Embedded Files
The final ballet sequence appears at the very end of An American in Paris after Jerry has lost Lise, who is going to marry Henri and leave for America. Functioning as the film's narrative and visual resolution, the ballet transforms Jerry's memories of Paris and his feelings for Lise into a fully imagined visual world. From the beginning, the sequence signals an imagination of synthesis, shifting away from realism.
Following a scene of an art students' ball where characters all dress in black-and white, the ballet opens inside a simple black-and-white sketch of Paris. Jerry appears in a dark costume, moving in this space that feels unfinished, as if his inner image of the city is still waiting to be filled in. As the ballet progresses, color slowly returns in controlled and symbolic ways. The dancers who first accompany Jerry wear costumes marked by white, red, and blue—the colors of the French flag. Rather than representing a specific place, these colors suggest Paris as an emotional concept of Jerry: stylized, distant, and abstract, much like the distant Paris introduced in the beginning overview of the film.
When Lise finally enters the ballet and begins to dance with Jerry, color shifts again. In the sequence where Jerry and Lise meet beside a flower stand, former tricolor tones give way to warmer pinks, yellows, and greens. The setting becomes richer and more varied. Emotion becomes visual here: Lise’s presence brightens Jerry’s imagination. It transforms Jerry's inner Paris from an abstract cultural symbol into a shared, intimate space.
One of the ballet’s most memorable moments comes when Lise suddenly vanishes and several men pull Jerry, who is now overwhelmed by loss, into a costume shop. He reemerges wearing a loud, red-striped suit, marching down the street in a deliberately exaggerated style. This is the moment Vincente Minnelli himself described as the most American part of the ballet. As Minnelli recalls, producer Arthur Freed wanted Gene Kelly to incorporate a George M. Cohan–style strut, presenting Jerry as a “young and vital American” (Minnelli 237). Color plays an important role in this transformation. Jerry’s bright red suit turns him into a comic and highly visible foreign figure within a French fantasy, exaggerating his Americanness through both color and movement. The iconic strut makes his national identity immediately visible. The moment foregrounds his identity, using humor and spectacle to make it visible and playful.
After this humorous interruption, Lise reenters the fantasy and joins Jerry. Together, they dance through a series of stylized Parisian settings that shift quickly in color and mood. In one scene, they move through cool blue tones that suggest restraint and quiet melancholy; in the next, they enter a brighter, more playful space filled with dancers in exaggerated costumes and varied colors. In these rapid changes, Jerry’s imagination is no longer tied to a single and linear image of Paris, being either grand or down-to-earth. It produces what Angela Dalle-Vacche describes as a sequence of "psychic associations," in which the scene moves on through moods and styles, instead of clear logic (69).
The whole ballet sequence moves across references of French painters such as Dufy, Renoir, and Rousseau. In this movement, Paris becomes a space of exhibition. As Dalle Vacche argues, Minnelli reconfigures the French painting into an "American theme part, a fantasy space or 'Parisland' where art history does not hang on the walls in hieratic immobility, but dances in a series of intertextual combinations" (77). Similar to Disneyland, it becomes a utopia of flexibility and inclusion.
As film scholar Thomas Schatz notes, the musical finale “integrates and mediates the conflicting attitudes and lifestyles of the characters, thereby celebrating their natural (musical) and cultural (marital) union in the act of performance” (198). In this sense, the ballet becomes a space where contrast turns into coexistence. It is a moment when “the conflicts that separated the lovers magically dissolve in a lush, dynamic homage to French painting and culture, set to George Gershwin’s musical score” (Schatz 198). What makes this resolution especially powerful is that it extends beyond the romantic couple: it imagines a world in which not only man and woman, but also elite art and popular entertainment, can exist together (198).
Through color, the ballet seems to complete the film’s dual-focus narrative by turning opposition into synthesis. Jerry, the concrete and optimistic American, and Lise, the abstract French figure of possibility, finally merge. Rather than following Altman’s “beauty/rich” motif, in which man being rich and woman being beautiful (25), An American in Paris imagines a different union. It is a union that brings Americanness and Frenchness together, as if the abstract possibilities associated with Frenchness are made tangible through their union.
Screenshots from the final ballet in An American in Paris, compared with The Sleeping Gypsy (Henri Rousseau, 1897)
This vision of coexistence and merge, however, is not neutral. In the union between man and woman, agency lies with the man. Jerry is never a passive observer of Paris or of Lise; he actively initiates, dances, and teaches. His cheerfulness reshapes Lise’s world, just as it animates his neighborhood. Lise’s abstract possibilities are realized not through her own narration, but through Jerry’s movement, energy, and imagination.
A similar structure exists in the coexistence of elite art and popular culture. The ballet draws heavily on French painting and high-art traditions, yet these forms are absorbed into a Hollywood musical designed for mass audiences. As a result, elite art is not beyond reach; instead, it is brought into popular cinema. Viewers no longer need cultural training or privilege: a movie ticket allows them to participate. The irony in consumerism and popular culture would later be expressed by Pop Art. However, at this moment, they seem to carry a utopian promise still: popular culture could include everyone.
Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, Pop Art
The coexistence of Americanness and Frenchness in An American in Paris is, thus, also uneven. It is Americanness that leads. It is post-war American optimism that turns Frenchness from an abstract set of possibilities into tangible experiences. What the ballet imagines is not simply cultural exchange, but transformation guided by American vitality.
Minnelli’s own recollections of An American in Paris make this structure explicit. Unable to shoot in France, he and Arthur Freed chose to “attack the [ballet] sequence in the same way a painter would, with bold and imaginative splashes of color” (Minnelli 230). Minnelli’s decision to precede the ballet with a black-and-white ball intensifies the contrast. As Kindem notes, mid-century audiences still associated black-and-white with the “illusion of reality,” while color carried a sense of fantasy until “television's conversion to color broadcasting and color news film in 1965-1966 gave color added realism in comparison to black-and-white” (Kindem 36). The monochrome costumes in the ball belong to a familiar visual language of realism, making the eruption of color in the ballet feel more attractive. In this structure, color becomes a metaphor for possibility. It expresses a post-war belief that the world could be remade through creativity, confidence, and enthusiasm, led by a young American character like Jerry.
At the end, the ballet becomes a fantasy of American presence in Paris. It becomes a shared romantic journey and exploration between Jerry and the audience to enter and reconstruct a foreign space with confidence. Perhaps this is why the film pays no attention to how Lise ends her engagement with Henri and return to Jerry—a drama that would definitely interest large scale of present audience. The film’s confidence lies precisely in its refusal to justify the happy ending. It assumes, with such optimism, that dream will come true without doubt.
Page updated
Report abuse