Research Catalog

Title

Astaire by numbers : time and the straight White male dancer / Todd Decker.

Author

Decker, Todd R.

Publication

• New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]
• ©2022

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 439 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

"Astaire by Numbers: Time and the Straight White Male Dancer looks at every second of dancing Fred Astaire committed to film in the studio era-all six hours, thirty-four minutes, and fifty seconds. Using a quantitative digital humanities approach, as well as previously untapped production records, this book takes the reader onto the set and into the rehearsal halls and editing rooms where Astaire created his seemingly perfect film dances. Looking closely in this way reveals how Astaire used the technically sophisticated resources of the Hollywood film making machine to craft a singular career in mass entertainment as a straight, white man who danced on screen across a quarter century of film history. Astaire by Numbers dissects Astaire's work at the level of the shot, the cut, and the dance step to reveal the aesthetic and practical choices that yielded Astaire's dancing figure on screen. How Astaire secured his masculinity (by dancing noisily and aggressively) and his heterosexuality (by dancing most of the time with a female partner) comes in for close examination, as does the content of Astaire's whiteness, which emerges in both the sheer extent of his work and the larger implications of his famous "full figure" framing of his dancing body. Astaire by Numbers rethinks this towering straight white male figure from the ground up by digging deeply into questions of race, gender, and sexuality and offering a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture"--

Subject

• Astaire, Fred
• Dancers > United States
• Male dancers > United States
• Motion picture actors and actresses > United States
• Dance in motion pictures, television, etc
• Dance and race > United States
• Gender identity in dance
• Dancers
• Motion picture actors and actresses
• Male dancers
• Dance and race
• United States

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages [425]-428) and index.

Call Number

*MGYB (Astaire, F.) 23-470

ISBN

• 9780197643587
• 0197643582
• 9780197643594
• 0197643590

OCLC

1325660828

Author

Decker, Todd R., author.

Title

Astaire by numbers : time and the straight White male dancer / Todd Decker.

Publisher

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]

Copyright Date

©2022

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages [425]-428) and index.

Research Call Number

*MGYB (Astaire, F.) 23-470