Who is he?
Hollywood film and theatre director, who directed over 30 feature films between the early forties and the mid-seventies. Before he came to Hollywood, Minnelli had gained considerable reputation as a set designer in the New York theatre scene, whose influence is very apparent in his films. He won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Director for Gigi in 1958.
What are his films about?
Themes
The subject matter of Minnelli’s films was diverse, running from movie industry satires to breezy romances, domestic dramas and biographical pictures. The apparent lack of a personal world view in these films cost him some repute among critics championing the auteur theory, with David Thomson opining that perhaps “inconsistency is his style”. One can, however, sense Minnelli’s identification with the many artist figures and creative personalities featuring in his films, whose passion for their work possibly mirrors Minnelli’s own.
Style
Minnelli worked within a range of Hollywood genres, but he is most commonly associated with melodramas and musicals — genres whose inherent excesses fell completely in line with Minnelli’s inclination for stark stylisation. He had a notorious tendency to subordinate the narrative details to formal flourishes and didn’t hesitate to abandon plot development for purely aesthetic exercises. These films are characterised by a wide-ranged colour palette, a theatrical eye to décor, lighting, architecture and set decoration, expressive soundtrack, elegant camera movements, improvised choreography especially in the songs and elaborately staged indoor scenes with precise actor movements.
Why is he of interest?
Highly divisive among international critics during his time, Minnelli was as fiercely rejected as he was celebrated for his stylistic gratuitousness. His reputation has nevertheless grown over the years, especially in the academia, where his cinema has been extensively studied and catalogued as one of the most important achievements of Hollywood’s golden era of filmmaking.
Where to discover him?
Debatably the greatest film about Hollywood ever made, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) charts the rise and fall of a shady movie producer who uses his artistic collaborators for personal ends. Minnelli’s film is a brilliant character study that does not settle for convenient psychological reductions. It recognises that seductive genius can very well co-exist with repulsive personality in a human being. The result is a throbbing, fully rounded portrait of one creative artist as well as Hollywood itself.
