Busby Berkeley and the Art of Order
For this soldier-turned-filmmaker, beauty comes down to vision, great legs — and mathematics.
By KRISTEN BIALIK
Before he was a Broadway and Hollywood musical choreographer, Busby Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant in World War I. Radical career change? Maybe not.
While stationed in Europe, Berkeley created and directed large-scale drill parades for men (1917–19). After returning to the US, he was asked to help direct the 1925 musical Holka-Polka. Suddenly, dozens of leggy blondes in sparkling showgirl costumes were made available to him. You can bet he took advantage of the change from troop to troupe.
Still, Berkeley’s military beginnings are visible in the way he created and reveled in onscreen dances. For one, there’s a sexually charged excitement in his working with leagues of scantily clad, dancing women. A psychoanalytic analysis might chalk this up to his close relationship with his mother and/or his prolonged lack of contact with women during wartime. (Unlucky in romantic love, Berkeley would marry six times.)
Nonetheless, always up for a bit of not-so-subtle phallic symbolism, Berkeley’s routines often included props such as balls, propellers, and yes, five-foot long bananas, among other objects.
For example, in Wonder Bar’s “Don’t Say Goodnight” (1934), women dance around giant, erect moving pillars that pull out to reveal rows of men behind them. In Footlight Parade’s “By a Waterfall” (1933), an overhead shot reveals wet women in a pool, forming the shape of twisting snakes. And Flying High’s “Dance Until the Dawn” (1931) features an(other) overhead sequence in which a row of men slides back and forth between pairs of rings made by spinning dames.
Finally, any Berkeley fan could quickly point out the director’s apparent fascination with women’s crotches via his many formations made by women’s spread legs.
The other evident carry-over from Berkeley’s military background is the emphasis on group precision and tightly organized pattern formations. Famed for his elaborate routines and overhead shots of ornate human kaleidoscopes, Berkeley had the ability to transform a group of chorus girls into a moving mosaic of heels and great legs.
From working in parades with as many as 1,200 enlisted men in the First World War, Berkeley maintained a vision that went beyond attractive arm and leg movements. Every individual had her place within the group and a carefully planned place within the stage.
Between 1930 and the end of the WWII, Busby Berkeley had choreographed and directed the scenes of musical numbers in nearly 30 film titles. His success during this era comes as no surprise — as his surreal, stunning, and meticulous kaleidoscope visions provided a glamorous indulgence to a nation down on its luck.
There was a kind of faith in the overhead shots that revealed the beauty of Berkeley’s controlled world. His direction took on a completely different perspective, showing that despite eye-level disorder, everything looks wonderful from above.
Busby Berkeley’s musical routines were precise to the point of mathematical exactness. Many of his formations took on patterns seen in the natural world and in mathematical biology. Again, Berkeley often favored aerial shots of dancers in floral patterns — the same kind of patterns studied for their adherence to Fibonacci numbers.
For example, in “Spin a Little Web of Dreams” from Fashions of 1934 (1934), the blonde bombshells filmed from above stand in rings and cover themselves up with feather fans, which then unfold from the center to create the illusion of a blooming flower.
In many other dance routines, Berkeley shaped his dancers into individual petals on a collective, whirling blossom. In fact, there is an entire line of study — Fibonacci phyllotaxis — devoted to studying the appearance of Fibonacci sequences in the structural formations of certain plants. But Fibonacci numbers aren’t just seen in flowers. Shapes like Pascal’s triangle and certain spirals also follow the sequence, shapes that Berkeley frequently uses in his arrangements.
What’s interesting about the prevalence of Fibonacci numbers in Berkeley’s work is their relationship to the Golden Ratio.
Believed to be especially aesthetically pleasing, the Golden Ratio has been used in art and architecture since the Renaissance Period. If you divide a Fibonacci number by its immediate predecessor, the result approximates the Golden Ratio and gets continually closer to the real deal as the Fibonacci numbers progress.
Like Fibonacci flowers, the Golden Ratio is widespread in biological structure, from leaves on a stem to the human body.
German psychologist Adolf Zeising found the Golden Ratio was present in plant stems and veins, and they he went on to examine its presence in animals and minerals. In 1854, Zeising said,
The Golden Ratio is a universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.
If there was anything choreographer/director Busby Berkeley valued, it was the lusciousness of the human form. Through him, beauty in biology was no longer mysterious or accidental. It was about vision, great legs, and mathematics.
Indeed, Berkeley showed audiences that an ordered world could be dazzling, that we could escape in swirling banana dreams, and not to worry, because everything was golden.
Watch videos of Berkeley’s greatest sequences
A version of this story was originally published in Network Awesome. Its author, Kristen Bialik, is a writer, teacher and graduate student of Journalism and Mass Communication. In her spare time, she’s a baker of pies and maker of stories.
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