Fred Astaire’s Cane Hits My Brain takes its inspiration from a movie I have never seen. Or, rather, a film that I have chosen (for now) to never see. Yet this film under any reasonable definition would have to qualify as one of my favorites, for few movies have been so central to my life.
In a middle school music class, a teacher showed my classmates and me two different clips of performers singing “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” written in 1927 by Irving Berlin. First was Fred Astaire singing and dancing to the tune in Blue Skies(1946), for which Berlin wrote the story and music. The second was Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle seemingly spoofing Astaire as scientist and monster in Young Frankenstein (1974). I can barely remember this class, but I must imagine the point of the lesson was to demonstrate the idea of a song cover. Nevertheless, these clips stayed with me.
I was often on YouTube as a kid, feeding a fascination with early 20th century culture and politics. As I suffered (and still do) from anxiety and depression, certain clips became important coping mechanisms, sounds that would soothe my brain, often in the evenings, when stress and angst would take over. Astaire singing and dancing to Berlin’s song was at the top of the list. I was especially thrilled when I discovered that a clip from the performance for decades kicked off the opening montage to the Kennedy Center Honors, a ritual that fed my fascination with Hollywood’s Golden Age. I end my video essay with this montage in reverse.
Whenever I played the YouTube clip from Blue Skies, I would often leave the sound running in the background. Seldom did I actually watch Astaire dance. Instead, I listened for specific sounds, especially when Astaire smacks his cane against the hardwood floor as part of his tap routine. The rhythmic hits had a soothing effect on my distressed mind, a tension I try to capture in the opening sequence of my video.
As the years went on, the YouTube clip became a trusted companion, so much so that I can remember quite clearly a particular period of distress when the clip was removed from YouTube. Thus, I was forced to spend $0.99 on iTunes for a version of the song included as part of the compilation album, Can’t Sing, Can’t Act. Balding. Can Dance a Little. At last, it was mine.
Yet there was something missing in the iTunes version, something I still am unable to quite put my finger on. There was a certain aliveness to the YouTube clip that was particularly soothing. Perhaps it was knowing that I could watch Fred Astaire dance. Or that the source of my pleasure was the byproduct of a communal, curatorial act by the person who uploaded the video, an example of what scholars have termed “spreadable media.”1
I am by no means alone in turning to Astaire’s work as a source of pleasure. Stanley Cavell described Astaire’s work alongside Cyd Charisse in Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953) as a “touchstone of experience.”2 Jonas Mekas danced with Astaire before Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s camera in Imagine (1972), which he later described as the “beginning, end, and highlight” of his dancing career.3 In Fated to be Mated: An Architectural Promenade (2018), Catherine Grant, in dialogue with the work of Steven Cohan, offers a videographic deconstruction of the scene between Charisse and Astaire in Silk Stockings (1957), what she describes as “a queer experiment in cinephilic re-spatialisation.” Cohan writes of the male spectacle of the Hollywood musical, noting in particular how when he dances, Astaire “halts the linearity of the story with his musical performance, he also stops the show to insist upon his own ability to signify ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’”4 My own engagement with Blue Skies is decidedly non-linear, and my video, which centers on the sound of Astaire’s cane—a sound that mentally transports me elsewhere—is perhaps an example of to-be-heard-ness.
So, what of this decision to never watch Blue Skies? It is an answer partially rooted in fear. I worry that watching the full film could provide too much context, thus permanently altering my relationship with the scene. I found this to be the case for another Astaire sequence, his first with Ginger Rogers in George Stevens’s Swing Time (1936). Serge Daney chronicled his relationship with a film he had never seen in an essay written near the end of his life. Of a June 1961 essay written by Jacques Rivette for Cahiers du cinéma, Daney writes: “Am I the only one who has never seen this movie and yet hasn’t forgotten it? For I haven’t seen Kapo and at the same time I have seen it. I have seen it because someone has shown it to me—with words.
Rivette condemns the final framing of a tracking shot in the film. Daney remembers immediately knowing Rivette was correct, adding that “this revolt came with a less clear and probably less pure feeling: the relieved recognition that I had just acquired my first conviction as a future movie critic.” Catherine Fowler writes that Daney’s essay demonstrates the “elsewhere” of cinema, one that “operates through the readings and writings about films that one has and has not seen, as well as the viewing and remembering of them.”5 For Fowler, “elsewhere” exists on a trajectory that begins with “there,” the film image itself.
The clip of Astaire I encountered while a child is yet another example of the “elsewhere” of cinema. I have seen Blue Skies because someone—an unknown user—decided to upload the scene to YouTube and show it to me. Perhaps someday I will go “there,” but for now, the clip and the sounds of Astaire’s cane suffice.
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Endnotes
- Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 94.
- Stanley Cavell, Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 235.
- Jonas Mekas, A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions, 2017), 3.
- Steve Cohan, “’Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the spectacle of masculinity in the Hollywood musical,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 47.
- Catherine Fowler, “Remembering Cinema “Elsewhere”: From Retrospection to Introspection in the Gallery Film,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 44.
Will DiGravio