Film, Media and Music

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Girlhood Studies and ‘Spain’s first feminist film’
Sally Faulkner

Acknowledging the importance of work that has focussed on the adult character, Ana, in this film, this chapter argues for the importance of the figure of the Girl to the film’s intervention in the particular historical moment of Spain’s Transition when it was filmed. It first pays close attention to press response, and to distribution and exhibition difficulties occasioned by the producer’s commissioning of an unauthorised Catalan version. Second, it analyses the ways the film lampoons the current trend of ‘destape’ (soft porn) cinema in Spain, through its deployment of comedy. The chapter then considers both the literary tradition of the ‘chica rara’ (unconventional girl) in Spain, and transnational Girlhood Studies approaches. It takes the insights from Girlhood Studies in particular to argue for the Girl’s special, destabilising relationship to ideology, drawing on recent insights into the adolescent and queer Girl. The chapter then uses these to demonstrate the primary importance of the supposedly secondary character of Bárbara in the film’s shrewd cultural response to the in-betweenness and dislocation of the Spanish Transition.

in The cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé
Qué tal Margarita… pero bien and La linda Casilda
Sally Faulkner

This chapter focusses on unfilmed scripts, and thus analyses the written word only. It defends the inclusion of Bartolomé’s unfilmed scripts as vital to the recovery of the director’s work for Spanish film and transnational feminist film historiographies. To do so, it deploys recent unproduction studies scholarship, especially a methodology of ‘speculation’ (Field 2022) and defence of the ‘incomplete’ (Beeston and Soloman 2023). It therefore analyses the scripts of Qué tal Margarita… pero bien / What’s Up Margarita…? Not Bad (1974) and La linda Casilda / The Beautiful Casilda (1976) to speculate concerning the images of female experience in these films (including what would have been highly original treatments of post-natal depression and suicide). It also considers the evidence for the filming techniques that are hinted at, which suggest a connection to contemporary feminist counter-cinema. Within these techniques, it also pays attention to the sounds that audiences might have heard.

in The cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé
Peter Morgan Barnes

Chapter 1 traces the transmission of pasticcio, as a practice in oral storytelling tradition, into the proto-literate culture of early modern society. While mass literacy in the nineteenth century brought an end to pasticcio in many narrative artforms, it survived in opera. This chapter explores why. Early opera’s many oral inheritances include the predominance of words over music, mimesis in learning roles and an oral rather than literate relationship with visualisation. Credible motivations are weak in early opera, as they are in storytelling. Rhetoric provided much of the framework for operatic structures and the chapter argues that this classical oral inheritance, although mediated through text, provided another means whereby oral narrative approaches shaped opera in the teeth of an increasingly literate culture. This approach restored a profound type of immersion in a story, one which had largely disappeared from spoken theatre. This kind of immersion was much written about and was a key factor in the popularity of opera. Pasticcio was much used in its creation, but intertextualities intended to be ‘read’ by the audience are argued to belong to more literate periods. References and allusions abound but a pasticcio created a new original.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
Abstract only
Peter Morgan Barnes

The introduction explains what a pasticcio opera is and how the term is defined in the book, outlining where this differs from previous scholarship. The book argues that pasticcio is not a genre of opera, but a construction method that was already widely used before the word ‘pasticcio’ became current. Not all operas created using the pasticcio method designated themselves as pasticci, even while the term was current, but much twentieth-century scholarship only considered an opera a pasticcio if it used this designation. Evidence is given that the practice was more widespread and occurred for longer than previously argued and I challenge assumptions of its termination in the nineteenth century, arguing that pasticcio continued in direct descent from baroque practice into the twentieth century. The introduction also offers a prospectus of the varied arguments made throughout the book and a rationale for its long timeframe. Society’s changing relationship with pasticcio is argued to be closely connected to other socio-cultural and economic changes with long timeframes, such as the transition from an oral to a literate culture, generational changes in the understanding of the self and the contradictory influences of mass production on the arts.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
Peter Morgan Barnes

What was later called pasticcio was widespread in Roman poetry, medieval hagiography and in the cantillated epic tales sung at courts. Seventeenth-century Italian operas continued these techniques and this chapter argues that recitative derives from earlier kinds of sung speech. The contrafactum in liturgy and madrigals is argued to prefigure the reuses of aria texts and settings in opera. Specifically Italian pasticcio practices were passed to Britain in 1656 with Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, though they may have been known earlier. Yet indigenous traditions for reusing pre-existing material had been as deeply embedded in Britain as they were in Italy. Interpolation, ‘dressing’ and collaborative process had characterised spoken theatre before the civil wars, but new encounters with operatic practice emboldened British dramatists, as demonstrated in Davenant’s The Law against Lovers (1662). Spoken theatre became increasingly literate in culture attending to resonances of Protestantism, masculine codes of behaviour, rational motivations, personation and verisimilitude. Opera, on the other hand, in restoring a much-missed emotional engagement, relished the fantastical, the digressive; it was continental and Catholic and repeatedly broke neoclassical rules. It provided an experience which spoken theatre had left behind but the need for which had not yet left society.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
Abstract only
The golden age
Peter Morgan Barnes

The expansion and popularity of pasticcio between the 1660s and the 1780s in many artforms is far from monocausal, but this chapter proposes that pasticcio practices in art were a reflection of how eighteenth-century people performed the self. In a reaction against the embedded factionalism of the previous century, a cult of civility became widespread among the elite and the self-conscious construction and performance of a public self (or selves) was also created through borrowing and assemblage. Pasticcio practices in art were thus complemented by pasticcio in personal behaviour. Another parallel explored is the relationship between opera production and the period’s mania for collecting. Collections, both public and private, are necessarily assemblages of pre-existing parts and pasticcio was a means of bringing narrativity to a collection, conscious and overt or merely implied. Sculpture restorations and operatic pasticci both tailored classical stories to neoclassical tastes and the works of an alien culture to contemporary British mores. Lastly, the chapter examines the vexed issue of pasticcio in conceptions of musical property, arguing that nineteenth-century perspectives often have been too readily projected backwards into the eighteenth century. Pasticcio is argued to be rooted in earlier, orally derived, conceptions of music as property.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
History and context

A pasticcio opera is a new opera created from pre-existing parts, a creative process which has been in use for as long as the artform itself. This book argues that pasticcio is a method rather than a genre, one that was already widely used before the term was coined in the eighteenth century, and continued in use long after it dropped from favour. Nor is the method unique to opera: pasticcio poetry, plays, sculptures and film scores continue to be made. Yet all kinds of pasticcio art came under pressure in the nineteenth century as Romantic conceptions of originality and authenticity married with a rise in the importance of text over performance. A main argument in the study is that this shift from performance tradition to text was part of a wider societal transition from a proto-literate society with many oral inheritances – of which the pasticcio method was one – to a mass-literate society. A narrow canon and an ever-contracting operatic repertoire were the result in Britain, a contraction which continued for much of the twentieth century. Yet pasticcio did not disappear in the nineteenth century, as was once thought, and the book discusses its surprising continuation and proliferation. Today, it is enjoying a tentative revival.

1780s to 1870s
Peter Morgan Barnes

Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with authenticity and originality, the chapter explores the pressure which pasticcio practices experienced across many artforms. Practices changed in sculpture and antiquities as well as opera, to accommodate new Romantic ideals. It was argued in the twentieth century that pasticcio opera was discontinued early in the century as a shift towards fidelity occurred. This chapter lists numerous examples of its continuity, both for operas that designated themselves as pasticci and those that called themselves something else. This continuity is found in regional opera and in London. In recontextualising the centrality of text for nineteenth-century musical practice within the shift towards mass literacy, the chapter proposes that advocates for fidelity did not have the influence claimed. In defining fidelity and pasticcio as binary opposites much is missed: pasticcio practices were often relied on to bring greater fidelity to an opera, bringing it closer to its source material, to what were considered timeless behaviours, to national stereotyping or the locale in which the story was set. These fidelities were achieved at the expense of that to the original score, but these other fidelities were often a greater priority, even for reformers.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
Peter Morgan Barnes

If pasticcio operas did not terminate in the nineteenth century and advocates for textual fidelity did not have the influence claimed, how did pasticcio become so marginal to twentieth-century operatic practice? To answer this, the chapter first discusses copyright and performance licensing, arguing that their structures between the 1870s and 1920s contracted the canonical operatic repertoire and militated against pasticcio in leading opera houses. Yet these were virtually the only context where pasticcio was not practiced: from the beginning twentieth-century cinema and television took a pasticcio approach to the use of music and beyond Covent Garden pasticcio opera continued. That pasticcio skills were widespread among the public is evidenced by the thousands of musicians who invented accompaniments to silent films every week. Lines of teacher/pupil descent illustrate how skills were transmitted: Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon’s pasticcio operas were broadcast on television in 1938, and their tutors were taught by Henry Bishop, a pupil of Francesco Bianchi, to whose pasticci Mozart contributed in the 1780s. Pathways back from the margins for pasticcio operas increased after the 1970s when academic rehabilitation sped its return. The book concludes with a pulse-reading of the twenty-first century’s renewed interest in pasticcio opera.

in Pasticcio opera in Britain
The Wire (2002–2008)
Mikkel Jensen

This chapter examines why The Wire is structured in a seemingly pessimistic manner. While several critics have argued that this serial is both bleak and systemic in its portrayal of contemporary society, this chapter argues that it is useful to understand these textual elements as building blocks in The Wire’s attempt to create a coherent and consistent political argument. Had The Wire been structured as a more uplifting and redeeming story, the systemic nature of its societal criticism would be undercut and the serial would not embrace the logical consequence of the politics it espouses. This politics connects to how The Wire rejects the trope of the lone outsider as having the potential to make a difference. The chapter argues that deromanticizing this outsider figure is an important part of the show’s politics, and the chapter shows how this aspect is tied to The Wire’s ‘sociological gaze’ in which all social phenomena are seen in relation to each other. The chapter also examines how The Wire tackles the issue of deindustrialization and shows how the serial’s second season emphasizes class over race as a focal point in its depiction of the American city. This analytical section connects The Wire’s depiction of deindustrialization to the challenges that many American cities have faced especially since the 1970s.

in David Simon’s American City