Academic literature on the topic 'Music documentaries'

This paper deals with the relationship between sound and image as expressed in the cinematic genre of music documentary. In particular, it tries to explore the way in which musical cultures are audiovisually expressed through filmic representation of music performances and artists/groups portraits. By applying a critical and comparative approach, the films Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Café de los Maestros (2008) become vehicles to investigate images and sounds of music in everyday life, with an emphasis on the impact of globalization and commercialization during their creation and interpretation procedures. The focus is on the commercial exploitation of these films in the context of world capitalism and the way in which it influences the construction of visual representations of non-European musical cultures and identities, as cultural industry shares today a comparable postmodern situation through the concepts of “world music” and “world cinema”. In this light, the paper discusses Latin American (Cuban and Argentine) identities and local music cultures which spread internationally via films and gain a place in the global music scene. Consequently, it points towards issues of authenticity, nostalgia, exoticism, hybridity, folklorization, and the Western domination upon musics as well as films.

Music is one of the most cherished topics in Brazilian documentary filmmaking. Vinicius (Miguel Faria Jr., 2005), Raul: O início, o fim e o meio (Raul: The Beginning, the End and the Middle, Walter Carvalho, 2012) and Chico: Artista brasileiro (Chico: Brazilian Artist, Miguel Faria Jr., 2015) feature among the most successful Brazilian documentaries from the last twenty years, which makes clear their appeal to national audiences. However, to better articulate their significance it is also crucial to understand them from an international context. The In-Edit – International Music Documentary Film Festival, an event solely devoted to the screening and discussion of music documentaries, allows us to do so. First organised in Barcelona in 2003 and swiftly exported and adapted in multiple countries, the current In-Edit occurs annually in Chile, Brazil, Greece and the Netherlands. Throughout the years, it has also been celebrated in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Colombia and Peru. In-Edit Brasil was first organised in São Paulo in 2009 and showcases a wide variety of music documentaries both from Brazil and abroad. At the same time, some Brazilian music documentaries are screened in other In-Edits, such as Chile and Spain. In effect, In-Edit organisers hold a privileged perspective on the role that Brazilian music and Brazilian music documentaries play within the international scene. Cristian Pascual (Barcelona, 1980) was the director of In-Edit Barcelona from 2007 to 2019, and he is still part of the organising committee. We met him in São Paulo in 2017, and he provided us with a programmer’s view of music documentaries from all over the world. Despite how political events have altered the country’s international influence in global politics (most notably Jair Bolsonaro taking over as president at the beginning of 2019), we believe that Pascual’s views present a rich reflection on Brazilian specificities regarding the production and reception of music documentaries today.

AbstractRecent popular music and film studies have revealed the political functions of documentaries about musicians. These studies suggest that such documentaries make powerful interventions into the field of music production as they construct the value of their subjects and their work. Owing to the expense and complexity of broadcast equipment, production companies have tended to favour documentaries about artists and work considered to be popular and historically significant. Over the past 15 years, however, new technologies have allowed musicians to make documentaries themselves, which they can release at the same time as their song or album. Using the example of Gotye and his album Making Mirrors, this article argues that these developments have led to powerful and distinct interventions into debates and themes within home music production for independent musicians. It also argues that the use of this technology on social media platforms challenges the relationships between text and process.

Stereotypically, creative people are considered intelligent, immature, demanding, aware, receptive, autonomous, flexible, introverted, self-confident, unconventional and asocial. They are driven by a desire to create, peer acceptance and, to an extent, commercial gain. They negotiate their creative persona by seeking validation from others. Accordingly, creative people are active agents in the negotiation of their identities, and they can communicate their attitudes and feelings towards their work through the stories depicted in documentaries. Netflix has released several documentaries capturing the creative process and projects of musicians and singers, which offer a ‘behind the scenes’ account of what it is like working in the music industry. These same documentaries offer insights into what it means to be a creative navigating the trappings of project-based work, questions of authenticity, audience and management demands, and the pressures of making successful music. The purpose of this research is to use thematic analysis to explore the documentaries of Shawn Mendes, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande and Queen + Adam Lambert for how they conceptualize the creative identity and whether they maintain or challenge the stereotypes that continue to be perpetuated in the media.

Synthesising real events with creative treatment, increasingly emotive and cinematic documentary presents now more than ever an ethically challenging dichotomy between factual broadcasting and fictional entertainment. Within the discussions of documentary ethics, this dichotomy is largely explored in relation to visual and editorial decisions which might be accused of manipulating or reframing the ‘truth’. However, within both ethical guidelines for documentary production, and academic debate around documentary ethics, reference to music is somewhat scarce. Potential challenges faced by non-music academics in asserting the role of music within documentary, a perceived precedence of visual over auditory components, and the notion of the documentarist as an ‘artist’ all participate in defending and deflecting the ethical responsibility of music in the contemporary audio-visual documentary. Through exploring the use of music in three different documentaries, this research proposes a typology outlining music’s areas of ethical concern, including persuasion, representation, and emotional heightening. Music’s ethical precariousness emerges in recognising its capacity to influence audience perception of ‘reality’ through emotional and semiotic capacity, and crucially, in the degree to which its influence often remains unnoticed.

Over the past forty years, a growing number of television documentaries have attempted to produce a history of Anglo-American popular music for a wide audience. This article represents an attempt to come to terms with the particularity of the popular music documentary form and the different ways in which these documentaries present themselves as authoritative public texts that circulate understandings about popular music’s past. The argument is inspired by the landmark mid-1970s installment in this tradition: Tony Palmer’s epic seventeen-part narrative, All You Need Is Love. While this series makes strong historical claims—in Palmer’s words, it sets out to tell “nothing less than the entire history and development of popular music”—the author argues that the series is, in fact, based on the tropes and discourses of memory. Through an analysis of some of the particular formal and aesthetic characteristics of the series, this article reveals the ways in which talking and thinking about the past of popular music and its culture necessarily call on an experience of the senses that is simultaneously replayed and refracted as memory.

In this interview, Luiz Tatit explores some specificities of Brazilian popular song which may explain the considerable success of music documentaries in the country. Such specificities include the connection between popular song and daily speech, its ties with Brazilian national identity and its complex relationship with foreign music styles.

This study offers a contribution to the reception analysis of TV doc­umentaries by focusing on viewer opinions expressed on social me­dia. It analyses German and English comments from YouTube and Facebook in order to find out what aspects of documentaries the audience comments on. More specifically, it describes how the viewers evaluate strategies that the producers use for simplifying complex content while still creating an appealing and entertaining media product. The results imply that most viewers appreciate informative shows that are entertaining at the same time. They also show that viewers tend to focus on the music and image, rather than on the spoken text, and that documentaries where nature plays an important role are judged more positively than science and history documentaries.