Disintegrating the Musical (Paperback)

• Category:  Books  »  Entertainment  »  Film & Video - History & Criticism
• Format: Paperback   Learn more about the Paperback format using Tower WIKI.
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
• ISBN: 0822329638
• WAPI (Tower ID): 101173966
• Release Date: August 1, 2002
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• Tower.com Sales Rank: #638819 in Books (See Top 100 Books Bestsellers)
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• #1301 in Film & Video - History & Criticism (See Top 100 Film & Video - History & Criticism Bestsellers)

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From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. "Disintegrating the Musical" tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film's classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals--a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars--Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge--emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites--even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

"Disintegrating the Musical" covers territory both familiar--"Show Boat," "Stormy Weather," "Porgy and Bess"--and obscure--musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne's first film "The Duke Is Tops," specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short "Jammin' the Blues," It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, "Disintegrating the Musical" shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporarymusical films like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Bamboozled,"

A lively examination of an important, overlooked element of American cinematic history, "Disintegrating the Musical "will appeal to those interested in cinema studies and African American studies.

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