Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
andquot;With obvious affection for their subjects, the authors of the fascinating essays in
Cinematic Canines provide a trove of information on famous dogs in the movies and how they have been handled and mishandled by the humans behind the camera.andquot;
Review
andquot;A book for Fidoandrsquo;s film fans and scholars of animals in motion pictures alike, Cinematic Canines gathers case studies that together make a lively case for considering nonhuman life as essential to media history.andquot;
Review
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.
Synopsis
Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of andldquo;manandrsquo;s best friendsandrdquo; (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to
Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.
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).