Cinema Invents Ways of Dancing

"How do you dance, Sandman?"  That pointed question from Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984) cues us into the many forms and meanings that dancing has in cinema, once it is liberated from the strict confines of the conventional musical. Dance as social action, as strategy or resistance ... cinema is always inventing ways of dancing, often in the least likely contexts. Taking its cue from jazzy commentators including Serge Daney and Eric de Kuyper, this presentation will offer (with a generous serving of clips) a range of cinematic dance-inventions, from Godard and Akerman to King of New York and Punch-Drunk Love.

Adrian Martin is a Melbourne-based film and arts critic, and Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory and Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University (Australia). His work on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over 20 languages. He has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Cahiers du cinéma España, andhas written four books: Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (2003), The Mad Max Movies (2003), Once Upon a Time in America (1998) and Phantasms (1994).