Astaire by Numbers : Time & the Straight White Male Dancer / Todd Decker

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Decker, Todd, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American--film musical.

American.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (457 pages)

Edition:

First Edition

Place of Publication:

New York, NY Oxford University Press 2022

Summary:

Astaire by Numbers: Time & the Straight White Male Dancer looks at every second of dancing Fred Astaire committed to film in the studio era-all six hours, thirty-four minutes, and fifty seconds. Using a quantitative digital humanities approach, as well as previously untapped production records, this book takes the reader onto the set and into the rehearsal halls and editing rooms where Astaire created his seemingly perfect film dances. Looking closely in this way reveals how Astaire used the technically sophisticated resources of the Hollywood filmmaking machine to craft a singular career in mass entertainment as a straight white man who danced on screen across a quarter century of film history. Astaire by Numbers dissects Astaire's work at the level of the shot, the cut, and the dance step to reveal the aesthetic and practical choices that yielded Astaire's dancing figure on screen. How Astaire secured his masculinity (by dancing noisily and aggressively) and his heterosexuality (by dancing most of the time with a female partner) comes in for close examination, as does the content of Astaire's whiteness, which emerges in both the sheer extent of his work and the larger implications of his famous "full figure" framing of his dancing body. Astaire by Numbers rethinks this towering straight white male figure from the ground up by digging deeply into questions of race, gender, and sexuality and offering a complete reassessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture.

Contents:

Contents: Introduction - One:Numbers - Two:Shots - Three:Days, Hours, Minutes - MIDPOINT: "I Just / Won't / [Don't?] Dance" - FOUR:FRAMES, SETS, CUTS - FIVE:PARTNERS - SIX:NOISY MASCULINITY - CONCLUSION - Appendix One: Astaire Films Corpus - Appendix Two: Astaire Dancing Corpus by Number - Appendix Three: Astaire Dancing Corpus by Shot - Acknowledgments - Notes - References - Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Decker, Todd Astaire by Numbers

ISBN:

0-19-764362-0

0-19-764361-2

0-19-764360-4