Description
Book SynopsisAstaire by Numbers offers a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture through a new looks at every second of dancing Fred Astaire committed to film in the studio era. Author Todd Decker provides a deep examination of this towering straight white male figure from the ground up by digging deeply into questions of race, gender, and sexuality.
Trade ReviewIn wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity. * Raymond Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities, UCLA *
Todd Decker's Astaire by Numbers deftly pairs quantitative analysis with archival research to examine both the material labor of Fred Astaire's dancing body and his position of power within the Hollywood studio era. Through a novel and careful parsing of musical choreography and production practices, Decker illustrates how Astaire's identity as a cisgender, heterosexual white male allowed him to dominate the Hollywood Studio era's film musicals in a way no other musical star has. * Colleen T. Dunagan, California State University, Long Beach *
Astaire by Numbers provides an in-depth look into the fastidious creative processes of Fred Astaire and how the dancer's work and persona shaped the concept of the male dancer during his time... Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction One: Numbers Two: Shots Three: Days, Hours, Minutes Midpoint: "I just / Won't / [don't?] Dance" Four: Frames, Sets, Cuts Five: Partners Six: Noisy Masculinity Conclusion Appendix One: Astaire films corpus Appendix Two: Astaire dancing corpus by number Appendix Three: Astaire dancing corpus by shot Acknowledgements Notes
