Dying Swans and Madmen
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A01=Adrienne L. McLean
Adrienne L. McLean
American life
and Narrative Cinema
art
art form
Author_Adrienne L. McLean
ballerina
Ballet
ballet artists
ballet image
ballet's acceptability
ballet's popularity
Billy Elliot
Category=ATF
Category=ATQL
cinema
classical
commercial films
contemporary
dance
dancer
death
Dying Swans and Madmen
entertainment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fame
film studies
fulfillment
Grand Hotel
high culture
image of ballet
joy
melancholy
mental perversity
musicals
popular culture
power
profession
Save the Last Dance
sexual perversity
silver screen
the Body
The Company
The Red Shoes
tragic melodramas
Waterloo Bridge
way of life
Product details
- ISBN 9780813542805
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Feb 2008
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From mid-twentieth-century films such as Grand Hotel, Waterloo Bridge, and The Red Shoes to recent box-office hits including Billy Elliot, Save the Last Dance, and The Company, ballet has found its way, time and again, onto the silver screen and into the hearts of many otherwise unlikely audiences. In Dying Swans and Madmen, Adrienne L. McLean explores the curious pairing of classical and contemporary, art and entertainment, high culture and popular culture to reveal the ambivalent place that this art form occupies in American life.
Drawing on examples that range from musicals to tragic melodramas, she shows how commercial films have produced an image of ballet and its artists that is associated both with joy, fulfillment, fame, and power and with sexual and mental perversity, melancholy, and death. Although ballet is still received by many with a lack of interest or outright suspicion, McLean argues that these attitudes as well as ballet's popularity and its acceptability as a way of life and a profession have often depended on what audiences first learned about it from the movies.
Drawing on examples that range from musicals to tragic melodramas, she shows how commercial films have produced an image of ballet and its artists that is associated both with joy, fulfillment, fame, and power and with sexual and mental perversity, melancholy, and death. Although ballet is still received by many with a lack of interest or outright suspicion, McLean argues that these attitudes as well as ballet's popularity and its acceptability as a way of life and a profession have often depended on what audiences first learned about it from the movies.
Adrienne L. McLean is a professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of numerous books, including Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (Rutgers University Press).
