In Akira Kurasawa's classic 1950 film Rashômon, three participants testify to a tribunal about a rape/murder. The rape itself has been elided into the crime of murder in most of the literature-a ...symptom of patriarchal frames, both Eastern and Western, and both within the film and in the scholarship. Two characters represent female archetypes: the woman Masako is-even in the same tellings-a lady and a seductress; the Medium who channels the testimony of the samurai-a crone figure, androgynous, powerful, and terrifying. Music is at its most manipulative in relationship to these two characters, functioning like narrative magic: a glamor that conceals beneath an appealing surface, or an incantation that summons a ghost. Fumio Hayasaka's score borrows heavily from an exoticist Franco-Russian depiction of Spanishness from the dance repertoire of the 1910-20s, emphasizing the startling physicality of the two women that may challenge the tale's misogyny. The unmarked male gaze is perhaps irreparably shattered to modern viewers, particularly in an era sensitized by scandals of powerful men abusing their power over women.
Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of ...films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930).
Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films (The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel both 1935 and Dimples 1936) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel, the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musico-dramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara.
The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.
Robbie Robertson’s score for The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) emphasises the film’s underlying contemplation of impending aging and death. Building on Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s concepts of ...reticence, sensuality, and eroticism, this analysis explores the collaborators’ converging stylistic relationship to reticence and proposes a distinction between the “sensual” (an immediate appeal to the senses, residing particularly in timbre, texture, and sonic space) and the “erotic” (a temporal unfolding of anticipation, expectation, evasion, and fulfillment), all concepts richly represented in the score. Two primary cues—the “Theme” that punctuates the narrative at key points and the end-title music, “Remembrance”—share a bluesy aesthetic, but break through the style’s predictable responsorial, circular forms: the “Theme” takes a minimalist approach, the erratic phrasing of its tenuous texture thwarting expectation and building suspense, even dread; in “Remembrance,” three virtuoso blues guitarists solo individually and yet together, abandoning traditional call-and-response and cutting competition to join into a heterophonic communal lament, peaking in an ecstatic release of grief and a reflective recovery of breath.
How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such ...shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the 'social' consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way.
The 1939 film Honolulu (Edward Buzzell, MGM, 1939) takes advantage of a cruise-ship tradition of passenger talent shows to add numbers to its shipbound second act. The talent show with the theme ...“Come As Your Favorite Movie Star” features Gracie Allen as Mae West, Robert Young as Leopold Stokowski, and a full complement of faux Marx Brothers (including multiple Grouchos). But the star turn, internally to the film and externally, is Eleanor Powell performing Bill Robinson’s “stair dance”CLIP ...
It is one of the most basic distinctions in film music: diegetic or nondiegetic? It is a simple, technical matter—is the music part of the film’s story world or an element of the cinematic apparatus ...that represents that world? It is one of the easiest things to teach students about film music—to comprehend, if not to spell (it’s getting to the point where I see “diagetic” so often, it’s starting to seem right to me). Even on the first night of a film music course, college students can recognize moments that challenge their sense of that boundary even
More than any other film genre, the musical of Hollywood’s Golden Age depended on the presence of performers on the bill: these personalities met the expectations of the star system and, in addition, ...their dancing and/or singing skills gave them a special place in a context where star images were foregrounded. This book studies what makes musical stars so specific from the 1930s on: their performances, especially solo, which also reveal how film musicals tackle highbrow and popular culture. Acts by Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Barbra Streisand, Carmen Miranda, Eleanor Powell, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor, Doris Day and the Nicholas Brothers are analyzed according to four main issues: the role of technology in cinema-made performances (editing, dubbing…); ethnicity issues and the distinctive place that the musical genre granted - or not - to “non-white” artists; the importance of stars specialized in comedy who developed a carnivalesque dimension in films; and the process of star construction itself within the Hollywood system, in relation to other forms of performance or cultural industries.
