Discursive program: Dance and Hollywood

This year's Oslo Pix Film Festival is all about American influence on society.

There are many examples of how USA has influenced both popular culture and art, and in the films created during the Golden Age of Film era in Hollywood (1927-1960) we see dance, choreography and staging of movement that have influenced many dance expressions ever since.

On Wednesday 28 August at 18:00, we will host a discoursive program about the dance films that have shaped and influenced trends and tendencies in (popular) culture and society. We will discuss the dance you see on the screen and how it has been allowed to develop and become part of contemporary society, the kind of whitewashed reality most of the films showed and the kind of values Hollywood films helped to emphasize in society in relation to race, gender and sexuality. In addition, it is important to talk about how the films have come to define aesthetics and what we understand as ‘beautiful’.

The discussion program will last 75 minutes and, in addition to a panel discussion, will consist of screenings of relevant excerpts from films and an introduction to the aesthetics of Hollywood films by fashion historian and journalist Ida Eritsland. 

The panel includes social anthropologist, cultural heritage conservator and research librarian at the National Library of Norway, Michelle Tisdel, Merete Mørk Lingjærde, lecturer in jazz dance and head of the bachelor's programme in jazz dance at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts - Department of Dance, and Ida Cathrine Holme Nielsen, film researcher and critic.

After the discussion programme, at 19:30, the musical film Funny Face (1957) will be screened.