Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.

Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical

Dr. James Phillips (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2026
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
9798765124857 (ISBN)

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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.

James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at 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
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	20.8.2026
Reihe/Serie	New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
ISBN-13	9798765124857 / 9798765124857
Zustand	Neuware