Bilderback, W: The Caveman and the Machine

In this book Willis Peter Bilderback examines two discursive tendencies found in the American Musical Film during the period 1929-1935. The first is a tendency toward the technological sublime as displayed by the films that Busby Berkeley choreographed for Warner Brothers studios. The second is the eroticization of the primitive as found in a significant number of pre-code Hollywood Musicals. Bilderback unpacks the meaning of these discourses through a close analysis of the films, and by referencing the cultural, economic and political history of the United States during the early part of the twentieth-century, and the 1930s in particular. Bilderback finds a parallel between Fordist production methods and the kind of disciplines the body is subjected to in Berkeley s elaborate production numbers, that parallels the American public s own complicated, ambivalent relationship to technology and industry during the Depression. Additionally, he finds in the eroticization of the primitive evident in many pre-code Musicals, an alternative relationship to modernity in which the primitive is imagined as modernity s vital, libidinal other.