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, reconstructing the past as an episodic narrative. This narrative dramatises the relationship between past and present, constructing a memory of the past through the recycling of particular iconography that metonymically comes to represent it. Particular fashions, music and visual images are memorialised, and become subject to reinterpretation in the present. Memories of the 1970s in the 1980s, for example, are
his engagement in politics, broadly defined, is nicely exemplified by Music Box (1989) , which deals with the, then, largely ignored history of the Hungarian Holocaust, the last large-scale operation in the final solution that was directed personally by Adolf Eichmann. Produced at a key moment in the history of Hungary (the fall of communism in 1989), this US-made film, based on a screenplay by Hungarian-American screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, breaks important cinematic ground for world cinema. Music Box is the first film to address how the Nazi final solution was
3049 Experimental British Tele 16/5/07 08:02 Page 166 10 Experimental music video and television K. J. Donnelly The music video as an aspect of experimental or avant-garde television has received surprisingly little attention in the frequent and wide ranging discussions on the topic. This is particularly surprising since many of the techniques of the avant-garde became evident (and some filmmakers worked) in music video and profoundly altered the way that pop music appeared on television. Considerations of television still suffer from ocularcentric
11 Popular music on East German television: Constructing the televisual pop community in the GDR Edward Larkey Popular music in the GDR media was always subject to intense political scrutiny so that Western influences, if they could not be prevented altogether, would at least be incorporated into discursive structures largely controlled by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED). Before the 1970s, television programmes were supposed to help develop a musical alternative to capitalist pop music, to distance GDR music
100 8 A dance to the music of Herrmann: a figurative dance suite David Cooper M Prelude y earliest encounter with the music of Bernard Herrmann was in the early 1970s, as a teenager growing up in Belfast who was interested in contemporary music and always on the lookout for the scores of new pieces I could afford to buy. I discovered by sheer chance the music for Bernard Herrmann’s Echoes for string quartet in Tughan-Crane’s music shop, a somewhat surprising piece for them to have in stock. It was some time later that I found a coupling of the work on LP
24 2 Hitchcock, music and the mathematics of editing Charles Barr ‘Construction to me, it’s like music.’ (Hitchcock, 1995: 298) ‘Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose. It’s like notes of music. They must make their point.’ (Hitchcock, 1995: 290) I am no kind of music expert, and am not equipped to write about music as such, in the manner of other contributors to this volume such as Jack Sullivan, author of a definitive chapter on ‘Hitchcock and Music’ in the recent collection A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (2011). Instead
50 4 The therapeutic power of music in Hitchcock’s films Sidney Gottlieb V ertigo (1958) contains not only some of the most memorable music in a Hitchcock film but one of his most grim pronouncements about the limited power of music. After the apparent death of Madeleine before his eyes, Scottie is institutionalised, comatose, beyond hope and help. Midge’s rueful comment perfectly sums up his desperate condition –which is indeed aesthetic as well as psychological and metaphysical –as, to coin a phrase, Amadeus absconditus. Mozart isn’t going to be nearly
Even though studies of medieval films include articles, books and entire conferences, critics tend to be silent on the subject of music in films about the medieval period, even though music is a conventional part of narrative cinema. Films use their soundtracks to engage audiences’ emotional responses, to sell CDs and to provide a musical counterpoint to the images on screen. This chapter highlights
The tendency in most writing on the temporal properties of film music has been to note music‘s ability to establish, quickly and efficiently, a films historical setting. Although acknowledging this important function, this paper seeks to explore a wider range of temporal properties fulfilled by film music. Three aspects of musics temporality are discussed: anachronism (whereby choices of anachronistic music can provide the spectator with ways of making sense of a films subtext or its characters’ state of mind), navigation (the ability of music to help the spectator understand where and when they are in a films narrative) and expansion (musics ability to expand our experience of film time). The paper focuses on Bernard Herrmann, and his score for Taxi Driver (1976), and argues that Herrmann was particularly sensitive to the temporal possibilities of film music.
This article examines the paradoxes inherent in filmic time, with particular reference to the autobiographical work of the British director Terence Davies. Analysing ways in which film, itself constructed from still images, can create, reverse or freeze temporal flux, confuse and blend multiple and conflicting temporalities, and create the spatial dimensions of an ‘imaginary’ time, it argues that the relationship between film and music may well provide a fundamental key to the understanding of filmic time.