Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.
Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical
Series: New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media;
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Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 20 August 2026
- ISBN 9798765124857
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages256 pages
- Size 228.6x152.4 mm
- Language 700
Categories
Short description:
Examines the musical sequences that Busby Berkeley directed at Warner Bros. in the early 1930s as microcosms of the dark social, political and economic forces of the period, but also unexpected stories of containment and escape.
MoreLong description:
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.
Table of 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
