to cinematic frenzy as is a panning shot.) This is most evident in the second of the two races, when the frenzy is suddenly interrupted by a (still somehow frenzied) slow-motion shot that forces us to reckon directly with the horror of the scene. Thus, even as the film’s misery coalesces, and as the film’s presentation of that misery as a spectacle reaches its spectacular peak, we are enjoined to be wary of the spectacle. Throughout the film, the audience at the dance hall is depicted as a grotesquerie, simpleminded in its simultaneous support of the dancers and revelry at their misfortune; in the film’s delicately balanced moments of frenzy, when we are closest to reveling in the miserable spectacle, we are made to realize our affinity to that audience.
More information about dance marathons can be found at http://www.historylink.org/essays/ou…m?file_id=5534
The image from the movie looks pretty bad, so here are some images from real-life marathons:
Tags: favorites, frenzy, Great Depression, movies
