Page 136 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 136/146
Busby Berkeley: The Gang’s All Here 1943
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHfApfdWW0
The Gang's All Here is quite remarkable - a kind of hyper-kitsch - made the same year as Deren’s avant garde short Meshes of the Afternoon, it has several adventurous neo-abstract sequences. Take for example the tour de force - the Polka Dot Polka - the final sequence of the film where the love triangle is resolved and the heroine (Alice Fay) gets her man. This is an epiphanic montage of various styles, some verging on the abstract (the kaliedoscopic sequence), some trademark Berkeley cine-choreography, some screwball romance, some avant garde moderne optical effects, all infused with Berkeley's roving craned camera. The entire movie is available on Youtube...
The kind of special optical effects deployed by Berkeley in this strange tour de force, married with the cine-choreography and synchronised dance in which he had proved to be so successful - the zooming, roaming, flying camera, the isolation of individual cut-out motion closeups, the whole jazzy media-fusion of it all - shows an artist thoroughly conversant with the art and science of his chosen medium - and poiints forward I think to the future fusion of these media in the digital do- main of the late 1990s and onwards.
While several artists, apart from Berkeley, were engaged in this techno-aesthetic exploration, in- cluding : Gjon Mili, WeeGee, Edward Steichen, Maya Deren, Philippe Halsman, Erwin Blumenfeld are examples - others were exploring the theoretical potential, including György Kepes, Moholy Nagy and Sergei Eisenstein: