M HKA Ensembles

Print, 20,5 x 25,5 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. DM10).

[Homer] Van Pelt, Production Still of the Film-Musical "The Thrill of Brazil" [title given by Allan Sekula] black-and-white photograph, 1946, 20,5 x 25,5 cm. Purchased by Allan Sekula through eBay on 6 May 2010. [Allan Sekula – The Dockers' Museum, 2010-2013, object nr. 10]

The picture shows a production still of an American movie-musical called *The thrill of Brasil* (1946). In the scene you see a group of male dancers carrying bags of coffee, with a female figure in the foreground and two in the back. The woman in the white dresses can be associated with Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion, she also refers to the typical Bralian imagery of females carrying baskets with fruits like in the film *Flying Down to Rio* (1933). The men wear a stylised docker-outfit and are posing with the same hip thrust as the standing [docker](http://ensembles.mhka.be/items/7735) by Constantin Meunier. The musical is turning the work on the docks into a spectacle, turning the rhythmicity of an assembly line into an aesthetic regularity. Even though the dancers poses resemble the pose of leisure and interruption of work, that you find in the sculpture by Meunier, musical theatre makes this pose into a aesthetic version of the movements of work. The docker by Meunier Meunier is more a pre-mass ornament social realism (cfr. Siegfried Kracauer), claiming the potential freedom of the body during this pause from work.