To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Film Sound Analysis.
Books on the topic 'Film Sound Analysis'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 30 books for your research on the topic 'Film Sound Analysis.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse books on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
David, Neumeyer, and Deemer Rob, eds. Hearing the movies: Music and sound in film history. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Find full text
2
Siewert, Senta. Performing Moving Images. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462985834.
Full textAbstract:
Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects presents institutions, individuals and networks who have ensured experimental films and Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s are not consigned to oblivion. Through a comparison of recent international case studies from festivals, museums, and gallery spaces, the book analyzes their new contexts, and describes the affective reception of those events. The study asks: what is the relationship between an aesthetic experience and memory at the point where film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices intersect? What can we learn from re-screenings, re-enactments, and found footage works, that are using archival material? How does the affective experience of the images, sounds and music resonate today? Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects proposes a theoretical framework from the perspective of the performative practice of programming, curating, and reconstructing, bringing in insights from original interviews with cultural agents together with an interdisciplinary academic discourse.
3
Flom, Eric L. Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2008.
Find full text
4
Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2015.
Find full text
5
Neumeyer, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328493.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This volume explores the history and evolution of film music studies from the silent film to the sound film era. It examines the relevance of various theories, including ontological, feminist, queer, critical and apparatus theories, in film studies and analyzes the influence of theater or opera music on the development of film soundtrack. It also discusses the history of video game music and presents two case studies involving the analysis of the musical scores for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
6
Lewis, Hannah. French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema examines film music practices in France during a period of widespread artistic and creative experimentation: the transition from silent to synchronized sound film. While this period in Hollywood has been examined from a range of scholarly perspectives, the transition to sound in France—and the unique interactions between French sound cinema and French musical discourses—remains underexplored. In France, debates about sound cinema were fierce and widespread, and many filmmakers addressed theoretical questions about the potential of the new technology head-on, articulating their responses to these questions both in writing and in their films. Music played an integral role in the debate. Lewis argues that debates about sound film had a powerful effect on French musical culture of the early 1930s, and that diverse French musical styles and traditions—from Les Six, to the opera house, to the popular music-hall—played a crucial role in shaping the cinematic soundscape. Filmmakers experimented with music’s role in sound cinema within a range of genres, including avant-garde surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau), recorded theater (Marcel Pagnol), early poetic realism (Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo), and the film musical (René Clair). Lewis’s analysis of the experiments undertaken in these few important years in French cinematic history encourages readers to challenge commonly held assumptions of how genres, media, and artistic forms relate to one another, and how these relationships are renegotiated during moments of technological change.
7
Johnston, Nessa. Sounding Decay in the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0012.
Full textAbstract:
Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2012) and Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) are collage works made up of decayed silent-era film fragments. The films approach sound in contrasting ways: Lyrical Nitrate uses old 78 rpm recordings of operatic music as musical accompaniment to its decayed images, whereas Decasia uses a specially commissioned score and exists not only in DVD format but also as an elaborately staged performance piece. This chapter is an investigation of the role of the soundtrack within both films’ repurposing strategy, comparing and contrasting their sonic approaches, using a Chion-esque idea of “audio-vision” in an effort to understand their aesthetic workings. Despite the material heterogeneity of film sound and film image, the spectator takes in the experience as a synthesis. Yet beyond representational strategies the materiality of sounds and images in the pre- and postdigital ages is arguably the subject of exploration unifying this comparative analysis.
8
Birtwistle, Andy. Meaning and Musicality. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.
9
Kaduri, Yael, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199841547.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book examines different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations, and collaborations of the audio and the visual in different art forms. The contributions, written by key theoreticians and practitioners, represent state-of-the-art case studies in contemporary art, integrating music, sound, and image with key figure of modern thinking constitute a foundation for the discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core subjects, each of which constitutes one section of the book. The first concentrates on the interaction between seeing and hearing. Examples of classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance, which are motivated by the issue of eye versus ear perception are examined in this section. The second section explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section shows how the new light shed by modernism on the performative aspect of music has led it—together with sound, voice, and text—to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in visual poetry, short film, and cinema.
10
Buhler, James. Theories of the Soundtrack. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371075.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book is concerned with summarizing and critiquing theories of the soundtrack from roughly 1929 until today. A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to it, how it is effectively organized, how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature of the object, the tools available for its analysis, and the interpretive regime that the theory mandates for determining the meaning, sense, and structure that sound and music bring to film and other audiovisual media. Beyond that, a theory may also delineate the range of possible uses of sound (and music), classify the types of relations that films have used for image and sound, identify the central problems, and reflect on and describe effective uses of sound in film. This book does not provide an exhaustive historical survey but rather sketches out the range of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the soundtrack over time. For each approach, it presents the basic theoretical framework, considers explicit and implicit claims about the soundtrack, and then works to open the theories to new questions about film sound, often by putting the theories into dialogue with one another. The organization is both chronological and topical: the former in that the chapters move steadily from early film theory through models of the classical system to more recent critical theories; the latter in that the chapters highlight central issues for each generation: the problem of film itself, then of image and sound, then of adequate analytical-descriptive models, and finally of critical-interpretative models.
11
Aspell, Luke. Shivers. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325970.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Shivers (1975) was David Cronenberg's first commercial feature and his first horror film. In a modern apartment block, a scientific project to unleash the id results in the equation of passion with contagion and predation. Because the writer-director's imaginative landscape arrived in the genre fully formed, the unique forms of this début have often been overlooked or mistaken for shortcomings. Cronenberg's most comedic film until Map to the Stars, Shivers is also his most spectacularly unnerving, throwing more images of extreme behavior at us than any of his subsequent films; it remains, with Crash, his most disquieting and transgressive film to date. This book's analysis addresses all channels of communication available to the 35mm sync-sound narrative feature, including shot composition, lighting, cinematographic texture, sound, the use of stock music, editing, costume, makeup, optical work, the screenplay, the casting, and the direction of the actors. This tour of Shivers as “cognitive territory” takes in architecture, cultural context, critical reception, and artistic legacy.
12
Kytö, Meri. Soundscapes of Istanbul in Turkish Film Soundtracks. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.0028.
Full textAbstract:
This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. This chapter examines the changing relationships of sounds, places, and their cultural meanings in Turkish films located in Istanbul. Starting with a brief review of the historical context of Turkish film sound and sonic representations of Istanbul, the chapter then analyzes two recent films set in middle-class apartment homes,11’e 10 kalaandUzak, which represent the auteur vein of new Turkish cinema. Both feature subtle and delicate sound design and evidence a form of heightened realism that contrasts with traditional approaches, shifting the focus of Istanbul’s soundscapes from public to private. Although the locations and characters of both these films are remarkably similar, their soundtracks differ in rendering the experience of urbanity and strategies of acoustic privacy by the transcoding of soundmarks and the use of transphonia in scenes.
13
Lehman, Frank. Tonal Practices. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.003.0002.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter lays out a series of conventions toward pitch design that both constrain musical meaning making in film and enable its unique effects. The chapter begins by examining the idiom of late Romanticism in European art music and the ways in which film music conforms to and differs from that model. This exploration is followed by a discussion of three vital aspects of American cinematic tonality: subordination, immediacy, and referentiality. Examples are drawn from an expansive set of filmmaking eras and styles; these range from the early days of the Sound Era to far more contemporary sounds. Beginning in this chapter, the beginnings of an interpretive methodology are constructed, recruiting from approaches as diverse as leitmotivic, atonal, Schenkerian, and audiovisual styles of analysis.
14
Muzyczuk, Daniel. Discontinuities and Resynchronisations. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter explores three distinct attempts in Polish film history to use the medium for research into synaesthesia. The first can be found in the films of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson made before the Second World War and after their emigration to Great Britain. Their experimental attitude is exposed through analysis of their work from 1944 entitled The Eye and the Ear. Second, the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, established in the wake of Stalinism, became an important space where new approaches into investigating of the sound and vision relationship could develop. Primarily oriented towards electroacoustic composition, the studio was also used for producing scores for popular cinema. The third site for exploration was the Workshop of Film Form, a group of artists-filmmakers based in Łódź whose work exposed the primary elements of film language. Their research resulted in some of the best-developed experiments in synaesthesia.
15
Berliner, Todd. Raging Bull’s Stylistic Dissonance. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658748.003.0006.
Full textAbstract:
Illustrating some of the points made in chapter 5, chapter 6 offers an extended analysis of some complex tendencies in Raging Bull’s cinematography, editing, and sound devices. The film tests the limits of the classical Hollywood style and sometimes crosses over into avant-garde practice. Raging Bull offers an illustrative case study of the boundaries of Hollywood’s stylistic systems.
16
Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Brutal Intimacy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
Chapter 5 begins with risk sociology’s understanding of intimacy as “a dogmatism for two” to explore an interdisciplinary mix of theory, including Tim Palmer’s analysis of the cinema of “brutal intimacy”; Tanya Modleski’s recognition of a current horror genre inflection of new desires for unleashing sexuality, violence, and control; Kelley Conway’s recognition of an authorship of considerable diversity in the context of films made by women about female sexuality in French culture; Raymond Williams’s concept of historical “structures of feeling”; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s “normal chaos of love”; and Giddens’s “transformation of intimacy.” Within these contexts, the films Twentynine Palms, Trouble Every Day, and Irréversible are analyzed textually, exploring genre, narrative, visual shot style, diegetic/non-diegetic sound, and spatial mapping (and the disruption of all these categories), with a particular focus on the road film Twentynine Palms.
17
Walker, Elsie. Code Unknown. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190495909.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter analyzes Code Unknown from a postcolonial perspective, with particular emphases on multiethnic voices, disempowered sonic presences, and cross-cultural possibilities of communication in the context of racial politics in contemporary France. The analysis considers how the sound track amplifies diverse characters’ choices to hear or not to hear, along with providing patterns and resonances that invite us to make interpretive leaps beyond the characters’ individual capabilities. Code Unknown reminds us how much our efforts to communicate matter, especially through the multiethnic, deaf-mute children who bookend the film with their extended efforts to physically “speak.” By contrast, many hearing-speaking adults of the film fail to speak or listen with patience, good will, or moral kindness, and sometimes with awful consequences. After considering many sonic moments of social discordance through the film, this chapter dwells on the tentative hope of those scenes in which the deaf-mute children create percussive music together.
18
Lewis, Hannah. Surrealist Sounds. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0003.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter focuses on the controversial early sound films directed by avant-garde filmmakers Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel: Le Sang d’un poète (1930) by Cocteau and L’Age d’or (1930) by Buñuel. They were the first surrealist sound films, and both filmmakers used music to create strange audiovisual juxtapositions and to shock their audiences. Although music’s role in the surrealist movement was contested, Lewis demonstrates through her analysis of these two films that music was crucial for a surrealist audiovisual cinematic conception. While experiments this audacious were short-lived, these two films offer a glimpse into a style of audiovisual filmmaking that was most closely aligned with modernist musical practices of the 1920s, in terms of the participants involved, their aesthetic priorities, and the institutional structures in which they were funded and supported.
19
Lehman, Frank. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Hollywood Harmony revolves around three primary arguments: (1) tonal practices of the nineteenth century continue to flourish and evolve in film music; (2) chromaticism using consonant triads is a key ingredient of the “Hollywood Sound”; and (3) this chromatic style is associated with representations and evocations of wonderment in cinema. The book’s Introduction broaches these three claims with a brief initial analysis of studio logo music, before offering a survey of the scholarly landscape of film music theory, including treatments of chromaticism and so-called pantriadic music, especially transformation theory, the triadic guise of which has come to be called “neo-Riemannian theory.” Finally, the Introduction lays out the scope, approach, and organization of the chapters to follow.
20
Clayton, Wickham. SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL! University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830319.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL!: Experiencing Friday the 13<sup>th</sup>, is the first book entirely devoted to the analysis of the Friday the 13 <sup>th</sup> franchise. The story a film tells is usually filtered through a particular perspective, or point of view. This book argues that slasher films, and the Friday the 13<sup>th</sup> movies particularly, use all the stylistic tools at their disposal to create a complex and emotionally intense approach to perspective, which develops and shifts across the decades. Chapter one discusses the history of perspective in horror, and the different critical conversations around this. Chapter two looks at the use of camerawork, specifically point-of-view camerawork in the way these films visually communicate perspective. The fourth chapter talks about the way sound and editing work together to communicate perspective and experience in the death sequences these movies capitalize upon. The fourth chapter considers the perspective of viewers, and how each movie speaks to viewers who are either familiar or unfamiliar with the ongoing story in the series. The final chapter first explains how these trends look across a chronological timeline, and what this tells us about the historical development of perspective before looking at the influence these stylistic approaches have had on ‘serious’ film, particularly those recognized by the Hollywood critical establishment.
21
Walker, Elsie. Amour. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190495909.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter is the culminating analysis of the book because Amour incorporates many sonic patterns that are representative of Haneke’s work, though it also handles these same patterns in surprising ways. The film features Haneke’s most subtly and tenderly demanding sound track to date, and this chapter explores how it rewards close analysis in relation to the director’s previous work. The chapter also provides extended consideration of Emmanuelle Riva’s performance as the female protagonist, emphasizing her subversively strong sonic presence. Along with refusing to reduce the ailing and aged woman to an image of decay, the film repeatedly amplifies her sonic power. In connection with the compassion of Amour, we return to misunderstandings of Haneke’s work that have led to critical presumptions of his emotional coldness. Ironically, we will find that Amour is Haneke’s most moving and aurally nuanced appeal to our imaginations and hearts.
22
Välimäki, Susanna. The Audiovisual Construction of Transgender Identity in. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.030.
Full textAbstract:
This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. This chapter discusses audiovisual communication and the construction of transgender subjectivity in the filmTransamerica(dir. Duncan Tucker, 2005), which portrays a male-to-female transgender woman’s journey of self-discovery and parenthood while driving with a teenage son across America. Combining audiovisual analysis with queer and transgender studies, the film is interpreted as a queering—or more precisely, atransgendering—of the standard road movie format, adopted as the means of depicting the culmination of the protagonist’s gender transition. The analysis focuses on how the journey trope of transgenderness is constructed in the film music and sound. Special attention is devoted to the use of American country music to symbolize an identity in transition, the use of music encoded for ethnic identity to highlight transgender people’s social status and create a potentially progressive space of intersectionality and multiculturality, and gendered play in uses of the human voice.
23
Weinel, Jonathan. Inner Sound. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190671181.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Inner Sound explores how altered states of consciousness have shaped the design of electronic music and audio-visual media. The book begins by discussing consciousness, and how this may change during states such as dreaming, psychedelic experience, meditation, and trance. Next, a variety of shamanic traditions are reviewed, in order to explore how indigenous societies have reflected visionary experiences through visual art and music. This provides the necessary background from which to consider how analogue and digital audio technologies enable specific capabilities for representing or inducing altered states of consciousness in psychedelic rock, electronic dance music, and electroacoustic music. Developing the discussion to consider sound in the context of audio-visual media, the role of altered states of consciousness in films, visual music, VJ performances, interactive video games, and virtual reality applications is also discussed. Through the analysis of these examples, the author uncovers common mechanisms, and ultimately proposes a conceptual model for ‘Altered States of Consciousness Simulations’. This theoretical model describes how sound can be used to simulate various subjective states of consciousness from a first-person perspective, in an interactive context. Throughout the book, the ethical issues regarding altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audio-visual media are also explored, ultimately allowing the reader to consider not only the design of Altered States of Consciousness Simulations, but also the implications of their use for digital society. In this way, Inner Sound explores the limits of technology for representing and manipulating consciousness, at the frontiers of electronic music and art.
24
González-López, Irene, and Michael Smith, eds. Tanaka Kinuyo. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409698.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.
25
Walker, Elsie. Hearing Haneke. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190495909.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Haneke’s films are sonically charged experiences of disturbance, desperation, grief, and many forms of violence. They are unsoftened by music, punctuated by accosting noises, shaped by painful silences, and defined by aggressive dialogue. Haneke is among the most celebrated of living auteurs: he is two-time receipt of the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival (for The White Ribbon [2009] and Amour [2012]), and Academy Award winner of Best Foreign Language Film (for Amour), among numerous other awards. The radical confrontationality of his cinema makes him a most controversial, as well as revered, subject. Hearing Haneke is the first book-length study of the sound tracks that define his living legacy as an aural auteur. Hearing Haneke provides close sonic analyses of The Seventh Continent, Funny Games Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour. The book includes several sustained theoretical approaches to film sound: including postcolonialism, feminism, genre studies, psychoanalysis, adaptation studies, and auteur theory. From these various theoretical angles, Hearing Haneke shows that the director consistently uses all aural elements (sound effects, dialogue, silences, and music) to inspire our humane understanding. He expresses faith in us to hear the pain of his characters’ worlds most actively, and hence our own more clearly. This has profound social and personal significance: for if we can hear everything better, this entails a new awareness of the “noise” we make in the world at large. Hearing Haneke will resonate for anyone interested in the power of art to inspire progressive change.
26
Lehman, Frank. Hollywood Harmony. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Film music represents one of the few remaining underexplored frontiers for the field of music theory. Discovering its inner workings from a theoretical perspective is imperative if we wish to understand its tremendous effects on the ears (and eyes) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hollywood Harmony applies for the first time the tools of contemporary music theory and analysis to this corpus in a thorough and systematic way. In order to help readers appreciate how film music works, this study enlists a number critical apparatuses, ranging from abstract theoretical description to psychological models and sensitive close reading. It argues that matters of musical structure in film are matters of musical meaning, and pitch relations are inherently expressive, always somehow collaborating with visuals and narrative. One harmonic idiom, pantriadic chromaticism, plays an especially important role in the “Hollywood Sound,” and much of this study is dedicated to understanding its aesthetic and expressive content—of which the elicitation of a feeling of wonder is paramount. For better understanding of this tonal practice on a rigorous level, the transformational tools of neo-Riemannian theory are introduced and applied in an accessible and novel way. Neo-Riemannian theory emphasizes musical change and gesture over fixed objects or structures, and by recognizing the innate spatiality of musical experience in extended-tonal settings, it serves as an excellent lens through which to inspect film music. The works of a diverse assortment of composers are examined, with particular attention given to recent “New Hollywood” scoring practices.
27
Salzberg, Ana. Produced by Irving Thalberg. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451048.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Irving Thalberg was not just a critically important producer during Hollywood’s Golden age, but also an innovative theorist of studio-era filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, this is the first book to explore Thalberg’s insights into casting, editing, story composition and the importance of the mass audience from a theoretical perspective. The book argues that Thalberg’s views represent a unified conceptual understanding of production – one that is still significant in the modern day. It examines Thalberg’s impact on film-historical turning points, including the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of the Production Code, and features in-depth analyses of his productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1936. Indeed, each chapter offers a reading of Thalberg’s films through his own theoretical lens, thus highlighting his insights into production and introducing new ways of considering his classic pictures, including The Big Parade (1925), The Broadway Melody (1929) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). The work concludes by assessing his resonance in popular culture, tracing the mythology of Thalberg as it evolved after his death in 1936.
28
Tausig, Benjamin. Bangkok is Ringing. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190847524.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Bangkok Is Ringing is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where dissidents used media to broadcast to both local and diffuse audiences, the book catalogues these mass protests in a way that few movements have ever been catalogued. The Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt protests that shook Thailand took place just before other international political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Bangkok Is Ringing analyzes the Thai protests in comparison with these, seeking to understand the logic not only of political change in Thailand, but across the globe. The book is attuned to sound in a great variety of forms. The author traces the history and use in protest of specific media forms, including community radio, megaphones, CDs, and live concerts. The research took place over the course of sixteen months, and the author worked closely with musicians, concert promoters, activists, and rank-and-file protesters. The result is a detailed and sensitive ethnography that argues for an understanding of sound and political movements in tandem. In particular, it emphasizes the necessity of thinking through constraint as a fundamental condition of both political movements and the sound that these movements produce. In order to produce political transformations, the book argues, dissidents must be sensitive to the ways that their sounding is constrained and channeled.
29
Pomerance, Murray, and Steven Rybin, eds. Hamlet Lives in Hollywood. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411394.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
John Barrymore’s influence on screen and stage in the early twentieth century is incalculable. His performances in the theater defined Shakespeare for a generation, and his transition to cinema brought his theatrical performativity to both silent and sound screens. However, in today’s cinema culture, which favors “realistically” grounded performance and harbors suspicions of theatricality as “over-acting” or as somehow irreducibly different from acting in the cinema, both the historical and ongoing importance of John Barrymore’s uniquely cinematic theatricality is often forgotten or disregarded. This book, a collection of fifteen original essays on the film performances and stardom of John Barrymore, redresses this lack of scholarship on Barrymore by offering a range of varied perspectives on the actor’s work. The contributors to the book explore Barrymore from a number of angles, including performance analysis, theatricality, stardom, gender, masculinity, sexuality, psychoanalysis, voice, queer studies, and more. Specific chapters also offer overviews of Barrymore’s career on stage and on screen as well as considerations of his work with other actors, including his famous siblings. Taken together, Hamlet Lives in Hollywood represents a major attempt by contemporary scholars to come to terms with the ongoing vitality of John Barrymore’s work in our present day.
30
Minett, Mark. Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523827.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs a historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman’s filmmaking history and profile—lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate on their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman’s work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.