In my first week as a SpoutBlogger, I linked to Kevin Lee’s video essay on Dario Argento’s Inferno. Twelve weeks later (putting us at last weekend), I met Kevin for the first time in Real Life, and he told me that the next installment of his project has going to investigate one of my favorite musicals, the Busby Berkeley-choreographed Dames. It’s now up at his site.
The actual video essay breaks down the film’s title number, one of the most batshit insanely kaloidoscopic musical sequences of Berkeley’s career, into symbols and meanings; the page it lives on is tricked out with quotes from the film’s original reviews, unadulterated clips of other musical numbers, and Lee’s own analysis.
My favorite part of the whole thing comes at about the 3:55 mark of the video, when Lee stops in the middle of his analysis to ponder the one scene that appears to have gotten away from Berkeley.
