Astaire by Numbers: Time & the Straight White Male Dancer

— —

Todd Decker (Paul Tietjens Professor of Music, Paul Tietjens Professor of Music, Washington University in St. Louis)

Astaire by Numbers

Time & the Straight White Male Dancer

Todd Decker (Paul Tietjens Professor of Music, Paul Tietjens Professor of Music, Washington University in St. Louis)

$286

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Oxford University Press Inc
02 February 2023

Film theory & criticism; Dance; Music: styles & genres

"Astaire by Numbers 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, author Todd Decker takes the reader onto the set and into the rehearsal halls and editing rooms where Astaire created his seemingly perfect film dances. Watching 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. Decker 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. He offers new insights into how Astaire secured his masculinity and his heterosexuality, along with a new understanding 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, ultimately offering a complete re-assessment of a twentieth-century icon of American popular culture."

By: Todd Decker (Paul Tietjens Professor of Music Paul Tietjens Professor of Music Washington University in St. Louis)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 242mm, Width: 159mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 768g
ISBN: 9780197643587
ISBN 10: 0197643582
Pages: 504
Publication Date: 02 February 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Introduction 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"

"Todd Decker is the Paul Tietjens Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and many articles and book chapters on popular music and media in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Decker has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London's Victoria and Albert Museum and was featured in a 2019 BBC World Service documentary on the song ""Ol' Man River."""

Reviews for Astaire by Numbers: Time & the Straight White Male Dancer

In 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 *