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In this book Willis Peter Bilderback examines two discursive tendencies found in the American Musical Film during the period 1929-1935. The first is a tendency toward the technological sublime as displayed by the films that Busby Berkeley choreographed for Warner Brothers studios. The second is the eroticization of the primitive as found in a significant number of pre-code Hollywood Musicals. Bilderback unpacks the meaning of these discourses through a close analysis of the films, and by referencing the cultural, economic and political history of the United States during the early part of the…mehr

Produktbeschreibung
In this book Willis Peter Bilderback examines two
discursive
tendencies found in the American Musical Film during
the period
1929-1935. The first is a tendency toward the
technological
sublime as displayed by the films that Busby Berkeley
choreographed for Warner Brothers studios. The second
is the
eroticization of the primitive as found in a
significant number of pre-code Hollywood Musicals. Bilderback unpacks the
meaning of
these discourses through a close analysis of the
films, and by
referencing the cultural, economic and political
history of the United
States during the early part of the
twentieth-century, and the 1930s
in particular.

Bilderback finds a parallel between Fordist
production methods and
the kind of disciplines the body is subjected to in
Berkeley s
elaborate production numbers, that parallels the
American public s
own complicated, ambivalent relationship to
technology and
industry during the Depression. Additionally, he
finds in the eroticization of the primitive evident in many pre-code Musicals,
an alternative relationship to modernity in which the primitive is
imagined as modernity s vital, libidinal other.
Autorenporträt
Willis Peter Bilderback earned his Ph.D. from the Department of
Cinema Studies at New
York University in 2000. He is currently Senior Program
Coordinator for Brown
University s Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. He lives in
Rhode Island with his
wife, Marjorie, his son, Will, and his daughter, Amelia.