Dancing on the ceiling.

On Wednesday evening, I watched Eric Rohmer's 'Pauline at the Beach' (1983) in my flat. I have (very slowly) been watching all of the Comedies and Proverbs, an endeavour that was inspired by Rohmer's death earlier this year.

'Pauline' is the film that has galvanised me to finish the series. Rohmer's framing and arrangement of bodies is masterfully precise - actors will make little movements, slightly adjust their spatial relationship with other actors, in a way that helps us to understand their mental and emotional relationships with each other. He is not flashy, he is restrained in his use of camera movement and editing, so that when he slowly zooms in to close-up of Pauline here, the moment she realises that of course Henri has been lying, it is like the explosion of a firework.

This is all besides the point (as far as anything this beautiful is ever beside the point), for my purpose in writing is to share some very particular moments. There's a scene, about half-way through the film, when Pauline meets Sylvain on the beach. They have briefly conversed before, and there's an evident instant teenage crush between the two of them. Henri, the mischievous and irresponsible older boyfriend of Pauline's older cousin, approaches the two youngsters on the beach and asks them if they want to come to his beachside house to listen to a record. They do. The clip starts at 06:44

There is such depth of feeling visible in the dance. It is a codified set of actions that permits the expression of desire - something that is particularly poignant for these youngsters who are still feeling their way through such expressions.

I was also struck by the environment in which the dance takes place. Clearly, Henri is an irresponsible cad who believes firmly in immediate pleasures without thought to the consequences (and his quite hilarious exit in this scene suggests - he also thinks that everyone else would be happier if they lived their lives according to these values). Yet the domestic space he keeps is in its own way quite wonderful, people come, people go, they watch television, they eat dinner, they have sex. This dance is one action that primarily defines the space as liberated. He welcomes all - it is a space where people can (and do) get emotionally hurt but it is also a free space which potentially provides physical safety and joy. It is, after all, a space where these teenagers are allowed to explore and discover their emotions.

This led me to investigate and collect other moments of two characters slow-dancing in spaces not primarily intended for dancing. What can be expressed in the dance? How does this change the definition of the space?

Thanks to some thought, some Twitter and Facebook friends (thanks to @squeezegutalley, @beescope, @solittleofuleft, Lauren, Kayleigh and Chris), I have collected some comparable moments for you:


(Deadwood series 1, episode 12: 'Sold Under Sin' 2004, dir. Davis Guggenheim, with Brad Dourif, Geri Jewell, Ian McShane & Paula Malcomson)


[clip starts at 06:40]
(Before Sunrise, 1994, dir. Richard Linklater, with Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke)


(Beautiful Thing, 1996, dir. Hettie Macdonald, with Scott Neal and Glenn Berry)


(The Notebook, 2004, dir. Nick Cassavetes, with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams)


(Witness, 1985, dir. Peter Weir, with Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford)


(Edward II, 1991, dir. Derek Jarman, with Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan)


(It's A Wonderful Life, 1946, dir. Frank Capra with James Stewart and Donna Reed)
(They never quite dance in this one, but the structure and the ideas are similar to the others. And, hell, it's almost Christmas.)

Also suggested were: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in Once (which I couldn't find the clip for), Matt LeBlanc and Mike Hagerty in Friends: The One with the Ballroom Dancing.. (which I couldn't embed the clip, although typically Friends emptied the motif of emotional feeling), and Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch in Road House (which again I couldn't find a clip for, although Monte Pindik described it as the best dance into crazy sex scene ever).

There are two ideas that struck me when watching these clips: the dance as a last-gasp effort to hold on to something more important than circumstance (which is visible in some but not others), and the transformation of public space into private space. By dancing in these unusual spaces - dancing, as we have seen, provides a space for people to express very private and very deeply felt emotions - the dancers create a space and a moment of privacy in otherwise public spaces. Some of the clips emphasise the public watching (to illustrate the discordance between private/public) and others prefer to formally emphasise the constructed privacy of the space (in which case we need to remind ourselves of where they are). In every case, the dancing emphasise the quality of the public space - often underlined by music, which either has a diegetic source (record player, piano, harpsichord) giving a sense of magic to the space or is given by the film, again to emphasise the beauty and the privacy within this public space.

Through this little gesture, the dancers reclaim the public space for themselves and improve it for everybody. It provides a space where our emotions, thoughts and feelings towards one another can be expressed within a codified set of actions (the dance). Being a dance, requiring two people, it allows those sensations to be shared. Even if we choose not to dance, it gives us the opportunity to recognise that there are people who feel and desire like us. This sensation finds its analogue in the music, again something beautiful that improves the everyday life of everybody (and not just the dancers). It is a tiny intervention into the public realm but one that would have benefit for everybody if it just happened more often.