The Creative Turn From Utopia To Urban Street

In the 1960 s,the entertainment-driven Hollywood song and dance film was in decline.In the face of the rise of the television industry and the solidification of the creative mode of the song and dance film itself,people were no longer satisfied with utopian song and dance film entertainment.Under this historical background,the emergence of West Side Story,a landmark Hollywood song and dance film,led to a shift from utopian entertainment to street-critical realism as social tensions in the United States intensified.Hollywood song and dance films were no longer limited to the superficial visual enjoyment of song and dance art,but truly combined song and dance in the narrative expression of film art to reflect the antagonistic relationship under social contradictions,giving dance films a deeper level of realistic significance.This paper takes the most iconic Hollywood song and dance film of the period,West Side Story,as its object of study,and aims to analyse its creative twists and innovative breakthroughs from a historical perspective.Unlike the traditional paradigm of backstage song and dance films,West Side Story,not only elevated the creative heights of song and dance film itself but also reflected the sharp contradictions and conflicts in American society.The paper is divided into three chapters.The first chapter analyses the historical causes of the decline of Hollywood song and dance films in the 1960 s and the historical opportunities of the turning point of the creation of West Side Story by combing the creative background of West Side Story,and analyzes the historical causes of Hollywood song and dance film in terms of the social objective factors and subjective factors of creation.With the increasing popularity of television and the rise of suburban life in America,the Hollywood box office was in a the crisis of development.Under the background of the intensification of racial contradictions in American society,the American public began to awaken to the desire for change and became dissatisfied with the uniformly indulgent mode of Hollywood song and dance films,which creates a historical opportunity for the rise of the critical reality of the West Side Story.The second chapter analyzes the breakthroughs and innovations of West Side Story in the creation latitude.In terms of music,the musical conflict with confrontation as the core provides a continuous internal driving force for the dance;in terms of choreography,it uses diverse dance elements to break through the tragic subject matter,emphasizing the inner motives and psychological details of the characters’ actions,and using dance as a drama to break the narrative bottleneck of dance films;In terms of camera language,the film differs from traditional single shooting methods by using immersive camera movements,diverse shooting angles and dynamic camera editing to amplify the shot impact of the body motion under the audio-visual communication,breaking the spatial limitation of the viewfinder;in terms of live-action filming,its outdoor integrated camera shooting truly realizes the inner unity of stylized dance and real environment,achieving a breakthrough in the transformation of the dance space in a live-action film.Based on the analysis of the creative background and creative breakthrough of the first and second chapter,the third chapter of this paper analyzes the diversified influence of West side Story.From the formal analysis of West Side Story on the street dance and Michael Jackson music videotape.And from the content analysis of the value transformation from entertainment to seriousness of Hollywood song and dance film after1960 s.Thus demonstrating the turning point and historical influence of the work in the history of Hollywood film image and its realistic significance to the creation of contemporary song and dance film creation.