Let's face it, musical are a difficult form/genre to like--or admit liking. Despite the ongoing popularity of musicals on Broadway and the West End, of touring productions, and of innumerable school and amateur productions, most people are disdainful of them, or at least tend to refer to them as "mere entertainment." Folk wisdom and Hollywood wisdom are in accord that the 'classic' musical is dead as a film genre (despite Moulin Rouge and the upcoming Chicago), and serious academic work on musicals is harder to find than friends of Jud Fry. It seems that musical film is portrayed as the refuge of the fan, or, if of wider interest, only as a historical artifact, included as part of film studies perhaps only--and ironically--in terms of the special kinds of images that it led to; Busby Berkley overhead chorus shots, or singin' (and dancin') in the rain. Musicals are a weirdly contested niche.

All of this is by way of making the point that if someone is writing about musical film, they will have an uphill battle to prove that such a project is worth the effort. What can we learn from that which is 'merely' popular, or unpopular, or only popular to some, or for specific reasons? Arthur Knight's Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film has an answer that is important not just to film studies, but to studies of representation, race, and civil society.

Knight makes the case that some of the most significant and enduring representations of African Americans in US popular culture come from musical film. Particularly in early US sound film history, musical film might be one of the few places where representations of African Americans might be found with any regularity. Knight explores these representations in blackfaced white and black performers, one-off specialty minstrel scenes, and the rare all-black musical. He concludes that there never was, and still is, no such thing as "'just' singin' and dancin'" (248). African American performances in musical film are shown to be complications and paradoxes, stories of inclusion and exclusion, pain and pleasure, reductionist and overdetermined.

Disintegrating the Musical combines meticulous documentation with a balanced temporally and conceptually building argument. Split into two sections, Knight first deals with the motivations and interpretations of white and black blackface in sequences and whole films, and then moves on to all-black musical films. Most of the material in both sections, particularly newspaper reports, has been brought to scholarly attention for the first time, a fact that Knight deals with reflexively throughout. Most impressively, Knight avoids separation between textual analysis and contextual information, constantly interpreting one in the light of the other.

Knight introduces the book with a discussion of his central concept of integration, which he interrogates in terms of the industrial, sociocultural, and formal. Following DuBois, he discusses the link between African Americans and music, and how that integration is important to the representations of African Americans in film.

In the first section, Knight explores the turbulence of blackface, its origins in vaudeville, the paradoxes of whites and blacks in blackface, and the counterpoint of 'whiteface'. Al Jolson's extensive blackface career, of course, figures large in this section, but it is only one part of a complex reading that includes intricate work on African Americans in blackface, from accommodation in Dimples to (attempted) appropriation in Stormy Weather. Knight is careful not to make the mistake of simple condemnation, but ultimately finds blackface representations problematic in both presentation and reception. By the end of the blackface section, one is left in no doubt as to the important role of musical film in representing many African American stereotypes, stereotypes that had an impact on US society in general, and later had to be referenced, in some way, by all-black musicals. Moving from the dilemmas of blackface, Knight's larger second section covers the principles of generic African American representations in the eight all (or mainly) African American musicals of the classic sound era of US film, from Hearts in Dixie to Porgy and Bess. He also covers, in wonderful detail, the short film Jammin' the Blues. Throughout this section, Knight concentrates on how the concept of race amplifies the tensions between the production, content, and reception of the musical as a generic form.

Disintegrating the Musical concludes with a brief comparison and contrast of two recent films, the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou and Spike Lee's Bamboozled, and while he finds some evidence of productive representations, he also finds similar tensions at play to those of the classical period. Finding change, though, is not as critical to Knight's argument as is the built-up demonstration of the important role musicals have played, and continue to play, in dis/integrating simple links between race and representation. I believe that Knight's book should be used as more than just an examination of a generic form, or of, indeed, particularly racial representations. Its importance, for me, lies in the way it takes up the challenge of Du Bois and demonstrates the influence of popular culture in civil society through careful documentation of historical and textual processes.

Details

Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film
Arthur Knight
Duke University Press
September 2002 338pp
Paper: ISBN 0-8223-2963-8 $21.95