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The number is not a pause: it is a scene that has to move the story.
There is a point, in one of these ten films, where the form promises the biggest number of all and instead falls silent: a girl stands in front of two gangs, with a body on the ground, and speaks. Whoever built that ending knew that a song, right there, would have consoled somebody. The musical lives on a question it cannot dodge — why are these people singing — and the answer each film gives itself decides everything else: who has a right to a number, where the scene ends and the show begins, how much you are meant to believe of what passes in front of you. The first volume collects five answers that do not fit together. The second loads onto the form a weight it was not built for: a tragedy, a history going under, the bill for a dream that actually came true. You learn to enter and leave a song, and to build a number that is a scene with a job.
In a courtroom as gray as a page of crime reporting, a woman looks at the same room and sees it full of spotlights, and we see it with her. Out of that single decision come the satire of the film, its editing and its ending. Five different designs, each one settling everything else.
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A boy with the face of an angel starts a tender melody at the tables of an open-air beer garden; the others pick it up one at a time, and when the shot drops to the uniform the song turns out to be an anthem. Five films that ask the most festive form in cinema to carry what was never its business.
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Two volumes on the number as a narrative unit. The first sets five answers to the founding question of the genre side by side, the second tests how much weight that form will bear before it gives. Ten films on the transition into and out of a song, and on endings that refuse easy comfort.