Books on the topic 'Early sound film'
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1
Wiegand, Daniel. Aesthetics of Early Sound Film. Nieuwe Prinsengracht 89 1018 VR Amsterdam Nederland: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463727372.
Abstract:
This volume takes a fresh look at the various aesthetics emerging globally in the early sound film era, with a focus on the films’ fundamentally experimental and inventive character. By considering films and production contexts often neglected in film studies, it strives to counter the still dominant view of the transitional period as a time of yet-to-be-perfected forerunners of ‘classical’ sound film. Instead, authors highlight the sense of ‘fruitful uncertainty’ in this period of media change and transformation. Subjects covered include visual and auditory style; the uses of speech, music, and noises; aesthetic conceptions in sound film theory; and intermedial aesthetics. The volume’s scope is decidedly international, covering production and reception contexts in the Soviet Union, Japan, the USA, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland.
2
1941-, Abel Richard, Altman Rick 1945-, and Domitor Conference (5th : 1998 : Library of Congress), eds. The Sounds of early cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001.
3
Barham, Jeremy. The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era. New York: Routledge, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429504471.
4
Rossholm, Anna Sofia. Reproducing languages, translating bodies: Approaches to speech, translation and cultural identity in early European sound film. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006.
5
Wagner, A. F. Recollections of Thomas A. Edison: A personal history of the early days of the phonograph, the silent and sound film and film censorship. [London]: City of London Phonograph & Gramophone Society in association with Symposium Records, 1991.
6
Mukherjee, Madhuja. Aural films, oral cultures: Essays on cinema : from the early sound era. Kolkata: Jadvapur University Press, 2012.
7
Henry, Jenkins. What made pistachio nuts?: Early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
8
Jenkins, Henry. What made pistachio nuts?: Early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
9
Library of Congress. Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. Early motion pictures: The paper print collection in the Library of Congress. Washington: Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, 1985.
10
Buhler, James. Early Theories of the Sound Film. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371075.003.0002.
Abstract:
Chapter 2 examines several major theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the definition of the sound film was contested. The theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to 1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage. The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin.
11
Tomii, Reiko, Martha Buskirk, Hitoshi Nomura, and Fergus McCaffrey. Hitoshi Nomura: Early Works - Sculpture, Photography, Film, Sound. McCaffrey Fine Art, 2010.
12
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media. Amsterdam University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463724739.
Abstract:
This book is the first ever systematic attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent by artistic research. The book aims to fill the scholarly void on the issues of sound and listening in the Global Souths’ cultures. It develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound world of Indian film and audiovisual media through the examination of historical developments of sound from early optical recordings to contemporary digital audio technologies. The book is enriched with a practice-based methodology informed by the author’s own practice and based on extensive conversations with leading sound practitioners in the Indian subcontinent. The book locates an emerging social and spatial awareness in Indian film and media production aided by a creative practice of sound, occurring alongside the traditionally transcendental, oral, and pluriversal approach to listening. By tracing this confluence of tradition and modernity, the book makes valuable contributions to the fields of film history, sound, and media studies.
13
Slowik, Michael. After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934 (Film and Culture Series). Columbia University Press, 2014.
14
Rogers, Holly, and Jeremy Barham, eds. The Music and Sound of Experimental Film. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.001.0001.
Abstract:
This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.
15
Slowik, Michael. After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934. Columbia University Press, 2014.
16
Slowik, Michael. After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934. Columbia University Press, 2014.
17
Thom, Randy. Notes on Sound Design in Contemporary Animated Films. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.018.
Abstract:
This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Contemporary animated films are not the cartoons of yore. For the sound designer, an advantage of working on animated films today is the opportunity for early collaboration between sound designer and animators. The sound designer must consider the appropriateness of sound mix with visual style: “Each film calls for its own sound design aesthetic.”Coralineand recent animated films by Robert Zemeckis choose simplicity (no elaborate background, no complex layering of sounds) to match the storytelling.The IncrediblesandBolthave complex, multilayered sound; the point in each case is to achieve clarity.
18
Lewis, Hannah Rose. Negotiating the Soundtrack: Music in Early Sound Film in the U.S. and France, 1926-1934. 2014.
19
Pravadelli, Veronica. The Early Thirties. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038778.003.0002.
Abstract:
This chapter examines the early sound period. From a formal perspective, the dominant film style has an affinity with silent cinema; it is filled with superimpositions, extended dissolves, elaborate optical effects, and a wide range of “attractions.” Consequently, the films of this period rely heavily on visual rather than verbal devices. The chapter then argues that between the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, American cinema privileges plots of female emancipation and images of the New Woman. The figure of the New Woman, combined with the aesthetic of attractions, can be interpreted in light of the “modernity thesis.”
20
Withall, Keith. Studying Early and Silent Cinema. Liverpool University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733704.001.0001.
Abstract:
In this introduction to early and silent cinema, which is currently enjoying a renaissance, both academically and in the popular imagination thanks to The Artist, the author provides both a comprehensive chronology of the period until the birth of sound and also a series of detailed case studies on the key films from the period—some well-known (including Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, Eisenstein's Strike and Chaplin's The Kid), some perhaps less well familiar (including Murnau's The Last Laugh and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates). As well as covering in detail the major film-making figures and nations of the period, the book also provides insights into the industry in less well-documented areas. Throughout, the films and film-makers are placed in the context of rapid worldwide industrial change.
21
Kornhaber, Donna. Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190852528.001.0001.
Abstract:
Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction covers the full span of the silent era, touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe and focusing on how the public experienced these films. Silent film evolved during three main periods: early, transitional, and classical. First seen as a technological attraction, it rapidly grew into a medium for telling longer stories. Silent film was genuinely global, with countries around the world using cinema to tell stories and develop their own industries. Although sound was introduced to cinema in the late 1920s, elements of silent film persist even into the twenty-first century.
22
Lewis, Hannah. French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.001.0001.
Abstract:
French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema examines film music practices in France during a period of widespread artistic and creative experimentation: the transition from silent to synchronized sound film. While this period in Hollywood has been examined from a range of scholarly perspectives, the transition to sound in France—and the unique interactions between French sound cinema and French musical discourses—remains underexplored. In France, debates about sound cinema were fierce and widespread, and many filmmakers addressed theoretical questions about the potential of the new technology head-on, articulating their responses to these questions both in writing and in their films. Music played an integral role in the debate. Lewis argues that debates about sound film had a powerful effect on French musical culture of the early 1930s, and that diverse French musical styles and traditions—from Les Six, to the opera house, to the popular music-hall—played a crucial role in shaping the cinematic soundscape. Filmmakers experimented with music’s role in sound cinema within a range of genres, including avant-garde surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau), recorded theater (Marcel Pagnol), early poetic realism (Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo), and the film musical (René Clair). Lewis’s analysis of the experiments undertaken in these few important years in French cinematic history encourages readers to challenge commonly held assumptions of how genres, media, and artistic forms relate to one another, and how these relationships are renegotiated during moments of technological change.
23
Brend, Mark. The Sound of Tomorrow. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501382888.
Abstract:
London, 1966: Paul McCartney met a group of three electronic musicians called Unit Delta Plus. McCartney was there because he had become fascinated by electronic music, and wanted to know how it was made. He was one of the first rock musicians to grasp its potential, but even he was notably late to the party. For years, composers and technicians had been making electronic music for film and TV. Hitchcock had commissioned a theremin soundtrack for Spellbound (1945); The Forbidden Planet (1956) featured an entirely electronic score; Delia Derbyshire had created the Dr Who theme in 1963; and by the early 1960s, all you had to do was watch commercial TV for a few hours to hear the weird and wonderful sounds of the new world. The Sound of Tomorrow tells the compelling story of the sonic adventurers who first introduced electronic music to the masses. A network of composers, producers, technicians and inventors, they took emerging technology and with it made sound and music that was bracingly new.
24
Ashworth, P. Sound It Out; Early Language File. Longman, 1999.
25
Buhler, James. Theories of the Soundtrack. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371075.001.0001.
Abstract:
This book is concerned with summarizing and critiquing theories of the soundtrack from roughly 1929 until today. A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to it, how it is effectively organized, how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature of the object, the tools available for its analysis, and the interpretive regime that the theory mandates for determining the meaning, sense, and structure that sound and music bring to film and other audiovisual media. Beyond that, a theory may also delineate the range of possible uses of sound (and music), classify the types of relations that films have used for image and sound, identify the central problems, and reflect on and describe effective uses of sound in film. This book does not provide an exhaustive historical survey but rather sketches out the range of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the soundtrack over time. For each approach, it presents the basic theoretical framework, considers explicit and implicit claims about the soundtrack, and then works to open the theories to new questions about film sound, often by putting the theories into dialogue with one another. The organization is both chronological and topical: the former in that the chapters move steadily from early film theory through models of the classical system to more recent critical theories; the latter in that the chapters highlight central issues for each generation: the problem of film itself, then of image and sound, then of adequate analytical-descriptive models, and finally of critical-interpretative models.
26
Platte, Nathan. In the Selznick Family Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371112.003.0002.
Abstract:
This chapter begins with David Selznick’s apprenticeship in silent cinema under his father, Lewis J. Selznick, in New York. As with other directors and producers who learned film in the silent era, Selznick’s early experiences shaped his attitude to cinema, even long after the introduction of sound. This chapter argues that musical traces from Lewis J. Selznick’s films, such as sheet-music tie-ins from War Brides (directed by Herbert Brenon, 1916), and the father’s tense relationship with New York’s musically effusive exhibitor, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, are critical for understanding David Selznick’s use of music in later films as means for reconciling aesthetic and commercial aims. The chapter concludes with Selznick’s work at Paramount, the studio at which Selznick gleaned many important lessons concerning music in early sound films. A discussion of Selznick’s Four Feathers and The Dance of Life prepares the stage for the producer’s bolder musical operations at RKO.
27
Jacobs, Christophe P., and Donald McCaffrey. Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema. Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1999. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400660429.
Abstract:
The latest offering from the Reference Guides to the World's Cinema series, this critical survey of key films, actors, directors, and screenwriters during the silent era of the American cinema offers a broad-ranging portrait of the motion picture production of silent film. Detailed but concise alphabetical entries include over 100 film titles and 150 personnel. An introductory chapter explores the early growth of the new silent medium while the final chapter of this encyclopedic study examines the sophistication of the silent cinema. These two chapters outline film history from its beginnings until the perfection of synchronized sound, and reflect upon the themes and techniques established with the silent cinema that continued into the sound era through modern times. The annotated entries, alphabetically arranged by film title or personnel, include brief bibliographies and filmographies. An appendix lists secondary but important movies and their creators. Film and popular culture scholars will appreciate the vast amount of information that has been culled from various sources and that builds upon the increased studies and research of the past ten years.
28
Abel, Richard, and Charles (Rick) F. Altman. Sounds of Early Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2001.
29
Baumgartner, Michael. Metafilm Music in Jean-Luc Godard's Cinema. Oxford University PressNew York, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190497156.001.0001.
Abstract:
Abstract This monograph explores the underresearched use of music in Jean-Luc Godard’s films and video essays from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. While Godard is largely hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and groundbreaking cinematography, his achievements as a leading pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image have been mainly overlooked. On these soundtracks, music assumes the unique role of metafilm music. Metafilm music self-consciously refers to its own role as film music and disrupts the primary function of film music as an essential filmic device creating cinematic illusion. The concept of metafilm music describes how Godard thinks with film music about film music. Metafilm music manifests itself in Godard’s work in four distinct manners: as fragmentized musical cues; as the same fragment verbatim repeated several times; as extrapolated, short excerpts from classical or popular music; and as music making as a model for filmmaking. With a detailed analysis of these parameters, the book explores fragmented and repeated music as Godard’s critique of the leitmotif technique. Godard further self-reflexively investigates genre-specific music in musical comedies, films noir, and melodramas, as well as prototypical film music as arguably its own musical genre. His last foray into metafilm music entails music making as a metaphor for filmmaking. By thinking with music about the function of film music, Godard has created throughout his career multilayered soundtracks that challenge the conventional norms of film music and sound.
30
Tobias, James. An Educational Avant-Garde. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0004.
Abstract:
This chapter looks at the role of music and voice-over in constructing and deconstructing highly political messages in the experimental documentary format. It argues that Julien Bryan’s films on Latin America for the Office of Inter-American Affairs do not operate as US wartime propaganda, as is often believed, but are rather highly musical pedagogical essays challenging prevailing tendencies in US wartime communications by presenting progressive reforms proceeding in Latin America as more advanced than was politically feasible in the United States. These claims are dramatised and softened by complex synchronised scores. The films demonstrated the very problem of middle-class development as a highly gendered negotiation of national development. Bryan’s constructionist film education of often xenophobic US audiences on Latin America reframed the role of the spoken voice-over familiar from early cinema’s film lecturer, while deploying the newer, through-composed musical synchronisation of the sound film.
31
Maslon, Laurence. A Few of My Favorite Things. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199832538.003.0010.
Abstract:
The technology to reproduce a film’s soundtrack for home consumption didn’t arrive fully until the early 1950s; it was no surprise that the Capitol soundtrack recording to the 1955 film of Oklahoma! was the biggest seller of its day. Film soundtracks gave home listeners a second chance to hear their favorite scores and often, as in the case of West Side Story, the film soundtrack provided a new opportunity to discover the music (that soundtrack stayed longer at No. 1 than any album in history to this day). The performer who sold more soundtrack albums than anyone else in the 1960s was Julie Andrews, whose simultaneous recordings of the films Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made her the most ubiquitous singer in pop culture.
32
Lehman, Frank. Tonal Practices. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.003.0002.
Abstract:
This chapter lays out a series of conventions toward pitch design that both constrain musical meaning making in film and enable its unique effects. The chapter begins by examining the idiom of late Romanticism in European art music and the ways in which film music conforms to and differs from that model. This exploration is followed by a discussion of three vital aspects of American cinematic tonality: subordination, immediacy, and referentiality. Examples are drawn from an expansive set of filmmaking eras and styles; these range from the early days of the Sound Era to far more contemporary sounds. Beginning in this chapter, the beginnings of an interpretive methodology are constructed, recruiting from approaches as diverse as leitmotivic, atonal, Schenkerian, and audiovisual styles of analysis.
33
King, Rob. Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture. University of California Press, 2017.
34
Henry, Jenkins. What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. Columbia U.P., 1993.
35
Reid, John Howard. Silent Movies and Early Sound Films on Dvd: New expanded Edition. Lulu Press, Inc., 2011.
36
King, Rob. Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture. University of California Press, 2017.
37
Marsh, Leslie L. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037252.003.0001.
Abstract:
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role of women in the Brazilian film industry during the twentieth century. Brazilian women have been channeling their visions of politics and society through cinema throughout the twentieth century. From the beginnings of sound cinema to the close of the studio era, pioneer Brazilian women filmmakers sought out their own opportunities from within the structures of the film industry. They often began as actresses who learned the craft of filmmaking and influenced a film's production while on set. Others relied on their personal finances to produce their own films, referred to as cavação—a staple of production practices in Brazil during the early twentieth century. However, it was on the heels of the international success of Cinema Novo that women began gaining a more solid foothold in filmmaking in Brazil.
38
VanCour, Shawn. Making Radio. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190497118.001.0001.
Abstract:
The opening decades of the twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of modern sound media, with workers in US film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles tailored to emerging technologies of electric sound reproduction that directly shaped dominant forms and experiences of modern sound culture. Focusing on broadcasting’s initial expansion period during the 1920s, Making Radio explores the forms of creative labor pursued for the medium before the better-known network era of the 1930s and 1940s, assessing their role in shaping radio’s own identity and identifying affinities with parallel practices pursued for conversion-era film and phonography. Tracing programming forms adopted by early radio writers and programmers, production techniques developed by studio engineers, and performance styles cultivated by on-air talent, it shows how radio workers negotiated a series of broader industrial and cultural pressures to establish best practices for their medium. In the process, it argues, these sound workers shaped not only the future of broadcasting, but also contributed to much broader shifts in popular forms of music, drama, and public oratory, ushering in a new era of electric sound entertainment.
39
Lewis, Hannah. Surrealist Sounds. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0003.
Abstract:
This chapter focuses on the controversial early sound films directed by avant-garde filmmakers Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel: Le Sang d’un poète (1930) by Cocteau and L’Age d’or (1930) by Buñuel. They were the first surrealist sound films, and both filmmakers used music to create strange audiovisual juxtapositions and to shock their audiences. Although music’s role in the surrealist movement was contested, Lewis demonstrates through her analysis of these two films that music was crucial for a surrealist audiovisual cinematic conception. While experiments this audacious were short-lived, these two films offer a glimpse into a style of audiovisual filmmaking that was most closely aligned with modernist musical practices of the 1920s, in terms of the participants involved, their aesthetic priorities, and the institutional structures in which they were funded and supported.
40
Toymentsev, Sergei, ed. ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474437233.001.0001.
Abstract:
Despite an output of only 7 feature films in 20 years, Andrei Tarkovsky has had a profound influence on international cinema. Famous for their spiritual depth and incredible visual beauty, his films have gained cult status among cineastes and are often included in ranking polls and charts dedicated to the best movies ever made. Beginning with the late 1980s, Tarkovsky’s highly complex cinema has continuously attracted scholarly attention by generating countless hermeneutic challenges and possibilities for film critics. This book provides a fresh look at the director’s legacy, with critical essays by both world-famous and early-career film scholars. It consists of four parts covering biographical, aesthetic, and philosophical aspects of Tarkovsky’s work as well as tracing his influence on other filmmakers. Part one, entitled ‘Backgrounds’ (chapters one to three), discusses extra-cinematic factors that influenced Tarkovsky’s cinema, such as his biography and theoretical statements. Part two, entitled ‘Film Method’ (chapters four to eight), examines Tarkovsky’s cinematic techniques, including his treatment of film genre, documentary style, temporality, landscape, and sound. Part three, ‘Theoretical Approaches’ (chapters nine to thirteen), discusses Tarkovsky’s work in the contexts of psychoanalytical, philosophical, and other theoretical perspectives. The fourth and final part of this volume, ‘Legacy’ (chapters fourteen and fifteen), is dedicated to Tarkovsky’s longstanding influence on such prominent auteurs as Andrei Zvyagintsev and Lars von Trier, who are often hailed as the heirs of the Russian master.
41
Gardner, Colin. Chaoid Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474494021.001.0001.
Abstract:
The book expands on a burgeoning area in contemporary film studies that explores absences and interstices such as black and white screens that interrupt the film narrative in order to explore buried or hidden philosophical and affective layers that, once revealed, will radically change our reading of the film. In this case I explore silences in the soundtrack – not ambient silence or so-called ‘room tone’ but complete sound drop-outs, as if the film projector had broken down, thereby jolting the audience out of their passive relationship to the screen so that they become aware of their surroundings and the material apparatus of film as a mechanical device. The book uses a chronological case study approach so that these dislocations can be analyzed in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from early sound film in Weimar Germany to the post-war French avant-garde, the student and worker uprisings of May ’68, Cinema Nôvo in Brazil and post-revolutionary cinema in Iran. The main conceptual underpinning of the book is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Chaoids, which are various organizations of chaos through the different disciplines of science, philosophy and art. In this case I use silence to pursue a variety of vectors that open up the surface plane of art (in this case cinema) to discover different philosophical (and by extension, political) singularities and multiplicities.
42
Bishop, Daniel. The Presence of the Past. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.001.0001.
Abstract:
In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.
43
VanCour, Shawn. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190497118.003.0001.
Abstract:
This chapter asserts the need to reinscribe radio’s prenetwork period within broader histories of modern sound culture and advances a production-based approach that explores the practices of sonic labor behind broadcasting’s surface-level textual forms. Recognizing this period’s importance for defining radio’s own identity, it also stresses the need to place emerging forms of radiomaking within the context of broader shifts in early twentieth-century sound entertainment. To this end, the chapter elaborates radio workers’ contributions not only to the rapidly expanding field of broadcasting, but also to much larger shifts in dominant production methods and performance styles that would ultimately span combined regimes of modern radio, film, and phonography.
44
Xiao, Ying. China in the Mix. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496812605.001.0001.
Abstract:
Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an original, pioneering study of the connections and intersections of film, media, music, and popular culture in contemporary China under postsocialist reform, capitalist globalization, and hybridization. It explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock ’n’ roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. This book examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. The research offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world.
45
Halle, Randall. Interzone History. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038457.003.0003.
Abstract:
This chapter looks at the latter part of the nineteenth century when film makes its appearance, and at which point old multiethnic empires such as the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, or the Ottoman competed with the colonial powers of France and Great Britain, and new rising powers like the German Empire, for world domination. The moving image that entered into the medial apparatus intimately connected to questions of nationalism and imperialism. The chapter focuses on the historical development of cinema from the early silent to early sound eras. It seeks to revise that history by considering the relationship of the cinematic apparatus to the imperial and national social configuration, while underscoring the production of interzones in those relationships.
46
Lewis, Hannah. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0008.
Abstract:
The conclusion summarizes the book’s main points and themes, particularly the range of diverse responses to the arrival of synchronized sound film in France, and music’s significant role within those responses. It further suggests that examining the interaction between music and cinema during the critical technological juncture of the early 1930s not only nuances our understanding of 1930s French musical and artistic culture more broadly but also provides a new perspective on the development of poetic realist audiovisual practices, revealing “classic French” cinematic conventions as one among many possible directions that sound cinema might have taken. We can additionally reconsider postwar French cinematic innovations, particularly those of the New Wave, as outgrowths and developments out of these earlier audiovisual experiments. Lastly, it encourages a nonteleological approach to examining moments of technological transition, which can help us better understand artistic responses to contemporary and future media transitions.
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Eisenstein, Sergei. The Eisenstein Reader. Edited by Richard Taylor. British Film Institute, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781838711023.
Abstract:
For the first time in one volume, this book presents in concise, chronological form, Sergei Eisenstein’s most significant work, including his famous theories of montage and articles on subjects as diverse as sound, film language and Russian history. The selection ranges from early writings on his silent masterpieces The Strike, October and The Battleship Potemkin, to later works, hatched in the hostile and paranoid environment of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Drawn from the acclaimed four-volume Selected Works, this collection, which includes a new introduction and explanatory notes by Richard Taylor as well as many illustrations, further illuminates the startling originality, diversity and power of the greatest and most flamboyant of all Russian film-makers. Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein has emerged as cinema’s most influential theorist and author of some of the most important aesthetic writings of the twentieth century.
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Williams, Tami. Fiction, Newsreels, and Social Documentary in the Sound Era. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038471.003.0005.
Abstract:
This chapter traces Dulac's transition to nonfiction filmmaking in the early 1930s, in her work as founding director of one of the most important news reel companies of the period (France-Actualités-Gaumont, 1932–35). It examines the aesthetic and social dimensions of her conception of the newsreel and its capacity for objectivity, as well as its ability to reveal reality and inner meanings beyond that which is visible with the human eye. The chapter also considers Dulac's socially and politically engaged nonfiction films and projects of the Popular Front, particularly her unique newsreel-based, pacifist documentary feature, Le Cinéma au service de l'histoire (1935), which investigates cinema's role as an actor within history.
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Goldsmith, Thomas. Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042966.001.0001.
Abstract:
Earl Eugene Scruggs (1924-2012) came from the hills of North Carolina and learned the banjo from the days he was too small to hold it properly. While still a schoolboy in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, he developed the high-powered three-finger picking method that both him and the banjo famous. At age 21, he joined the founder of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe, on the Grand Ole Opry, completing a sound that Monroe had worked to conceive. Leaving Monroe in 1948, Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt started their own group and made recordings including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” The lightning-fast banjo instrumental cut a swath through American music, inspiring countless pickers and becoming the “voice” of the business-disrupting 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. During a long career in music, Scruggs had many famous friends and collaborators. His influence also meant that his Gibson Granada banjo became an icon of American music
50
Lewis, Hannah. Source Music and Cinematic Realism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0006.
Abstract:
Chapter 5 focuses on the role of diegetic music in early poetic realist films. Poetic realism, the filmmaking genre that emerged out of the politics of the mid-1930s, had its roots in transition-era films by filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, and perhaps most notably, Jean Renoir. The soundtracks of these filmmakers tended to favor a “realistic” incorporation of music into the narrative, an aesthetic decision grounded in a broader preference for direct recording, and frequently featured popular songs and street musicians to enhance the realism of a film’s setting. But diegetic music in early poetic realist films was multivalent, revealing the emotions or thoughts of characters, providing narrative commentary, and at times going against the expectations of a scene’s mood or actions. Considering diegetic music in early poetic realist sound films shows the ways in which audiovisual realism and stylization worked hand in hand.