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Busby Berkeley: Sex, Surrealism, and SongPost an Event »
Oddball Films presents Busby Berkeley: Sex, Surrealism, and Song, a night of mind-blowing musical numbers from the wildest imagination in Hollywood choreography all on 16mm film from the archive. Clearly influenced by the concurrent surrealist movement in art and avant-garde cinema, Busby Berkeley numbers transformed masses of chorus girls into kaleidoscopic geometric patterns; blending dozens of bodies into one fleshy piece of moving art. The evening features some of Berkeley's most iconic and insane work including three scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933): Ginger Rogers sings We're in the Money in pig latin whilst draped in monetary lingerie, Shadow Waltz with sixty neon violin toting showgirls, and the overtly political tearjerker My Forgotten Man.
From Footlight Parade (1933), we bring you the risque Honeymoon Hotel number "with scores of bashful brides", Sitting on a Backyard Fence with dozens of dancers in kitty costumes, and the mesmerizing By a Waterfall sequence with reportedly 300 bathing beauties creating a human waterfall and then a series of morphing geometric shapes from a tank of water. Everywhere you look it's hundreds of Ruby Keelers, even coming out of her own eyeball in the hallucinatory I Only Have Eyes for You from Dames (1934). A smoking woman morphs into the Manhattan skyline and an army of tap dancers cause a frenzy that ends in one girl's death in The Lullaby of Broadway from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). Plus, two behind-the-scenes featurettes from the studios highlighting chorus girls and choreography: Three Cheers for the Girls (1943) and Calling All Girls (1942) which showcase snippets from Wonder Bar, The Singing Marine, Fashions of 1934, and Gold Diggers of 1937. Plus, Busby Berkeley-inspired Commercials, the trailer for Ken Russell's The Boyfriend (1971) and more!