Storytelling in Motion

Abstract Storytelling in Motion: Cinematic Choreography and the Film Musical demonstrates how figure movement can serve as a versatile strategy of meaning-making, particularly when filmmakers attend to the relationship between choreographed movement and film style. Using Franco-American film musicals as its main examples, this book analyzes the narrative and stylistic impact of figure movement in cinema and the subtle power of cinematic choreography, those moments when filmmakers deliberately combine the strengths of film style and organized figure movement to convey narrative meaning through motion. Integrating vocabularies and analytical systems from Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies, film studies, and related fields to parse cinematic figure movement on multiple formal levels, this book uses performative research methods from videographic criticism to show the poetic and oblique connections between films through videographic as well as written chapters. Storytelling in Motion centers the crucial material conditions needed to make figure movement a significant component of narrative filmmaking: time, money, rehearsal space, industrial support, and performers and crew with the necessary embodied and institutional knowledge. The films discussed tell a clear story of how cinematic choreography was used by transnational filmmaking teams to innovate storytelling through figure movement, inspired by their predecessors’ aesthetics while working within differing industrial conditions.