Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros. : Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical / James Phillips.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Phillips, James, author.

Series:

New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media.

New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Berkeley, Busby, 1895-1976.

Berkeley, Busby.

Choreographers--United States.

Choreographers.

Motion picture producers and directors--United States.

Motion picture producers and directors.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing (US), 2024.

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

Busby Berkeley's big-production numbers are emblematic of the Hollywood dream factory. Exploring the tensions between escapism and ideological over-coding in the Warner Bros. musical, this book tracks the ways in which Berkeley created spectacles that are both critical and complacent in relation to the society that produced and received them. Berkeley carried into his images of utopia the assembly plant, the misogyny, the fascism and racism of his day, but his collaboration with the filmmakers (Enright, Bacon and LeRoy) into whose narratives his numbers were spliced likewise involved taking care to draw a line between spectacle and the everyday. The book makes the case that the Warner Bros. musical, with its attention to the specificity and containment of the aesthetic dimension, has corrective lessons to impart for the aestheticized politics not only of the 1930s, but also of the current age.

Contents:

Introduction 1 Women and the Machinery of Escape 2 In the Lair of the Cyclops 3 Love and Censorship 4 Placing Spectacle and the Unfinished Business of Fascism Pre-Code Coda: She Had to Say Yes Afterword: Contemporary Lessons from the Aesthetics of the 1930s Notes Bibliography Index

ISBN:

9798765124840

9798765124833

9798765124826

OCLC:

1452966165