Del i serien New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media

Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.

Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

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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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-02-20
Mått158 x 232 x 20 mm
Vikt480 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieNew Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
Antal sidor256
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9798765124819

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James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (2007) and Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (2019), the editor of Cinematic Thinking (2008) and co-editor, with John Severn, of Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres (2021).

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 NotesBibliographyIndex

With his riveting assessment of Busby Berkeley's contributions to the Hollywood musical in the 1930s, James Phillips offers sharp insights into a body of work that was not only shaped by the cultural politics of its time but continues to influence popular culture in the twenty-first century. Phillips's smart analysis opens up the tensions and ambiguities that make Berkeley's work deliciously provocative to this day.