Videodance: How Film Enriches the Dance

Abstract

This essay pinpoints the ways in which film has amplified dance, covering the categories of space, time, body, perspective and montage. Perspective in film, or an intersection of framing choices and point of view, has the potential to alienate movement such that the laws of gravity are contested and the manipulation of time either gives the audience an opportunity to watch movement in slow motion or give the image sequence a more narrative feeling. Kassel explains various techniques used in dance film to give moving bodies a different look: duplications, change of size, mirroring or reproduction, fragmentation, and visualization of energy patterns all make these film versions of the dancing body ones that cannot exist without editing the motion.