Word: performance
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Remember...elegance, distinction, and aristocracy!" The last tense words of a renowned New York choreographer before the curtain rises, opening his last ballet? Almost. Helen McGehee, visiting instructor at the Harvard Summer Dance program and former soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, preps her students before they perform a piece from her own repertory. But these students are Summer School students, and the stage is a second floor studio in Agassiz...
Time: Christmas 1975. Place: a comfortable apartment on Manhattan's West Side. The members of a New York chorus and orchestra, having failed to raise money for expenses, have had to cancel their planned performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall. After a potluck supper, the singers and some of the instrumentalists squeeze into their conductor's dining room to perform the work for themselves and a few friends...
Besides serving as head of the choral department at Juilliard, Westenburg is now music director at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (where most of his Musica Sacra singers also perform) and conductor of the Collegiate Chorale, a 160-voice amateur chorus. And he is planning another Basically Bach festival for next year. All of this has forced him to forgo his weekly summer baseball games and subside to the status of a merely passionate fan. His team? "The Yankees-I guess because they're winners." Coming from a man with Westenburg's recent record, that figures...
...shot is divided into two equal segments-one occupied by close-ups of the characters, the other compact with decorative objects (sculptures, pictures, ironwork and flashing neons), or architectural detail (walls, windows, panels and storefronts). In these moments the camera often remains stationary while the actors and actresses perform and move within the flat surface of the image, creating a mise-en-frame (which is the cinematic equivalent of a painting). For example, in the sequence in which Allen talks to his girlfriend in his apartment and then climbs a spiral staircase, the concept of mise-en-frame is presented...
...made possible by photographing characters in close-up with the moving camera. By doing so, Allen decreases the theatrical nature of mise-en-scene characteristic of his previous movies (including Annie Hall in which dialogue has been filmed mainly by a stationary camera in front of which the characters perform their parts while the audience views the "scene" from a single perspective). In Manhattan, such a histrionic camera set-up is almost entirely replaced by the everchanging panorama of the tracking camera. It appears as though the camera is tenaciously chasing the characters (particularly Allen) who run frenziedly along...