Busby Berkeley and the "Fascist Aesthetic"

WORKING

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "Busby Berkeley and the 'Fascist Aesthetic'". Blog post on his Comic Spirit: Notes on Classic Hollywood Comedies, 1930-1945. 17 September 2021, at note here.[1]

Excellent essay, in which Csicsery-Ronay answers the accusation he paraphrases in its most coherent form: "Berkeley’s spectacles display large groups of chorines/dancers performing in unison, constructing complex abstract patterns out of performers who are 'dehumanized,' made to behave as parts in a machine. Because most of these dehumanized parts are women whose erotic allure is accentuated, the spectacles double the domination.'" We will summarize his response as, Not really: Berkeley in his choreography was part of a larger esthetic.

See the entire blog post for elaboration of the above and this:

Many historians of early Hollywood musicals have embraced the ideas of Siegfried Kracauer,[2] [... who] devoted a lot of space in his magnum opus, The Mass Ornament,[3][4] published in 1927, to analyzing The Tiller Girls, a company of precision dancing “girls” who were international sensations from the 1910s through to the 1930s. [...] Kracauer argued that The Tiller Girls — the inspirations for [...] countless chorus-line choreographies — were exemplars of the modern infatuation with mechanism as a social principle. Their movements and routines reflected the modern world’s immersion in the ideology of society working with the unity, precision, and discipline of the assembly-line factory. Their transformation of human bodies into mechanical parts was, for Kracauer, a completely appropriate representation of early 20th century “advanced” cultures’ acceptance of Henry Ford’s assembly-line revolution in production[...].[5]] [* * *]

Berkeley learned his craft working on [...] the Ziegfeld Follies. In his wonderful study, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars, Joel Dinerstein details Florenz Ziegfeld’s practice of combining complex choreographies of alluring young female dancers with celebrations of US technological development, in essence eroticizing the Machine Age.[6] Berkeley elevated this combination through his cinematic innovations, creating an even more logical synthesis of erotic gazing and the quintessential desire-production machine, cinema itself. This fusion of flesh and mechanism, dancing bodies and top-down design, spoke to all modernizing cultures eager to make the new technological regime feel pleasurable, exciting, and transformative.

See for Y. Zamyatin's We (ca. 1920), H. Ellison's "[[Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Contents include (from Smithsonian page):

Introduction, bodies and machines -- [...] The jazz train and American musical modernity -- African American modernism and the techno-dialogic: from John Henry[7] to Duke Ellington -- Swinging the machines: big bands and streamliner trains -- The standardized white girl in the pleasure machine: the Ziegfeld Follies and Busby Berkeley's 1930s musicals -- Tap dancers rap back at the machine [...] The world of tomorrow...in the groove: swinging the New York World's Fair, 1939-40 -- Conclusion: the continuing importance of swinging the machine[8]

From the blurb on Amazon.com and Google Books (edited):

In any age and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars [during the distinctly Modern part of] the "machine age" - when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles.

Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In "The Ballad of John Henry," the epic toast "Shine," and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew on the symbol of the train within this tradition to create a set of train-derived aural motifs and rhythms, harnessing mechanical power to cultural forms. Tap dance and the lindy hop brought machine aesthetics to the human body, while the new rhythm section of big band swing mimicked the industrial soundscape of northern cities. In Dinerstein's view, the capacity of these artistic innovations to replicate the inherent qualities of the machine-speed, power, repetition, flow, precision - helps explain both their enormous popularity and social function in American life.[9][10]

Cf. and in some cases emphatically contrast figuratively (and literally) choreographed movement in METROPOLIS, Zamyatin's We, and H. Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman."

RDE, finishing, 17Sep21

RDE, finishing, 16Sep21