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On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
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I want to hold you
But every time I try
Something keeps you
Out of reach
I want to love you
But every time I try
Something keeps
Love away
– Spain, “Every Time I Try”
In the quarter-century that I have been returning, off
and on, to Vincente Minnelli’s penultimate film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, two scenes have crystallised in
my mind as standing for everything that is wonderful, and everything that is
strange, in this truly maudit movie –
a commercial failure in its day, enshrined in a standard reference book on the
musical genre as a “confused mish-mash”, (1) little analysed even by the most
serious Minnelli devotees, and yet to find its cult-audience niche beyond a
handful of Barbra Streisand fans. (2)
1.
Here’s the first scene. The number “What Did I Have That
I Don’t Have” that occurs at around ninety minutes is, in my opinion, Minnelli
at his finest, working in tandem (as he frequently did) with a great performer.
For Barbra Streisand gives a whole other axis to any mise en scène – even one by Minnelli. I mean this in a quite
literal way: what she brought, as a performer, to her films of the 1960s and
‘70s was a certain play on exhaustion.
Streisand frequently gives the impression of being about to collapse, on the
verge of implosion – and how fitting this is for the weak-willed character she
plays in Clear Day. But, just as she
is crumpling up and sinking to the ground – her shoulders falling, her head
drooping, her arms listless – she mimics the finding, or mining, of some
indomitable energy within: she swells up, takes a step, begins to possess the
frame and, indeed, the entire space of the décor. And then she wilts again, and
then she flowers again – so fitting, once more, for a film with so many
supernaturally blooming plants – over and over. Even her character name cues us
into this: Daisy.
In fact, Minnelli cannily seized this aspect of
Streisand’s performance style and made it the veritable mise en scène principle of his entire film, not merely its musical
sequences. Look at the marvellous, constantly varied work he does with the
shell-like, très moderne chair into
which Daisy is squashed by her less-than-friendly hypno-psycho-therapist, Marc
(Yves Montand): it is the physical, bodily emblem of her discomfort, oppression
and passivity, until the dramatic moment when Daisy, transformed into her past
self as Melinda, rears up in this seat (accompanied by a subtle, reframing camera
movement upwards) and takes over the space.
“What
Did I Have” is simpler, in its range and scope of elements, than many of the
anthological musical sequences for which the public at large remembers this
director – and yet its mastery of space and gesture is total, its use of
significant props unflaggingly inventive, its accelerating and decelerating
rhythms perfect. The scene is a soliloquy, one star singing to herself in
Marc’s expansive office space – a set upon which Minnelli is able to ring many
changes of mood and aspect throughout the film.
The
roughly five-and-a-half minute song (including a spoken-word break and Daisy’s
end of a telephone call) is staged across only three shots. The first,
beginning with Daisy’s reaction to the tape recordings of her sessions with
Marc that she has accidentally discovered, runs for three-and-a-half minutes.
This is the predominantly exhausted/imploded phase of the song: Daisy trudges
around the set, sits defeated in her usual chair, perches on the window ledge.
In a neat transition between speech and song – always the hardest transition
for any musical sequence to manage – Streisand delivers the first few lines in
her broad, Jewish, comic drawl, before ascending into her usual vocal heaven. A
cut on the very last word of the verse (“what did I have that I don’t have /
now”) takes us into the second shot, as a quick tracking movement outwards
makes Daisy small in the frame. During this fifty-four second shot, Daisy
alternates between agitation and exhaustion as she talks to herself; music
continues as underscore, but the song itself does not yet return. A visual cut
on movement – a variation on the preceding cut within a sung phrase – gets us
to the third shot, which lasts two minutes. Here both performer and camera
become more frenzied, as the scene quickly recapitulates a number of the motifs
that have been previously established in this space: Daisy spins the
therapeutic chair in anger, and struggles to put on her coat. The confusion and
desperation expressed in the line “where can I go?” is literally visualised in
Daisy’s frantic exploration of the set, which now offers no points of rest.
Finally,
Minnelli manoeuvres Streisand into a relative close-up in the foreground of the
frame – relative, because he has filmed most of the preceding action with her
entire body in frame, thus giving this mid-shot special emphasis – and then the
scene suddenly breaks: the music stops for a moment, the camera turns around
Streisand in the silence, and then she limps away into the depth of the shot
and out the door as the music comes to its melancholic, diminuendo conclusion.
There are so many dramatic or comic beats in this scene, so many expert spatial
modulations and mood changes.
2.
Yet,
for all this excellence, the scene points to a certain sense of strain that is evidently telling on the
film, on Minnelli, and on the very genre of the American film musical at this
perilous moment in its history.
On a Clear Day is an
exceptionally clear case of what the Hollywood industry gingerly calls a troubled production. (3) It bled and
suffered all the way to its premiere. A great deal of scripted material was
later cut (either before or after shooting), as the plan for the film went from
a long-form musical (divided by an intermission as in The Sound of Music [1965]) to one that clocks in at 129 minutes.
Among this cut material is an alarming total of five songs (two entirely
deleted, two trimmed, and one replaced by a less elaborate substitute) – surely
a strange fate for a musical. (4)
To
look at this in another, more sympathetic way, On a Clear Day is a transitional work – transitional not so much for Minnelli himself (his career was hastening
to its end, a mere five years and one film away), but for the Hollywood that
was taking, as it seemed, one last stab at a musical before giving up the ghost
of the genre altogether. Another kind of dramatic realism, influenced by
European art cinema – the realism of Altman, Lumet and Cassavetes – was
beckoning to filmmakers in the ‘70s; and eventually, a different kind of
fantasy, as ushered in by George Lucas and Star
Wars (1977). Clear Day is a film
that is already nervous – even ashamed – to be an old-fashioned musical; it is
part of the scramble to in some way (any way) modernise the genre and align it
with the assumed tastes and sensibilities of an audience primed on the ‘60s
youth revolution – as signalled, for the film industry, by the stage success of Hair in 1967.
On a Clear Day, more
clearly than most films, points in two directions. On the one hand, it places
its bets on the assumed safe prospect of adapting a Broadway musical, as had
George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (which,
like Clear Day, had lyrics by Alan
Jay Lerner and extravagant costumes by Cecil Beaton) in 1964 and Wyler’s Funny Girl (Streisand’s film debut) in
1968 – nostalgic projects, with an airy, elongated, sometimes lumbering ‘stage
aesthetic’ that seemed to drag the musical genre back to a moment well before
the innovations of Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Busby Berkeley or Minnelli (let
alone Jacques Demy).
Yet,
on the other hand, Clear Day tries to
look forward, to be somewhat new in its outlook and innovative in its approach.
The sole big number, Montand belting out “Come Back to Me” from atop the Pan Am
skyscraper, is an entirely modern conception of what a song sequence might be,
comprised as it is of aerial telephoto shots, the Wellesian trick of skipping
frames mid-shot, an array of special effects, and a vigorous montage structure.
However,
the fact that this montage structure is based on a flagrant alternation – Marc and Daisy never being
in the same space at the same moment, until the exasperated ending of the song
– already begins to tell us something about why Clear Day seems such an unlikely project for a musical: an impossible musical in many senses, and
on many levels.
3.
One
index of the scramble in On a Clear Day,
the “confused mish-mash” between classical and contemporary, is how little
choreographed dancing there is to accompany the songs: we see the first signs
here of the realist compromise that simplifies dance into simple, everyday
gestures like walking, only lightly stylised for a casual, throwaway effect –
or eliminates it altogether (a style that, decades later, we see everywhere
from Alain Resnais’ Same Old Song [1997] to the popular American production High
School Musical [2006] that spawned two sequels).
“What
Did I Have” is a soliloquy. The song-type of the soliloquy has, historically,
always been a feature of the musical genre; indeed, Minnelli had staged several
notable examples, such as “The Boy Next Door” in Meet Me in St Louis. But now, in Hollywood’s frantic transitional
search for a modern mode of musical, the soliloquy form suddenly became
predominant, a kind of baseline option. It was an acceptable compromise between
realism and artifice: people singing to themselves – and walking, swaying, not
quite dancing as they did so – was deemed somehow more believable or acceptable
to the jaded audience of 1970 than a conventional bursting-into-song-and-dance
routine.
It
would fall to Streisand herself, as a fledgling director over a decade later,
to push this principle of the realist musical to its logical conclusion in Yentl (1983): there, the heroine no
longer even sings to herself, she just thinks in song (music by Michel Legrand), while Streisand stands, sits, stares into a
candle …
4.
Placing
a film in its context of industrial production and mainstream audience
reception is all well and good; but is there another, radically different way to
understand and redeem the strangeness and the supposed mistakes of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever?
In
a 1977 issue of the British magazine Movie devoted to the musical genre, a short piece by Jim Cook finds an ingenious
logic in the film’s very “failure”: it fails, precisely, to ever become a musical because Daisy’s
liberated self – and the liberation of self is almost always the prerequisite
for song and dance in the Minnelli universe – is both locked up in the past (in
Melinda) and postponed to the future (her meeting-in-reincarnation with Marc). (5)
This comment recalls the general picture of Minnellian cinema that Richard Dyer
once eloquently sketched:
[His] films address
the problem of how to come to terms with the vivid urgency of the ideal against
the drab necessity of living in the ordinary world. The films appear to have
happy endings, in which either the ideal is realised or the character is
reconciled to everyday life – yet these endings are only apparently happy. The
keenness of the longing for the ideal lingers in the mind, leaving a dark
undertow to even the most glittering of his musicals. It is as if the effort of
imagination required to see that reconciliation between the ideal and the
everyday eludes Minnelli, and more often than not he makes only a mere token
gesture towards the solution. (6)
It
is with this fruitful idea of the presentation of a gap in Minnelli – between the ideal and the real, between a dream
and its fulfilment, between romantic fusion and frustrating separation – that I
wish to start over again on On a Clear
Day.
All
the throwaway dismissals of the film harp on the clash of musical textures –
and hence the supposed miscasting – that is at the heart of the project: the
placing of Streisand against Montand. Indeed, it is hard to imagine two more
contrasting vocal styles: Montand’s quiet, jazz-inflected crooning versus
Streisand’s powerhouse, virtuosic dynamics. We are light years away already,
here, from the musical genre’s ingenious way of blending Frank Sinatra with
Bing Crosby in High Society (1956),
or Sinatra (again) with Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955). Montand, of course, never successfully cracked Hollywood
as a musical star: both this film and Cukor’s Let’s Make Love (1960) are monuments to his inadaptability to
American cinema’s norms (which signals a problem with Hollywood, not with
Montand, of course!). Every viewer, now as in 1970, takes the film as a vehicle
for la Streisand; Montand is inserted merely as a necessary buffer, filler or
foil. Musically, she’s the future while he’s the past.
But
surely the most telling, and peculiar, thing about this dual star casting is
that Montand and Streisand never sing
together, in a duet – even if, in its final scene, Marc passes the theme
tune over to Daisy and, in the longer version, was also given an opportunity to
reprise Daisy’s “He Isn’t You” as “She Isn’t You” – but neither of these
musical connectives offer much beyond only a very attenuated, merely
associative form of duet. Streisand and Montand remain as separate, as split
apart, as their characters Daisy and Marc, from first scene to last – with only
a fantasy flash (in Marc’s mind) giving a few fleeting glimpses of the pair (as
Marc/Melinda) even dancing together. Romantic comedies past and present
routinely play upon a mounting sense of frustration and deferment in their
target spectators – but it is rare indeed to have a supposedly feel-good movie
like On a Clear Day in which the
lovers do not manage to get together at
all, and their final separation is meant to carry the requisite feel-good
vibe. Once again, we are faced with the intriguing question of Minnellian
interpretation: is this discrepancy in Clear
Day just an unfortunate blunder, a miscalculation – or something far more
intriguing and compelling?
5.
It
is necessary to place On a Clear Day within a different, more inventive and less expected generic context – not the
musical comedy, but a network of narratives that cross several genres, all
dealing with unsynchronised lovers. From the Surrealist favourite Peter Ibbetson (1935) and Joseph Mankiewicz’s
classic The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), all the way to Jacques Rivette’s Story
of Marie and Julien (2003), Julio Médem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998) and the Keanu Reeves/Sandra
Bullock tearjerker The Lake House (2006, a remake of the Korean Il Mare [2000]), by way of films as singular as Alain Resnais’ L’Amour à mort (1983), as sublime as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), as perverse as
Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), and
as peculiar as Alan Rudolph’s Made in
Heaven (1987) or Monte Hellman’s planned project Love or Die: many different story formats have been tried out to
portray the dilemma of lovers fated to never be together in the same time,
space, or level of reality.
The
relationship between a ghost (or an angel) and a human; between people stranded
in two different moments in time (yet still able, magically, to communicate
with each other); between a person who has survived the death of their partner,
and that partner returning in a seemingly reincarnated (usually younger) body …
the variations multiply, and it is notable how this trans-generic template of
the supernatural romance, fated to
impossibility, truly crosses the line between the fluffiest comic
entertainments (Minnelli had himself grazed this terrain once before in Goodbye Charlie [1964], where a tough
guy reincarnates as a woman) and the most elevated art films: just the sort of
mixed cultural space where, as James Naremore has argued, Minnelli needs (and
aspired) to be placed. (7)
Back
in 1973, discussing Bells Are Ringing (1960), Raymond Durgnat suggested that what makes certain films, designed
mainly for the purpose of entertainment, so keenly interesting is the intuitive
way that, while “accepting all that is true in the conformist myth”, they
nonetheless “reveal at least the outlines of those parts of reality against
which the myth is braced”. (8) We can put this suggestive formulation another,
quite concrete way: how hard is the
problem that a narrative sets itself, in the terms of the complications
(moral, ethical, socio-political) that it must struggle to either satisfyingly
resolve, or successfully wriggle out of? The more impossible the central dilemma of a story, the more likely we are
to feel the gap or discrepancy
between its symbolic problem, and the standard ideological solution that will,
more or less inevitably, be trotted out. One of the hallmarks of Minnelli’s
cinema (Brigadoon [1954] is exemplary
in this regard) is the immense difficulty of the central problem to be solved,
and the tendency to fudge its solution, to end on a faintly unconvincing or
diffusely melancholic note. This is a hallmark, too, of Alan Jay Lerner as a
lyricist, as Martin Sutton has pointed out: his scripts for Brigadoon, Clear Day and An American in
Paris [1951], like his libretto for Camelot,
all deal with the “less happy areas of romanticism: the virtual impossibility
of realising one’s dreams, and the vast difficulties involved in permanent and
meaningful communication between people”, resulting in a “low-key wistfulness that
verges at times on anguish”. (9)
On a Clear Day stretches
to the breaking point its central plot contradiction: namely, the fact that who
Marc loves is not Daisy but Melinda. This is a rare convolution, even for
supernatural romances. It sets the central protagonists at painful
cross-purposes: the more that Daisy becomes confident in her self (a growth
triggered, nominally, by the conquest of her smoking addiction), the more she
entertains the fantasy that Marc is attracted to her for who she is – rather
than for the other self that she also
is, or rather was, in a previous life. And when she finally discovers the
truth, she is devastated. In this sense, the film drags in a standard
complication from un-supernatural romantic comedies: a love relation that is
based on a misunderstanding or (in psychoanalytic parlance) misrecognition, and then on the deceit
that is necessary to maintain that misunderstanding. Of course, the
misrecognition goes only one way in Clear
Day: it is Marc, the rational man of science, who holds all the cards of
knowledge, while Daisy acquiesces as his hypnotised subject – and it is
fascinating indeed to watch contemporary audiences squirm at such a flagrant,
diagrammatic exposure of the inequality and non-reciprocity between the sexes,
something that the film simultaneously avows, explores, and milks some easy,
conservative laughs from (as in the moments where, despite Daisy’s explicit
protests, Marc is able to reduce her to passivity with a single hypnotic-cue
gesture).
6.
How could any film comfortably get out of this mess and
find its way to a happy ending? One interpretation of the film aligns it with
the prevalent confusion between the
spheres of dream and reality that structures many Minnelli works: Dyer notes
that the film “never reveals whether her memories are real, or products of her
fertile imagination, or fantasies put to her by the hypnotist” – thus
anticipating more recent cultural anxieties over repressed versus planted
memories in psychotherapy – and this confusion continues the tradition in
Minnelli whereby “always the question of illusion, of what is real and what is
not real, remains unanswered, perhaps unanswerable”. (10) The solution that the
film does explicitly offer for its central dilemma is patently weak, a handy
safety-valve or exit-strategy, since it results in no actual on-screen moment
of communal satisfaction: Marc learns (again with his subject under hypnosis)
that he and Daisy will one day get together in another, future lifetime –
cueing the proto-New Age bromide that, just as Daisy is, after all, a
“remarkable woman”, thus we all “contain multitudes”, we are all remarkable
people, somewhere and somehow.
Yet this resolution is hardly enough to wipe away the viewer’s
memory of the far more vivid scenes that gave voice to Marc’s bitterness and
disappointment that the woman before him on the analyst’s couch is not “the
dream Melinda” (to quote his song “Melinda”). The film’s ostensible effort to
bolster the modern ideology of selfhood thus ends up with the more disquieting
suggestion that selves can scarcely get themselves together, let alone
rendezvous successfully with their appointed Others.
The only refuge from – or compensation for – such agony
of split selves is provided by a very Minnellian phantasm: the dream of
romantic fusion with another person –
something that is also the crucial motor force of many supernatural romances
(as in Peter Ibbetson, where the
nocturnal union of a brutally separated man and woman within a mutual
dream-space is only ever interrupted by the ‘thunder of the world’ and the
spectre of death). This brings us to “Love With All the Trimmings”. To fill out
the mute images that accompany this thought-song, Minnelli gives us a
back-and-forth, shot/reverse-shot depiction of a seduction: in a crowded,
lavish dining hall, Melinda and Robert Tentrees (John Richardson) have eyes
only for each other, and she is going to make sure his eyes do not stray. So we
are treated to an agonisingly drawn-out alternating series – eighteen shots in
all – which Minnelli keeps stepping up in intensity in various ways: zooms,
closer reframings, glamour lighting and cinematography, and especially
Streisand’s orgy of scintillating gestures (batting her eyes, drawing her
drinking glass down over her breasts, etc).
It is hard to experience this spectacle as anything other than the highest of high camp (it has surely provided the many drag queen impersonators of Streisand worldwide with prime material). However, the scene comes with an intriguing coda or reprise that puts it in a different, richer perspective. After an intermediate discussion with Winnie Wainwhistle (Irene Handl), Melinda’s seduction effort proves successful; Tentrees enters her room. As the song returns (with still no mouthing of the lyrics), Minnelli engineers a very particular kind of grand screen kiss: the bodies merge, the mouths meet, and the camera traces an almost complete circle around the new lovers. Retroactively, the principal function of that endless alternation between Melinda and Tentrees was to create a tension very specific to cinema: we long for the coming-together of these figures, at the same moment that we are reminded of the seemingly unbridgeable distance between them. (Four decades on, Wong Kar-wai would prove himself to be the modern master of this exquisite form of sentimental tension.)
So,
what is at stake in this kiss – and what makes it so quintessentially a
cinematic phantasm? It is precisely a moment that aims to capture and
communicate total fusion. But such fusion, in as much as it figures as an
absolute, Romantic ideal for cinema and popular culture generally, also
presents itself as a formidable limit – an impossibility.
7.
It has long been established in cinema theory and
criticism – thanks to the work of Raymond Bellour, Virginia Wright Wexman and
Rick Altman (12) – that classical narrative cinema works by a process of separation in order to ensure ultimate
fusion: a man and a woman (in the standard gendered form) are set into
distinct, alternating trajectories, in order that they can finally be brought
together, happily and harmoniously, in the final scene or shot. In relation to
the specific example from which he derives many of his analytical intuitions
and principles – Minnelli’s Gigi (1958) – Bellour concludes: “we have here a film that constantly and throughout
varies the principle of alternation which constructs it, through an effect of
reflection and reciprocal implication between its different levels”. (He also
notes that a general alternating structure is “pretty much characteristic of
the genre of musical comedy”.) (13) Although Clear Day, in the form that we have it, undoubtedly falls rather
short of the classical perfection that Bellour found in Gigi, the film certainly multiplies its alternations and
separations on the micro-levels of its mise
en scène as much as on the macro-levels of its plot – and, indeed, it
invents even more fanciful multiplications of character (as we have seen),
thanks to its psychoanalytic and supernatural-inflected premise.
There
will, however, always remain an aporia at the heart of this mechanism: impossible fusion, which would entail
(at its logical, mad extreme) the dissolution of individual beings, and perhaps
the disappearance of the very spatio-temporal co-ordinates that make cinema
itself possible. On the level at which Minnelli works on the problem of fusion
– the staging and filming of the kiss between Melinda and Tentrees – this
impossibility asserts itself forcibly. Narrative-representational cinema has
always hit this limit: how can it show a kiss, an embrace, or the sexual act,
as a oneness, as fused ecstasy – how can it show any such thing from within (as it were) its experience? All
that cinema has recourse to, finally, is the usual bag of tricks, artifices and
conventions: the dissecting trope of shots and reverse-shots (alternating
close-ups of each lover’s face upon the shoulder of the other); accelerated
montage; or (Minnelli’s preference here) the totalising movement of a camera
that sweeps everything up into the figure of a self-contained, circular
universe.
The
underlying “low-key wistfulness” of Minnelli’s œuvre has much to do with this:
the inevitable demonstration that a dream of fusion is fated to always fall
away into its component parts – the separate times, spaces, bodies, shots, and
voices of baseline phenomenal reality. And On
a Clear Day, across all its giddy levels and bits and pieces, offers one of
his most poignant demonstrations and explorations of this profoundly
philosophical truth.
8.
We
have at last arrived at the second moment that, for me, has always crystallised
this strange film. It involves a simple, entirely familiar editing device: in
fact, another shot/reverse-shot volley. Occurring quite calmly around eighty
minutes in, after various plot convolutions and revelations have already surged
and waned, the scene poses a conversation between Marc in his space (the study,
present-day) and Melinda in hers (a bedroom in the past). What a mind-boggling
cinematic conjunction this is! Thanks to the standard illusion installed by
reverse-field cutting, we (unconsciously) assume that these characters are
looking at each other – and hence, into each other’s worlds. But, of course, no
such thing is rationally possible. Marc is, in fact, gazing at a comatose Daisy
in another part of his own room; so what he is seeing at this moment (if he’s
seeing anything) can only be his fantasy-superimposition. If so, then where is
Melinda, and what is she seeing? What
is her reality-status, exactly? She is actually speaking – from out of Daisy’s
body – so cannot entirely be simply Marc’s fantasy-projection. In a sense, the
phantom Melinda is projecting, and hence giving ephemeral reality to, her world
as she imagines (or remembers) it.
And meanwhile, the dream-dialogue simply goes on, cutting back and forth, as if
none of these conceptual complications really matter one jot …
It
could be a scene from a Raúl Ruiz film, where divided characters often converse
serenely or banally between incompossible worlds. But what it most reminds me
of, in its melancholic, twilight hush, is not the droll, ludic humour of Ruiz,
but Eugène Green’s Le Pont des Arts (2004). In its own, unusual way, this film is also a musical, albeit of a
highly classical, highbrow sort: many scenes are devoted to sublime choral
singing. Green’s story concerns a woman’s suicide, and the effect it has on her
remaining, living acquaintances. The film ends on a magical dialogue between a
living man and the ghost (or fantasy-projection) of the dead woman; it happens
in the perfectly everyday, outdoor setting of the Pont des Arts in Paris. What
makes this scene so affecting is the straightforward way in which Green frames
and stages it: each character stands perfectly still, within their own reality,
and addresses the camera that is in the place of the Other; when the two shots
are cut together in the usual reverse-field way, Green creates a stark,
impossible, but entirely convincing face-off of separate, incommensurable
worlds, our world and a world elsewhere.
This
spectacle may be closer, in its inspiration, to Bresson than Minnelli. But
would we feel its pathos so strongly unless On
A Clear Day You Can See Forever had not already – to paraphrase what
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once said of Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) (14) – laid out the problem for
us in all its poignancy, and left it tremblingly unresolved?
A longer
version of this essay appears in Joe McElhaney (ed.), Vincente
Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 374-393.
book review Minnelli: Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1. Clive Hirschhorn, The
Hollywood Musical (London: Octopus, 1981), p. 396. back
2. A notable exception is Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinéma (Paris: P.O.L.,
2009), pps. 384-386. Also worth consulting is Emmanuel Burdeau, Vincente Minnelli (Paris: Capricci,
2011), pp. 274-278. back
3. For accounts of the film’s production, cf. Vincente
Minnelli (with Hector Arce), I Remember
It Well (London: Angus & Robertson, 1974), pp. 364-367; and Stephen Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, pp.
286-288. back
4. Most of the information about the initial, longer
version of Clear Day comes from the
invaluable research made available on the website The Barbra Archives, devoted to Streisand’s career; audio
clips of several cut songs can be consulted there. back
5. Jim Cook, “On a
Clear Day You Can See Forever”, Movie,
no. 24 (Spring 1977), pp. 62-63. back
6. Richard Dyer, “Minnelli’s Web of Dreams”, The Movie, no. 58 (1981), pp. 1153-1154. back
7. James Naremore, The
Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge University Press, 1993). back
8. Raymond Durgnat, “Bells
Are Ringing”, in Gregg Rickman (ed.), The
Film Comedy Reader (New York: Limelight, 2001), p. 236. back
9. Martin Sutton, “Brigadoon”, Movie, no. 24 (Spring 1977), pp. 57-58. back
10. Dyer, “Minnelli’s Web of Dreams”, p. 1154. back 11. See Lesley Stern’s analysis of Lerner’s lyrics for a
song in My Fair Lady, in “Acting Out
of Character: The Performance of Femininity”, in Susan Sheridan (ed.), Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 25-34. back
12. Cf. Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1979); Virginia Wright
Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love,
Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1994); Rick Altman, The American
Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). back
13. Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation,
Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour”, Camera
Obscura, no. 3-4 (1979), p. 83. back
14. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama”, in
Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where
the Heart Is (London: British Film Institute, 1987), p. 73. back
© Adrian Martin January 2007 / June 2014 |
