Film, Media and Music
In his survey of post-revolutionary and Stalinist cinema, Peter Kenez goes as far as to suggest that the Soviet authorities in fact placed too much faith in the power of propaganda, a situation which left them in a seemingly constant state of frustration at the unwillingness of the Soviet people to swallow their messages and reform their behaviour to conform with a more properly 'socialist' model of humanity. If we accept that the films under discussion here articulated a utopian vision in an attempt to secure the active consent of Soviet citizens to the Stalinist regime, then it follows that the parameters of this utopian vision - if it was indeed to exercise a broad appeal across a range of expectations and aspirations over the vast 'sixth of the world' under Stalin's aegis - could not be the same at all times and in all places. This book offers a thematic discussion of the debates surrounding the Soviet film industry during the years of Cultural Revolution up to and including the introduction of socialist realism as the 'single method' for all art and criticism. Drawing on the discourse theory of Bakhtin, the author's fits a number of key decisions regarding the future of Soviet cinema squarely into a marked tendency of contemporary Soviet culture and society, towards a radical centralisation and masculinisation of Stalinist discourse.
This chapter looks briefly at some of the earliest developments in the relationship between recorded music and the screen, suggesting reasons as to why available technologies failed to develop into fully social technologies. An overview of some of the major subsequent developments offers a rationale for the importance of studying popular music and moving image culture. Early cinema developed within a complex commercial, technological and ideological context, a context which also witnessed the development, at around the same time, of recorded music. Recorded music widened the availability of a range of music and singers to a mass audience, consumed in the privacy of their own homes. In spite of clear evidence that the relationship between popular music and the screen media is a long-standing dynamic one, the emergence of music video in the early and mid-1980s leads many to argue that it represented a distinct cultural form, epitomizing postmodern culture.
Pickwick Papers is unique among Dickens's works. He never wrote anything like this again. We may forever attempt to locate and identify its particular qualities, but we all recognise its extraordinariness. Noel Langley's Pickwick Papers was released in 1952. It is also a fact that this film, though not a masterpiece, certainly occupies a significant position in that bunch of British-made black and white Dickens films. Pickwick Papers is a novel about travelling across the countryside of England in the dim but unforgotten past when life was simpler and humanity more innocent. Langley's Pickwick Papers was released at a moment in modern history which now seems to be at the turning of the tide. The optimistic mood of the post-war settlement and consensus politics began quite rapidly to decline following the closure of the Festival of Britain.
First published in 1992, The English Patient won the prestigious Booker Prize, and firmly established Michael Ondaatje's reputation as a novelist. This chapter explores the extent to which Anthony Minghella's adaptation retains the sense of fragmentation and precarious vulnerability which is so characteristic of Ondaatje's novel, or whether he pursues a mirage of imposed coherence and continuity. It examines in depth the ways in which place, time and point of view are represented in novel and film, and outlines the ways in which Minghella's narrative departs from, or adds to, Ondaatje's. The novel presents us with a mosaic of narratives told by the different characters. The film adaptation of The English Patient relies for its success on a 'mirage' of romanticism, sweeping its audience along on a 'grand emotional tour' centering on the relationship between Katherine and Almasy.
The introduction of television and video technology have had a profound impact on popular music and the music industry. This chapter looks at the relationship between popular music and television and charts the development of rock and pop on both British and American television from the 1950s onwards. In Britain, television emerged from within the BBC and its public service monopoly of radio broadcasting, and was subject to policies and cultural attitudes which had prevailed within that context. Like Hollywood, American television's response to rock'n'roll and to the evident growth of the teenage market was often clothed in the discourse of controversy which characterized debate about young people and their lifestyle. The growing convergence between the record industry and television, the place of television in youth culture and the power of televisual images to determine the meanings of popular music, are examined through consideration of a number of specific programmes.
The alliance between popular music and the screen media - cinema, television and video - sits at the heart of contemporary popular culture. 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. In trying to understand popular music in its specific relationship with the screen media, the book attempts a kind of academic 'mission impossible'. It undertakes specific analysis of individual texts, examines their ideological determinants and effects, and emphasises the importance of economics 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. In teaching and learning about music video, it has always been important to emphasise the determining role played by corporations and institutions in the production of cultural goods. Primarily this is because of Music TeleVision (MTV) which rapidly assumed a significance beyond its capability to attract a mass audience. The book the book 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.
This chapter discusses the development of a commercial popular music tradition within what became known as Tin Pan Alley and its relationship with a maturing film industry. It undertakes specific analysis of a number of classical Hollywood musicals from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s and examines its role in the construction of the ideology of entertainment. When Hollywood needed songs and music, it drew inevitably upon existing popular entertainment traditions and personnel, upon musical luminaries such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, as well as lesser talents such as Bert Kalmar and Harry Rubin, who had worked as a song-plugger for Harry Cohn's music company. It was argued earlier that the successful development of the musical genre and its popularity with audiences throughout the 1930s and 1940s depended on the formal, thematic and ideological fusion of spectacle and narrative, and on the management of the tensions which result.
Of the several components of post-1968 film studies, it was semiotics, or what was presumed to be semiotics, that most provoked the film criticism establishment. The film semiotics propounded by the novelist and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was utterly different in inspiration and conception from that of Metz, being the theoretical corollary of the uncompromisingly anti-bourgeois realism of his films. Semiotics was in danger of becoming an obstacle rather than the royal road to the analysis of the text's political functioning. Of the various reasons for the eclipse of semiotics, the most important for film theory was the failure to integrate it with historical materialism. Semiotics would fill the lack in historical materialism, and vice versa. Furthermore, the rigour of semiotics chimed nicely with the Althusserian promise of scientificity.