The Caveman and the Machine

ISBN-13: 9783639169843 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 276 str.

Willis Bilderback

Opis

In this book Willis Peter Bilderback examines twodiscursive tendencies found in the American Musical Film duringthe period 1929-1935. The first is a tendency toward "thetechnological sublime" as displayed by the films that Busby Berkeley choreographed for Warner Brothers studios. The secondis "the eroticization of the primitive" as found in asignificant number of "pre-code" Hollywood Musicals. Bilderback unpacks themeaning of these discourses through a close analysis of thefilms, and by referencing the cultural, economic and politicalhistory of the United States during the early part of thetwentieth-century, and the 1930s in particular.Bilderback finds a parallel between Fordistproduction methods and the kind of disciplines the body is subjected to inBerkeleys elaborate production numbers, that parallels theAmerican publics own complicated, ambivalent relationship totechnology and industry during the Depression. Additionally, hefinds in the "eroticization of the primitive" evident in many"pre-code" Musicals, an alternative relationship to modernity in which the"primitive" is imagined as modernitys vital, libidinal other.

O autorze

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.