Dream Neighborhood: Athenian Agora

Continuing some thoughts and some screenings on the topic of Athenian Film archaeology, I return to the Athenian Agora excavations, America's most vivid archaeological presence in the world began in 1932. See my posting "Stella: Athenian Agora" (Feb. 13, 2010).

For much of June, I had been obsessed with the urban archaeology of the film Dream Neighborhood (1961): June 8, June 13, June 17, and June 18. The movie also implicates the Athenian Agora excavations in one scene, where the newly renovated Stoa of Attalos creates an important background. The Stoa of Attalos was restored by the Rockefeller Foundation between 1952 and 1956. It would have been under construction during the filming of Stella, but would have been freshly completed by Dream Neighborhood.

As I did with the funerary sequence earlier, I have sketched out a couple of scenes to help me in the framing of the filmic topography. The appearance of the Agora and the Stoa occurs when Stephania escapes the shanty town to meet her boyfriend and upper-middle-class youngsters for a spin to the suburbs. In the movie sequence she walks around Philopappou Hill and arrives at Apostolou Paulou Street, where two convertible cars wait for her. She hops on the convertible and the cars make a U-turn and spin around heading west. The figure in the middle of the street is another main character, Nekroforas carrying the lame child Themiakos, who's on his way to rob the villa of an old lady. You can see the scene here (cue 21:20 min.)

The characters enter a scene dominated by the Acropolis above. The image here signifies a modern Athens with automobile traffic, buses, a managed archaeological park and a beautiful setting. As the two convertibles spin around in dangerous speed, Nekroforas continues to walk towards the left. The camera zooms in and we can see more clearly his trench coat and the lame child. The camera also pans from West to East. The Acropolis disappears, while a long monument provides the visual focus. This is the Stoa of Attalos, restored by the Americans (cue 21:30 min). The long horizontal plain is mitigated by the peristyle rhythm of light and darkness. Above it rises the conic volume of Lykavittos Hill (prominent in yesterday's posting).

Nekroforas has his back turned to the camera, so he becomes a spectator of the urban archaeology. A few paths are visible through the fenced archaeological park, as well as some installations for the archaeologists along the pavement (I can't quite tell what these are yet). At this point, a bus enters the frame from the left, which is the bus that Nekroforas will take to the suburban villa. The camera continues to pan East (to the left) following the massing of the Stoa that concludes with a view of the Thesseion (Temple of Hephaestus).

In this scene, the ancient (Parthenon, Propylaea, Thesseion) and the modern (Stoa of Attalos restoration) are fused into one. The speed of the convertibles and the efficiency of public transportation overlap the modern construction of Athens that forms the dramatic foil to the shanty town around the corner. The Stoa of Attalos plays an important role in the dialectics of the urban story that is both temporal (ancient-modern), global (Greek-Anatolian-American) and socio-economic (dirty impoverished shanty town-clean monumental display)

REFERENCES

Leontis, Artemis. "Archaeology in the Neighborhood: Views of the Ancient Agora and Other Ruins from Outside the Gate," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27:2, (October 2009), pp. 417-425.

Sakka, Niki. "The reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos: Ideological and Political Aspects," Philhellenism, Philanthropy, or Political Convenience? American Archaeology in Greece," ASCSA, Athens, May 18, 2010.

Thomspon, Homer. The Stoa of Attalos II in Athens (Princeton, 1959)

Athens Silhouette 1956

A terrific sample of graphic design in the cultural column of the Greek evening newspaper Apogeumatini from 1956. Two 1930s fonts, "Evening" in black and "Hours" in white, float over a silhouette of the Athenian skyline. The city is drawn as an architectural section. The darkness suggests the sun's setting and pronouncement of evening outings. The afternoon hours are bracketed between siesta and nightfall. A second daily awakening is dramatized between the Acropolis on the left and Lycabettus Hill on the right, or between the Parthenon and the chapel of Saint George. The space between the two natural formations contains the cultural heart of Athens: Plaka, Monastiraki, Ermou, Omonia, the National Gardens, Vasilisis Sofias, Kolonaki.

The setting of the sun and the sweetness of urban darkness also marks a new social adventure, the watching of films. The newspaper graphic, in fact, is taken from a clipping that the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation has scanned and made available on line, where the director discusses the release of his movie debut. Windfall in Athens is one of the earliest movies to explore Athenian topography in its narrative, although the indoor scenes were actually filmed in a studio in Cairo. For the entire clipping, see "Ο κ. Μιχάλης Κακογιάννης ομιλεί δια τον Ελληνικόν κινηματογράφον," Apogeumatini (1956)

Dream Neighborhood: News Coverage

The re-release of Dream Neighborhood has generated some interesting media coverage this last week. I find it amazing that I can sit in Philadelphia and experience the Greek response to the movie online. I'd like to share two postings with you. The first is what I would have liked to do, if I were in Athens right now, to walk through the Asyrmatou neighborhood and search for archaeological clues. Blogger Athensville has done this in, "Η Συνοικεία το Όνειρο Σήμερα" (July 12, 2011). Thanks to Athensville for transporting all the non-Athenians to the spaces of Asyrmatou 50 years later (photo left).

The second feature is a TV clipping from Greek television that chronicles the film's censorship, see here and here.

I began my ruminations on the shanty town of Asyrmatou by thinking about the houses of the Athenian Agora excavations. The film's debut took place at Radio City cinema and was attended by journalists, foreign dignitaries, and representatives of educational institutions. I am certain that member of the American School would have been present. This might also explain a review in the Herald Tribune, which reviewed the film positively. American archaeologists would have been acutely aware of the Asyrmatou neighborhood because they were excavating around the corner.

Dream Neighborhood: Kite

The architectural character of modern Athens is a phenomenon of the 1960s. Intense urbanization after the German occupation and the Civil War, lax regulation, cheap labor, and a national industry of concrete brought about the city of apartment buildings that we know and love today. In the absence of monetary investment (national banks, no interest rates), modern Athenians invested in real estate. Greek prosperity was reflected predominantly in the ownership of one or more apartments and summer homes. The flip-side of this upward mobility was an architectural demarcating of classes. Lack of ownership and dependence on rents signified poverty (the typical scenario outlined by Engels as early as 1872 in "The Housing Question.")

The 1961 film Dream Neighborhood that I've been thinking about this last week offers a clear expression of the conflicts inherent in modernization (the concrete house), poverty (shanty towns), and the movement into the middle class (in the case of the film unsuccessful). The film is dramatized in the neighborhood of Asyrmaton, Plaka. The film ends with a suicide and a funeral procession (discussed here). Resurrection occurs at the last minutes, when a boy flies a kite over the Acropolis. The kite itself was designed to look like a child's image of reality. It features a couple in love (signified by hearts) and images of daily life. The upper right portion of the kite represents the process of construction. Although undoubtedly drawn by the set designer Tasos Zographos, it reflects the iconic aspirations of class.

The kite shows a crane building a concrete apartment building. Workers and material stand on the scaffolding. The image is particularly powerful because the construction of the kite is visible as a shadow behind the paper. The triangles of the kite's construction intersect the triangles of the projected architectural construction.

Dream Neighborhood: Funerary Sequence

More notes on Athenian Film ArchaeologyThe closing sequence of the 1961 film Dream Neighborhood (Η συνοικία το όνειρο) is a powerful moment in Greek cinema (see here on YouTube). A funerary procession leads the viewer from the hills of Ano Petralona to the shanty town neighborhood that forms the film's sociological subject. The film deserves an entire essay for its architectural narrative. This post hopes to unpack some of the basic spatial maneuvers. The sketch plan above shows the three major architectural subjects in Athenian topography. The camera is placed somewhere on the hill and tracks the funerary party as they process along the hill (offering views to the Acropolis and the Philopapous Monument) and then down into the impoverished architecture where the characters live. I've made five quick sketches to trace the movement along this sequence, numbered 1-5 above.
1. A black mass moves along the hill, counterbalancing the white architecture of the Parthenon and the Propylaea. The black mass is made up of the funerary party, a group of 20-30 individuals wearing black. The funerary party represents the pains of poverty and the negativity of self-destruction. Although the characters in the movie are not certain of this, the viewer knows that the dead man committed suicide, falling from the very same rocks. A bush at the middle ground of the frame creates a point of reference. A shaded triangular area in the foreground contains physical detail. The funerary part will eventually enter that foreground area and we will start discerning the actors' identities. The Acropolis serves as a silent icon in the distance. The mass to its left, the Propylaea are both the gateways to the ancient monument, but also the intermediary gate for the camera's movement. In a filmic conceit, the mourners will enter from the Propylaea to the Acropolis.
2. The black mass of mourners moves left to right while the camera zooms closer. The mourning poor have now come to the middle-ground of the bush. As they grow larger, they engulf the Acropolis and make it disappear. I read this as a visual statement of erasure. In the filmic environment blackness is more than the opposite of white, but the absence of projection. It becomes a hole in the screen. The audience is engulfed in the meaningless darkness of the movie theater (or the open air theater). Blackness within the projected frame is an interior duplication of the exterior darkness of the filmic existential drama.3. The mourners continue to move left to right. The camera keeps them in the center of the frame by moving along with them. In the process, the Acropolis goes out of view and we focus to an area located northeast of the camera. The mourners have stopped riding on the landscape but are now engulfed by the limestone geology. We see the dead man's wife being supported by two elder females. Most importantly, we see the Monument of Philopappos as an architectural signifier in the distance. Only those familiar with Athenian topography get the funerary subtext of this scene. The Philopappos monument is a first-century CE mausoleum of a Hellenistic prince from Syria. Although it seems as a mere column in the distance, the monument has a circular facade that reminds us of the circular movement of both the camera and the funerary party. The monument depicts Philopappos as riding through the city on a chariot and could be read as a filmic moment of its own right in stone. The Syrian origin of Philopappos might also trigger contemporary connotations, the fact that the impoverished subjects of the movie were Asia Minor refugees from 1922. The residents of Asyrmatou were refugees from Antalya.
4. The camera has now focused on a triptych, the mourning widow physically propped up by two elder women. The widow stops over the precipice of the rock. She leans forward for a moment, suggesting that she would have flung herself from the hill if she were not supported by the mourners. This moment harks back to a similar shot where her husband alone committed suicide from the same spot. The religious references of this triad are pretty obvious.
5. Having overcome sorrow and death, the mourners descend down the precipitous hill along a set of steps half natural half man-made. The camera now shows new Athens in all its modern poverty. The mourners have traveled the history of old glorious Athens and have annihilated in their descent to a different place below. I read the juxtaposition of great monuments and impoverished city as more than just a dialectic statement or an ironic juxtaposition between the unreal myth of Athens and the real hell of its existence. Rather, the mourners have eaten up the ancient topography and have, thus, overcome it. Antiquity is a point of reference in the distance far less interesting than the haphazard modern village. The subject of the film, Asyrmatou neighborhood, was located below the hills of Philopappos and above Troon Street. See here for some views today.

The movie ends optimistically. Right as the mourners descend, a little boy ascends up the stairs with a kite, which he flies from the hill. The kite represents a resurrection. The final scene contains no ancient monuments. The architectural content of the resurrection is found within the kite itself which the camera stops to show in great detail. The kite is hand-drawn and shows a child's version of modern construction (subject to my next post)

Athenian Film Archaeology

A few summers ago, I was going through Alison Frantz's excavation notebooks in the Athenian Agora, preparing a paper for Betsey Robinson's Radcliffe seminar, "New Discoveries from Old Excavations." American excavations at the Athenian Agora began in 1932 and are surrounded by a mess of interesting political questions best explored by Niki Sakka, Yannis Hamilakis and Artemis Leontis.

In order to clear the site, the excavators had to demolish many houses dating to the 19th century. The American School archaeologists kept an amazing photographic record of those houses, partially because ancient spolia were incorporated in the walls and partially because the excavators had embraced the ethics of modern documentation. These houses would have certainly been torn down in the 1960s and replaced by concrete apartment blocks. Their demolition by American archaeologists in the 1930s is somewhat fortunate from a preservation perspective. The record of the houses before demolition is so good that we could reconstruct their architecture in great detail. Using reverse-perspective techniques, the photographs can be used to create a virtual 1930s environment.

Brainstorming about the visual documentation of pre-concrete Athens, I have been thinking of another project, exploiting 1960s Greek films as visual records of vernacular architecture. This would require the archaeology of the film, trying to locate all the on-site locations were the films were made. I started doing this analysis with Stella (1955) but I did not get very far. It's hard to do this kind of research remotely.

A controversial film from 1961 was re-released today on Greek movie theaters (see Ta Nea), Alekos Alexandrakis' Συνοικία το 'Ονειρο (Dream Neighborhood). The film was a neorealist representation of the shanty towns of Athens. It was shot on at Asyrmatou neighborhood (right under Philopappou Ηill and Petralona in Plaka). The government banned the film as communist propaganda as soon as it opened, hence its re-release today. Although seen by few, the film is best known for its soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis, especially the song, Βρέχει στη φτωχογειτονιά (It's Raining in the Poor Neighborhood). See the last two parts of the film on YouTube here and here or the film in its entirety here.

In 1952, Finos Films released the earliest neorealist urban film, Frixos Eliadis' Νεκρή Πολιτεία (Dead City), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. There is also Nikos Koundouros' 1954, Μαγική Πόλις (Magic City). During the 1950s and 1960s, Greek cinema flourished. Dozens of movies were filmed weekly and many were formulaic (poor meets rich, slap stick comedy, coming of age, unrequited love, etc.) Whatever their cinematic merit might be, however, the golden era of Greek film produced a golden record of architecture and urbanism.

Bojangles Reconsidered

Back in December, I blogged on Fred Astaire's Bojangles routine in "Swing Time" (1936), see Astaire Shoes, Dec. 5, 2010, and Bojangles in Harlem, Dec. 2, 2010. I stirred clear from the problematic racial questions that Astaire's blackface raises, but I'm happy to see that they were tackled this weekend by Alastair Macaulay, "Astaire the Artist, Even in Blackface," New York Times (Jan. 27, 2011). The article argues convincingly that we should take the routine as a celebration of Bill Robinson and not as a derogatory minstrel show. The NYT article was an additional treat because it included the photo (left) from the shooting of the Bojangles dance. Astaire is here posing on the architectural model of Harlem that was featured in the background of his dance.

I am not a dance or film specialist, so I was glad to have two bibliographic suggestions. In Macaulay's words, "No performer in dance is more refreshing than Astaire. And no better companions to his art exist than the two reissues from the Educational Publisher: “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book” by Arlene Croce (originally from 1972) and “Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films” by John Mueller (1985).

The reason for studying "Swing Time" originally was organizing my 1930s art history seminar, which is moving along into its third week. To be honest, we have spent the first couple of weeks in the late 1910s and 1920s, surveying developments in the American avant-garde focusing on Duchamp's New York, the cult of Manhattan (Joseph Stella, the film Manhatta) and, finally turning to Charles Demuth in order to bring modernity back to Lancaster. Last week, I guest-lectured in "Constructing Sexualities: LGBTIQ Theory, Life and Culture," one of the most popular courses at F&M, and took the class to Washington D.C. to see the controversial "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Gallery. The exhibit offered the opportunity to turn our full attention on Demuth, the gay protagonist of Lancaster's modernism. On Saturday, the class goes to the Whitney in New York to see "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Times." The highlight of this trip for me will be seeing Demuth "My Egypt" in person, as well as taking my wonderful students to the RCA Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Radiator Building, the McGraw Hill Building and other Deco treasures.

Astaire Shoes

In addition to the projected triple shadows, Fred Astaire's Bojangles dance in Swing Time (1935) has psychoanalytical potential from the point of view of shoes. I feel that this must be mentioned, in order to clarify Kevin Brady's recommended readings from Zizek, quoted below. The dance routine begins with a gigantic personification of Bojangles through the bottom of Astaire's shows. Above, we see the stage sets for the soles, the bow-tie, the collar, the hat, and the racially exaggerated lips. In the background, a model of Harlem can also be seen. As the dance progresses, Astaire spreads his gigantic legs to reveal his striped pants that lead to his crotch. The dancers spread his legs open, and the viewer realizes that they are superhuman props.

I've followed up some of the racial tensions of Astaire's Bojangles to encounter a critical impasse. Some critics find Astaire's blackface intolerable, while others see in this performance an honest commemoration. Astaire's "Bojangles of Harlem" is here paying direct tribute to a historical figure, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1878-1949), one of the most popular African-American dance performers. At one level, therefore, we must acknowledge that Astaire is paying direct tribute rather than stereotyping. He acknowledges Bill Robinson's contributions to dance innovations. Hence, in the racially offensive scale, Astaire is somewhere in the grayer zone.

Going back to shoes, I quote the Zizek passages that Kevin Brady sent me, along with a most recent conversation:

Hi Kostis,
I re-read your new blog post about Astaire and Bojangles. Something that strikes me about the illustrations you provide (- besides the odd (bizarre? anamorphic?) - in any event, a floor-up perspective in which all lines converge on crotch (genitals and anus): from that viewpoint, we're as far as possible from the humanizing (& subjectivizing) features of the face, and the heads-up, feet-down "architecture" of the human figure is subverted (recalling here surrealist photography of toes and upside-down faces - Man Ray 1920s?). The identification of the movie screen itself with the dance floor - the mediating surface between the audience and film worlds - is interesting - horizontal is vertical, as if to say, this is one kooky, topsy-turvy world!
Kevin Brady, December 6, 2010 10:06 AM

ZIZEK PASSAGES

"Andersen's fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won't stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion. These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an 'undead' partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: 'it wants', it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject's well-being. This drive is that which is 'in the subject more than herself': although the subject cannot ever 'subjectivize' it, assume it as 'her own' by way of saying 'It is I who want to do this!' it nonetheless operates in her very kernel." From “Love Beyond Law” by Slavoj Zizek, a paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).


"The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”. Here, we have to be very careful. Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist striving for annihilation. I want to find eternal peace. I want… No. Death drive is almost the opposite. Death drive is the dimension of what in the Stephen King-like horror fiction is called the dimension of the undead, of living dead, of something which remains alive even after it is dead. And it’s, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself. It goes on, insists. You can not destroy it. The more you cut it, the more it insists, it goes on. This dimension, of a kind of diabolical undeadness, is what partial objects are about. The nicest example here for me, I think, is Michael Powell’s Red Shoes, about a ballerina. Her passion for dancing is materialised in her shoes taking over. The shoes are literally the undead object." From Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema.

Astaire and Zizek

Friend and F&M colleague Kevin Brady sent a great response to my earlier posting on Astaire's Swing Time, suggesting psychoanalytical trajectories and Zizek readings:

Dear Kostis
You might find this interesting - on a note tangentially related to your blog post about Fred Astaire, projected shadows, fonts and Robert Longo (all fascinating, by the way) - Your description of Fred Astaire standing aside to watch his own triple projection dance dovetails nicely with Slavoj Zizek's various film illustrations of Freudian-Lacanian desire vs. drive, and "death drive" in action (see two texts from Zizek, attached) - and in that regard, your use of the word "subject" in the blog is spot-on (desire is subjectivized, drive isn't).
The "projected" self, in Lacanian lingo, is the subject "barred" upon entering the socio-symbolic order (i.e. culture and language). The fact that Fred Astaire stands aside to watch three magnified selves dance autonomously can be related (I would think, speaking as a psychoanalytic amateur) to several other film motifs - e.g., Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1940), where the broom is a nightmare evocation of the Lacanian "partial object" (autonomous body part); the young woman in The Red Shoes (1948), who in the original story has to cut her feet off, because they won't stop dancing; Peter Sellers' "Heil Hitler" arm/hand in Dr. Strangelove (1964); even Forrest Gump's crazy running legs (1994, he can't stop himself, and his running always follows upon some loss or tragedy - in a word, drive takes over from desire). Zizek would add Fight Club (1999), where the main character can't stop his own autonomous fist from beating him up.
I haven't read much about Robert Longo, only seen images; but the psychoanalytic patterns suggested here (drive vs. desire, partial objects, symbolic castration or dismemberment in the socio-symbolic order) would probably readily apply - people flattened almost violently in their 1980s corporate costumes. It's significant that the three Longo figures are facelesss, de-subjectivized - possibly more traumatized than "dancing"? Has anyone related these images to crime scene photography?
Thanks for the thought-provoking blog piece!
Kevin Brady, December 4, 2010 9:42 AM

Bojangles in Harlem 1936

I thank Johanna for commenting on the Top Hat font and sending me to Fred Astaire's Bojangles in Harlem in Swing Time (RKO Pictures, 1936). The scene is aesthetically rich, if the viewer manages to pass over the highly offensive blackface. At the end of the scene, Astaire dances behind a triple projection of his own silhouette (sketched left). I send readers to my earlier thoughts on 1930s silhouettes here, elicited by the portraits that Georg von Peschke drew while excavating in Corinth. Incidentally, I got a chance to see all 20 of the Peshcke silhouettes in Athens this summer, but I must leave them for a future posting. Astaire's silhouettes elucidate the popular 1930s font, which pitch a thick line against a thin line in each letter. High contrast, thick-and-thin, large-and-small are in some ways the product of illuminated projection and the electricity of film and signage. I will show in a future posting that neon lights contributed to the development of fonts in the 1930s. Neon lighting has a three dimensional quality. The solid letter in the background is illuminated by a neon tube in the foreground that replicates the letter in form a few inches in front of the letter. The neon light does not occupy the same plane as the letter which it illuminates because physical contact would burn the letter from the tube's heat. A physical gap between neon and letter backdrop introduces perspectival variation as the viewer moves around the sign. Perspectival variation is what distinguishes Astaire's three shadows, since they are generated by three lights positioned around a circular platform to the right, center, and left of the real Astaire.

Like the black shadow of Fred Astaire, typography and neon tubes engaged the viewer in a game of projection. The high-contrast of shadows cultivated a minimalist aesthetic on a fertile black-and-white screen. But the dialectic of dancer vs. shadows supersedes simple mechanical replication the moment that Astaire's shadows disengage from Astaire and take on a life of their own. Astaire stops and observes his triple body move without his volition behind him. He stops being the generator of motion, or the object of projection, and he turns into a subject. He watches himself, as we watch him. His triples become his dance partners.

Astaire's black silhouettes are also interesting in light of Robert Longo's 1979 "Men in the Cities" series. Longo's involvement with the post-punk New York scene makes "Men in the Cities" the most iconic artistic expression of 1980s New Wave. It was one of the first images in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, a groundbreaking exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2008. Fortunately for me, the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings in 2008 were in Chicago and I got a chance to see the show; see catalog, here. As with the staging of Astaire's dance, Longo's dancers were displayed as a triptych (see photo of Dominic Molon, curator, in front of Longo's series here).

Whether intentional or not, I love the visual affinity solicited by Astaire's iconic dance. After all, punk archaeology begins in the 1930s, as Lewis Erenberg has convinced me in "The Crowd Goes Wild: The Youth Culture of Swing," Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago, 1998), 35-64.

Ultimately, both Astaire and Longo are the descendants of that famous Nude that Descended the Staircase in 1913 at the Armory Show. Unlike the male-gazing Duchamp, the American artist of the 1930s and 1980s is interested in a dressed male body, a suited figure that does not descend but ascends.

Top Hat 1935

Previewing Top Hat (RKO Pictures, 1935) on my way home, I noticed that the opening credits use the same font as noted on yesterday's posting. This Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film is a candidate for a lecture on Art Deco in Hollywood. The sets include a stylized classical hotel and a Venetian fantasy. The Gay Divorcee (RKO Pictures, 1934) is another possibility. The dynamics of the fonts in Top Hat are complemented by the sudden movement of the camera (as soon as the credits are finished) that reveals an actual person wearing the hat above. The next calligraphic delicacy is a zoom into a sign hanging on a wall: "SILENCE must be observed in the Club Room." The fonts here are traditional and Gothic and set a foil to Fred Astaire's uncontrollable desire to break the silence through dance.

Being a bit silly on my late train ride, I considered how my name would look like if I was an RKO actor in the 30s and a protagonist in Top Hat. Not very attractive: