stage and screen
I'm reminded of Feuer (1995): "The musical, technically the most complex type of film produced in Hollywood [though, really, Hedwig was filmed in Toronto], paradoxically has always been the genre that attempts to give the greatest illusion of spontaneity and effortlessness" (p. 447). Hedwig and the Angry Inch , though it involves plenty of camera setups, some rather involved (with the live performances and whatnot) and animated sequences, still comes across quite spontaneous. Roger Ebert calls the filmmaking as "free-form as such movies as 'Pink Floyd the Wall.'" And, that's sort of the point. At any given moment, we could be staring at an outlandish live performance, watching a profoundly simply designed animated sequence or enjoying a painful flashback. That's what makes the film more real. Like life, it doesn't all flow neatly start to finish. Sometimes, life gets bogged down in moments from the past, in flights of fancy... And yet, t...