Event overview
This lecture will be delivered by Yannis Tzioumakis, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool.
In a review that marked the theatrical release of Dirty Dancing in 1987, the New York Times compared the film to Baby, It’s You (1983), another 1960s-based film about a young couple’s problematic relationship that featured a strong focus on class politics and that was directed by John Sayles, a key figure in the independent film movement that exploded in the 1980s. Later, the same review moved to compare Dirty Dancing to Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983), a film widely considered a paradigmatic 1980s Hollywood high-concept film.
Despite its independent film credentials (Dirty Dancing was the first film to be co-produced and distributed by the video company Vestron which branched out in theatrical film production and distribution in 1986), Dirty Dancing has not been discussed as an example of American independent cinema in the vast literature that was published on this mode of filmmaking in the last 20 years. Neither has been seen as a predecessor of the more commercially-oriented “indie” cinema that Miramax would popularize only a few years later, a cinema that would depend increasingly on stars, clear generic frameworks, and emphasis on commercial subjects (think of, for instance, Miramax’s teenpic She’s All That (Iscove, 1999) – itself a remake of Dirty Dancing’s contemporary Pretty in Pink (Deutch, 1986)). When Dirty Dancing is mentioned by scholarly studies, this tends to be in brief passing and as an example of a film that was independent by accident and which should not have featured in lists next to films by such auteurs as Spike Lee, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, etc. whose films to a large extent defined the 1980s American independent film landscape.
The lecture will argue that despite its undoubted influence by the corporate Hollywood driven high-concept mode of filmmaking, Dirty Dancing was also characterised by a surprising number of stylistic, narrative and genre elements that bring it much closer to the independent film sector of the 1980s than it is given credit for. In this respect, the film becomes an interesting example of a text upon which both Hollywood and independent cinema are inscribed, an experiment, at a time (the 1980s) when those 2 different modes of filmmaking seemed to be distinct and clearly divided. This would not be the case, though, from the late 1990s onwards (only a decade after the release of Dirty Dancing), when Hollywood and American independent cinema would start increasingly to “meet” (King, 2009), and newly-coined labels, such as “indiewood” would be utilised to account for the often clearly commercial expressions of filmmaking originating in the independent film sector. The paper will argue that Dirty Dancing anticipated these developments when the increasing convergence between corporate Hollywood and independent film made the production of high concept “indiewood” films like Good Will Hunting (Van Sant, 1997), Traffic (Soderbergh, 2000), Juno (J. Raitman, 2007) and Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009) a dominant practice. Dirty Dancing then can be seen as a pioneering example of “indiewood” filmmaking, an argument that might go some way in terms of explaining why it still retains its popularity.
About the speaker:
Yannis Tzioumakis is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. His research specialises in American cinema and the business of media entertainment. He is the author of American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (2006), The Spanish Prisoner (2009) and Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (2012), all for Edinburgh University Press, for which he also co-edits the “American Indies” series that has published five volumes since 2009. Yannis is also co-editor of Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities (Intellect, 2011), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and beyond (Routledge, 2012) and The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2013) from which the paper derives. Currently, Yannis is co-editing The Routledge Companion to Film and Politics (2014) and is preparing the book series “Hollywood Centenary” (2015) which looks back at the history of the six remaining Hollywood studios as they celebrate 100 years of business, with an emphasis on their transformation from film companies to entertainment conglomerates.
Radical Media Forum: Media Experiments
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Mar 2013 | 5:00pm - 6:00pm |
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