Astaire by Numbers
Time & the Straight White Male Dancer
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 10 November 2022
- ISBN 9780197643587
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages450 pages
- Size 235x156x28 mm
- Weight 757 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 210 253
Categories
Short description:
Astaire by Numbers offers a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture through a new looks at every second of dancing Fred Astaire committed to film in the studio era. Author Todd Decker provides a deep examination of this towering straight white male figure from the ground up by digging deeply into questions of race, gender, and sexuality.
MoreLong description:
Astaire by Numbers 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, author Todd Decker takes the reader onto the set and into the rehearsal halls and editing rooms where Astaire created his seemingly perfect film dances. Watching closely in this way reveals how Astaire used the technically sophisticated resources of the Hollywood film making machine to craft a singular career in mass entertainment as a straight white man who danced.
Decker 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. He offers new insights into how Astaire secured his masculinity and his heterosexuality, along with a new understanding 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, ultimately offering a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture.
In wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity.
Table of 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
Acknowledgements
Notes
