"Let the Dance Floor Feel Your Leather": Set Design, Dance, and the Articulation of Audiences in RKO Radio's Astaire-Rogers Series
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 24568593
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/01956051.2014.961997
- Title of journal
- Journal of Popular Film & Television
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 2
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 0195-6051
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research uses primary sources gathered during the AHRC-funded project ‘Form Follows Fiction’, which looking at art direction and the birth of production design in 1930s Hollywood from the perspective of design theory and in particular Actor-Network theory. The project uses the Astaire-Rogers film musicals as a case study through which to examine internal decision-making within production company RKO, and its effect on artistic decisions and the eventual reception and mythology of the series. Drawing on analysis of trade papers, archival material on director Mark Sandrich, producer Pandro Berman and others, takes a theoretical step to challenge the concept of transcendence in cinema: the principal by which audiences feel transported by the apparatus of theatre and screen into fantasy experience. The study adopts the principle of articulation, drawn from Laclau and Mouffe, in order to explain how discourses surrounding the films were employed by necessity to ensure success for each film and offer the possibility of continued financial return. In the Astaire-Rogers series, various elements of the film text, such as dance routines and modernist furnishings, were articulated to audiences through extra textual material, and the visual landscape of aspirational modernism connected with real domestic and social spaces. The study proposes that the series offered more than an escapist fantasy for the passive audience, but engaged audiences physically and discursively in order to develop an intimate connection between screen aesthetics and financial success.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
