Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema

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Introduction : ballet in tin cans
A channel for progress : theatrical dance, popular culture, and (the) American Ballet
Gender, genre, and the ballet film through 1947 : part 1, the life of a ballerina is indeed tough
Gender, genre, and the ballet film through 1947 : part 2, the man was mad
but a genius!
If you can disregard the plot : the red shoes in an American context
The second act will be quite different : cinema, culture, and ballet in the 1950s
Turning points :
Ballet and its bodies in the "post-studio" era

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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.

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