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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
View the Table of
Contents
Outstanding Academic
Title, Choice, 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
"This is a superb and wonderfully readable work, a true
contribution to the fields of both cinema studies and dance." —Karen Backstein, Cineaste
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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