Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.

James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (2007) and Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (2019), the editor of Cinematic Thinking (2008) and co-editor, with John Severn, of Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres (2021).

With his riveting assessment of Busby Berkeley's contributions to the Hollywood musical in the 1930s, James Phillips offers sharp insights into a body of work that was not only shaped by the cultural politics of its time but continues to influence popular culture in the twenty-first century. Phillips's smart analysis opens up the tensions and ambiguities that make Berkeley's work deliciously provocative to this day.

• Introduction 1 Women and the Machinery of Escape 2 In the Lair of the Cyclops 3 Love and Censorship 4 Placing Spectacle and the Unfinished Business of Fascism Pre-Code Coda: She Had to Say Yes Afterword: Contemporary Lessons from the Aesthetics of the 1930s NotesBibliographyIndex