Page "Gene Kelly" Paragraph 38

According to Delamater, Kelly's work " seems to represent the fulfillment of dance-film integration in the 1940s and 1950s ".

While Fred Astaire had revolutionized the filming of dance in the 1930s by insisting on full-figure photography of dancers while allowing only a modest degree of camera movement, Kelly freed up the camera, making greater use of space, camera movement, camera angles and editing, creating a partnership between dance movement and camera movement without sacrificing full-figure framing.

Kelly's reasoning behind this was that he felt the kinetic force of live dance often evaporated when brought to film, and he sought to partially overcome this by involving the camera in movement and giving the dancer a greater number of directions in which to move.

Examples of this abound in Kelly's work and are well illustrated in the " Prehistoric Man " sequence from On the Town and " The Hat My Father Wore on St. Patrick's Day " from Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

In 1951, he summed up his vision as follows: " If the camera is to make a contribution at all to dance, this must be the focal point of its contribution ; the fluid background, giving each spectator an undistorted and altogether similar view of dancer and background.

To accomplish this, the camera is made fluid, moving with the dancer, so that the lens becomes the eye of the spectator, your eye ".