Busby Berkeley - Dance Until The Dawn - 1931

Busby Berkeley

Born in 1895 into a show business family, William Berkeley Enos entered the Mohegan Lake Military Academy when he was 12 and graduated in 1914. 

He volunteered to serve in the American Army during World War I and while there, in the role of Artillery Officer, he organised military parades in France and later, Germany.

Shortly before the armistice, he attended a course in aerial surveillance. 

After the war, he began a career as an actor, before moving towards musical show production on Broadway, where he earned his reputation as a choreographer. 

In 1930, the producer Samuel Goldwyn invited him to participate in Thornton Freedland’s Whoopee! Two years later, Berkeley signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., after which he worked at the frenetic production rate of five films a year, until he joined MGM in 1939. 

Berkeley’s meticulously planned rehearsals enabled him to film remarkably long and spectacular sequences of shots, mobilising a large group of anonymous dancers inside sumptuous settings. 

Berkeley mistrusted editing and filmed the sequences with one camera. 

Able to rise into the air and move about, Berkeley’s solitary and mechanical eye took pleasure in overturning conventional perspective: vertical images became his signature shot, assuming a particular symbolic and dialectic role in his film-work. 

In addition, these vertical views display in all their splendour the ‘ornaments’ that Berkeley carefully produced.

from: Mark Dorrian. Seeing from Above (p. 167). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

 here’s a beginner’s guide to Busby Berkeley.

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Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) is a remarkable insight into the early days of ballooning. Coming in at almost 400 pages the book is a wonderfully detailed account of Baldwin's one day in the air over Chester in 1785. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempts to describe his experience not only verbally but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape (see images below). Together these illustrative plates can be seen as the first ever "real" overhead aerial views.

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