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Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.

James Phillips
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Esther Williams
Fashions of 1934
film music
Footlight Parade
Gold Diggers of 1933
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Lloyd Bacon
Mervyn LeRoy
music video
Ray Enright
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Product details

  • ISBN 9798765124819
  • Weight: 480g
  • Dimensions: 158 x 232mm
  • Publication Date: 20 Feb 2025
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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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.
About James Phillips
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).

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