As soon as motion pictures could speak, they began to sing, and the musical genre has endured for more than a century. In this lecture, film scholar Jeff Hughes surveys the history of the movie musical from the brilliant Golddiggers of 1933 to the Golden Age of MGM to the postmodern musical fare of the 1980s (Dirty Dancing, Footloose, etc.). There will be songs! There will be dance! And there will be plenty of insights from scholars across the cinema studies landscape. As the lecture positions Bob Fosse as the genre’s most important modern figure, the featured film will be Fosse’s 1979 masterpiece, All That Jazz. Copies of the film will be available at the Library.
Presented by Jeff Hughes, a graduate of the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, who will explore the film’s production, themes, and lasting influence.