Magical History Tour: Of Forms and Figures – Choreographies in Film

In anticipation of our program focus in December – musicals! – we are already picking up on the subject of choreographies in film in this month's Magical History Tour. Even though the entirely choreographed arrangements of the musical genre could easily form the central examples for this film historical film series, we are for the time being concentrating on the sort of film choreographies that are only obvious at second glance and move far beyond just song and dance: precisely arranged figures, objects and gestures within the cinematic space as well as exactly orchestrated tracking shots, plot strands and montages in film. With a few exceptions, these choreographies are not actually danced but still have the character of dance, generating rhythms and abstraction, stylizing narratives, creating complex visual spaces and relationship entanglements and reflecting both the stationary and the moving – a cinema that could not be more physical, a cinema of highly accentuated, densely constructed units of staging, which we follow in eleven films.