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Gene Kelly performs the Alter Ego dance in the 1944 film “Cover Girl.”
Famed director Stanley Donen recounting his historic contribution to the sequence:
❝The director of the film said it’s impossible, it can’t be done. And Harry Cohn (head of Columbia Pictures) said to Gene, “Think the kid Stanley knows what he’s talking about?” Gene said, “Yes.” There was no such thing as a computer in those days, it hadn’t been invented, and we had to actually duplicate exactly the camera moves, how fast, how far, where the camera was panning, when, and how. There was no way to do that except as a dance number. I knew how to do it because I put marks on the floor and we’d mark the track, and I counted off the beats, the pan and tilt on the camera head. We put a piece of adhesive tape and little lines. The frame was half empty. They had to photograph him twice. Once on the real set. When we finished with the live character, we had to cover everything in black and leave the camera marks exactly, and he had to dance the other character in the black which made it even more difficult for the operator to know where he was because he saw nothing but Gene in the middle of blackness. So I was left at the age of I guess 18, or 19 to direct that sequence.❞
Donen, as a long time collaborator of Kelly on several of his films had contributed to the dance aesthetic of Kelly on film - and was a knowledgeable filmmaker in the medium of 20th century film with many problem solving skills as a film technician. Made apparent by his ingenuity to subvert limitations of cinema in 1944 with no AI, or CGI. This sequence is groundbreaking for its time, and by our contemporary standards, still upholds. Yet more - is that Donen was aged roughly 18, or 19 at the time. Every film that Kelly made with Donen - would be lessened in its effect without the effectual contribution of Donen who retrospectively is one of the foremost directors in Hollywood history and a proven choreographer distinctively. This dance is significant in that it also marked the psychological exploration in dance - and in the Freudian sense it is Kelly dancing against the ‘shadow’ of his psyche.