Film, Media and Music

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Men in labour in the collective farm comedies of Ivan Pyr'ev
John Haynes

This chapter begins with a brief outline of the drive to wholesale collectivisation of the countryside, a process that more or less coincided with the first Five Year Plan in the Soviet city. It demonstrates the ways in which rural culture was shaped through the turbulent era of Cultural Revolution into a containing and masculinising discourse that would 'tame' not only renegade discursive forms, but the very 'femininity' of the Russian land. The plot of The Old and the New charts the personal and professional development of a humble peasant woman, Marfa Lapkina, as she rises from being a simple farm labourer to become the politically-conscious head of her now-prosperous collective. The chapter take a closer look at Pyr'ev's comedies, but it is worth briefly raising the question of whether or not it is worth seeking out the ideal 'New Soviet Man' in the kolkhoz comedy genre.

in New Soviet Man
John Haynes

The idea that hopes of the 1920s for gender restructuring in the USSR not only came unfounded, but were in fact ab initio fundamentally flawed, falling foul of the same deep-seated patriarchal assumptions which had underpinned Russian culture since at least the times of Peter and Catherine, and which were enshrined in the Domostroi - the Russian guidebook to family life. The operations of socialist realism in safeguarding the single world-view of what was attempting to become a monoglot culture are by now well-known to us: the masculinisation of language, form, and content became standardised, and sought to pre-empt any challenge to the deeply patriarchal assumptions embedded in Soviet discourse. Most importantly, the family, which had been described by Russian feminist Inessa Armand as 'pretty much the last stronghold of the old system, the old slavery', was re-established as the basic cell of Soviet society.

in New Soviet Man
John Mundy

Around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, American popular music had dominated the entertainment industry. For the first twenty years of the new century, the American music industry had been dominated by Tin Pan Alley. This chapter examines the development of the technologies of sound recording in early cinema and analyses its successful application within a restructured American film industry through an examination of the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Actually, the development of sound cinema ended something of the silent cinema industry's insularity, as Hollywood, the theatrical industry, radio and the music industry came to recognize the mutual economic interests they shared. The Jazz Singer is significant in a number of ways. At one level, it represented the transformation of sound cinema technology into a fully social technology, into something that was to become part of people's everyday experience.

in Popular music on screen

Contemporary film theory has been indelibly marked by the political upheaval in France during 1968. Comprising filmmakers, technicians and critics, it provided an institutional platform for the articulation of two questions that would dominate film theory thereafter, and that would call on very considerable conceptual resources for their answers. The absence of anything analogous to interpellation occasioned a divide within post-structuralist film theory. The broad shift of film theory from structuralism to post-structuralism occasioned fewer differences and discontinuities than might be supposed. Despite the shift in conceptual terminology, the emphasis remained theoretical; and despite the eclipse of Marxism and the rise of the new politics, there was a continued commitment to oppositional politics. Nevertheless, by the mid-l 970s, in the light of the film theory developments associated with structuralism, many women felt a growing dissatisfaction with the assumptions on which much of feminist film theory proceeded. The first, structuralist theoretical moment in feminist film criticism has more recently been superseded, as it became apparent that the promise of overarching theory was unfulfillable. The influence of Althusser, in particular, was short-lived. Althusserian theory had never enjoyed the authority in the women's movement that it had elsewhere. Put schematically, gender and class appeared to be two quite different axes of exploitation and oppression, with the former no less important than the latter. It was in fact in rethinking and re-evaluating the concept of difference, specifically sexual difference, that the post-structuralist disposition was most evident.

Keith Selby

This chapter focuses on Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) as 'novels of character and environment'. The manner in which these two novels present their narratives shows a difference in Hardy's conception of his fictional rural world. If a tendency for hokum - 'theatrical speech, action, etc., designed to make a sentimental or melodramatic appeal to an audience' - is evident in the rural chorus of Far from the Madding Crowd, by the time of Tess of the d'Urbervilles it has all but disappeared. The chapter addresses whether that difference is reflected in the character and work of two filmmakers who adapted these novels: John Schlesinger and Roman Polanski. Hardy is also a writer working at a moment in the history of the English novel when the tension between the realist and self-conscious modes was, perhaps, most marked.

in The classic novel
John Mundy

The powerful hegemonic perspective, constructed and encoded through the Hollywood musical and its promotion of mainstream popular music, was increasingly under challenge during the 1950s. This chapter examines Hollywood's response to the challenge of rock'n'roll and the development of a youth market in the 1950s. Hollywood's supremacy as the entertainment medium was under threat from both record sales and the burgeoning television industry; the impact of a differentiated market and the challenge to conventional 'adult' values represented a crisis in sociocultural attitudes which Hollywood found hard to deal with. After consideration of both the film and the music industries at this period, detailed analysis of a number of films, including the early films of Elvis Presley, suggests that the screen industries successfully incorporated the challenges of the new music, arguing that Presley's films perpetuate ideological and aesthetic concerns established in the classical Hollywood musical.

in Popular music on screen
John Mundy

The development of the visual economy of popular music has both helped to define the social meanings of popular music and positioned the consumption of that music firmly within the discourse and ideology of entertainment. This chapter takes issue with the approach and tenor of much of the writing about music video and MTV. The author refutes any suggestion that music videos and music television channels which exploit and promote them are in any sense 'pointless'. Whilst acknowledging those differences which mark out music video from earlier cultural forms such as the classical Hollywood musical, the chapter suggests that music video and music television 'make sense' when they are seen as part of a larger continuity, a process of aesthetic, ideological, technological and industrial convergence between popular music and the screen which has been underway throughout the century.

in Popular music on screen
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Erica Sheen

Film has been around now for over a hundred years, so it is surprising that the nature of its relationship to literature is still an open question. The transfer of an 'original' (literary) text from one context of production to an (audio-visual) other has begun to attract academic attention. This book takes the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference. Brian Mcfarlane has shown that there is no reliable equation between fidelity and critical approval, infidelity and disapproval. It is fascinating to see that Alison Platt and Ian MacKillop are interested in what it is about the experience of reading a classic novel that its adaptation restores to us. The book presents a group of essays loosely clustered around the English literary canon and ordered according to its chronology, not that of the films in question.

in The classic novel
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John Mundy

By looking at the historical development of the relationship between popular music and moving image culture, this book aims to examine some important developments in the ways in which popular music has been mediated commercially, ideologically and aesthetically through the screen media throughout the twentieth century. It undertakes specific analysis of individual texts, examines their ideological determinants and effects, and emphasises the importance of economics - of business and commerce - in both their production and consumption. The book points to the crucial importance of technology in shaping and determining film, television and music video as both commodity and cultural form, and examines the pleasures which audiences have experienced. It examines the suggestion that what most characterizes the relationship between popular music and the screen media from Hollywood musical to music video is a strong sense of continuity.

in Popular music on screen
David Lean's film of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
Neil Sinyard

The most interesting adaptations are those which, through these changes, disclose a personal interpretation of the text, so that the film becomes part critical commentary written by the camera, and part palimpsest - that is, a fresh creation is revealed under the skin, as it were, of the original. It seems that David Lean's 1984 film version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India fulfils these criteria to a greater or lesser extent, but certainly with sufficient intelligence and craftsmanship to make it by far the most cinematically satisfying of all the Forster film adaptations to date. Although the film might be said to soften the satire and savagery Forster directs at the Anglo-Indians, it tightens the narrative structure and does better by its female characters, particularly Adela, who is a dry stick in the novel but transformed in the film into one of Lean's most poignant repressed romantics.

in The classic novel