A stolen thought on The Young Girls of Rochefort, a still that illustrates it, plus more

"In The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) [Jacques] Demy uses, between the big song and dance numbers, a lot of humming, people singing to themselves, fiddling around on musical instruments -- so that the act of music making is everywhere in the everyday...

Dancing constantly shoots in and out of the frame, traverses this rectangular window, like it's going on everywhere all the time, whether we can see it or not. Lastly, Demy intermingles walking with dancing, with some participants gliding almost imperceptibly into the foreground action from a long way in the background."

-Adrian Martin, "Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond, and Against Hollywood," in Movie Mutations, The Changing Face of World Cinema. Annapolis: British Film Institute, 2003.