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Dying Swans
and Madmen
Price: $26.95
Subtitle:
Ballet, the Body, and
Narrative Cinema
Author:
Adrienne L. McLean
Subject:
Film and Media,
Gender Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-8135-4280-5
Pages:
320 pages, 50 illustrations
Publication Date:
March 2008
Praise
for Dying Swans and Madmen
"McLean deftly interweaves an overarching account of how ballet figures in film, as narrative device as well as bodily spectacle, with detailed analyses of specific films, drawing with equal assurance on historically grounded cultural studies, film analysis, and dance theory. A beautifully illustrated, lucidly written, engaged and engaging study.”
—Richard Dyer, King’s College London
“Aside from cataloguing, describing, and closely reading the
plethora of films that comprise the group with which she
is concerned, McLean surfaces interesting theoretical
issues concerning the genre. This is a unique and
original project."
—Lucy Fischer, University of
Pittsburgh
Description:
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.
About the Author:
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).
Related Links:
Dance Films Association
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Price: $26.95
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