Busby Berkeley

Excess in times of shortage and austerity - deplorable, isn't it?

And yet, at least with respect to Hollywoood, the deprived and poverty-stricken audiences of the depressed 1930s seemed to adore excess...

There probably could only ever be one Busby Berkeley. His kaleidoscopic fantasy dance scenes lit up the era and warmed the cockles of many a blighted heart.  

Berkeley dealt in Escapism with a capital 'E'.  Although presented as though part of a genuine Broadway musical show, Berkeley's visions were quite impossible to stage.  Apart from the expense, the geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic imagery could never have been appreciated by an audience tethered to conventional theatre seats - note how the camera soars into the roof of the auditorium.  

It was, of course, all about dreams and indulgence.  In the following clip, from 1934s Dames (PC?  What's that?)  we have Ruby Keeler and the multi-talented Dick Powell (later to play Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet) leading us into a typical Berkeleyscape of wonders.

I know you're a busy person, but take ten minutes out of your workaday life to immerse yourself in this. You'll feel younger and happier, (even) more innocent...

Berkeley's set pieces became such an archetype for the Golden Age that they have occasionally been parodied ( 'honoured' might be more apt a description). As done brilliantly by the Coen brothers in 1998s The Big Lebowski. This is Berkeley shot through a harsher, wryer but somehow still respectful lens...

But let's close with more of the real thing, shall we? Is it wonderfully ludicrous or ludicrously wonderful?  I'll leave that for you to answer. Indulge!

"I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour"  Busby Berkeley.

Nostalgia - the noble lie?

Nostalgia, as the very first post in this blog suggests, is a recipe blending one part love, one part loss, one part romance, one part melancholy. Nostalgia - at least as we commonly think of it today - then strains that mixture through unashamedly rose-tinted glasses.  What remains is a delicious cocktail of indulgence and escapism.

Now, it could be argued that this is a kind of lie about the world - a pretty, slightly sad picture of the world as it never was.  

And it's true that when we look at the 1930s on these pages, we choose to ignore the ugly facts of the period. In our 1930s, there are no children without shoes, no queues for soup or bread, no rise of Fascism, no gangsters (except for Jimmy Cagney and George Raft). The Great Depression will be as invisible across these pages as Messrs Mussolini and Hitler.

But nostalgia, as we have come to know it, is not merely escapism, it's a kind of longing; a longing linked to the very human desire to find something better. Look in this woman's eyes:

Migrant Mother - photograph by Dorothea Lange.

Dorothea Lange's iconic 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, seems to project more than weariness and despair.  As her children hide their faces, doesn't it seem to you that there is a kind of wry wistfulness in the mother's expression? To me, it's almost as if she is looking out towards some better place - somewhere she can see but does not know how to reach. It may be a place from which her poverty has exiled her. But might it not also be a place she dreams of reaching in the future? 

When we indulge in nostalgia in its truest, narrowest sense, we wrap ourselves in the beauty of the place or the person we are missing. For the most part, we would not deny their flaws, or forget the conflicts and the shortcomings that make place or person, three-dimensional - real rather than ideal. In our nostalgic moments, we simply choose to set these aspects aside awhile.

It is, of course, our duty not to forget the hardships and horrors of the 1930s. But, remembering in some corner of our minds, those harsh truths, we may yet and profitably, dream of the 1930s as a "better place" and bring with us some of that betterness to the lives we are living, here and now.