Popular Music and Film

An overview of the music video work of Danny Perez and Steve Hanft, their involvement with indie music, as well as how their music video work is related to their feature film production. The chapter relates their work to general trends in indie music videos and discusses the impact that digital technologies have had in low budget music video production and feature production. Music videos examined include works by Beck and Animal Collective.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A PROOF COPY

it added to the fantastic subject matter. Or then again, there's always the chance that he just couldn't be arsed to tell the story of Melvin's gradual rehabilitation through observation rather than talking heads, or consistently get the boom mic out of frame.

A music video, commercial, musical, CD-ROM, or internet QuickTime movie can inspire a confusing mixture of rapture and bewilderment. So dazzling but so ephemeral - how to make sense of it? A groundbreaking work, Nicholas Cook's Analysing Musical Multimedia is the first to provide both descriptions and models of how media like music, lyrics, and image can function together. The book should interest scholars and students of American music because multimedia seem increasingly central to contemporary culture; in addition, Cook provides close readings of two quintessentially American
works - the Disney and Stokowski realization of The Rite of Spring from Fantasia, and Madonna's music video "Material Girl."

This chapter explores the No Wave moment in New York by looking both at the No Wave film produced at the time and recent retrospective documentaries such as Blank City and Kill Your Idols. While the latter are often highly problematic, the presence of the No Wave documents within them has a destabilising force capable generating a different relation to this past than the nostalgic domesticated one they present.

En el presente artículo nos sumergimos en la película 1, 2, 3… al esconditeinglés (Iván Zulueta, 1969), sin duda el ejemplo más paradigmático del cinepop español. La primera película del que pasaría a la historia como un cineasta maldito, el donostiarra Iván Zulueta, es un ejemplo incipiente de discurso contracultural y contrahegemónico en los últimos años de un régimen franquista abocado a la apertura internacional. La sucesión de secuencias musicales, casi videoclips de los grupos del momento, es una declaración de intenciones audiovisual que define perfectamente los anhelos musicales y sociales de una generación ansiosa de libertad.

Bei populärer Musik und Spielfilm handelt es sich in gleichem Ausmaße um an Massen orientierte kulturelle Phänomene. Entsprechend lag es von Anbeginn der Filmgeschichte nahe, beide zu kombinieren. Songs waren während der gesamten Stummfilmzeit und auch in der Epoche des Klassischen Hollywoodfilms wichtige Bestandteile von Filmen, jedoch fand diese gängige Praxis bislang wenig Beachtung in der Musik- und Filmwissenschaft. Einerseits liegt dies an den Bemühungen, den Film als Kunst aufzuwerten oder für die Kunst zu retten und dies teilweise durch das Engagement renommierter Komponisten. Andererseits ist dies auch ein Verschulden der bisherigen Filmmusikgeschichtsschreibung, die sich beispielsweise bezogen auf die Stummfilmzeit vornehmlich an Originalkompositionen der 1920er Jahre und nicht am wenig handfest überlieferten Kompilationsalltag der kleinen Kinos orientiert. Bezogen auf die Tonfilmzeit wurde im Einklang mit klassisch orientierten Filmkomponisten fortwährend der drohende Niedergang der klassischen Filmscore bejammert und sich auf die Darstellung von bedeutungsschweren sog. Filmklassikern wichtiger Regisseure beschränkt. Weniger häufig wurden jedoch nur kurzfristige Zuschauererfolgen im bei Kritikern wenig renommierten Bereich der Filmkomödien, Western, Melodramen und sonstiger B-Pictures einbezogen. Von Anfang an gingen auch Vermarktung des Films und Vermarktung seiner Musik Hand in Hand. Dass dies mit populärer, zumeist songorientierter Musik am besten gelingen konnte, ist nahe liegend. Während der Verkauf von sheet music zu Stummfilm- und frühen Tonfilmzeiten ein lukratives Zusatzgeschäft darstellte, lassen sich heutzutage manche Film- und Fernsehprojekte nur über den parallelen Tonträger-, Songdownload- und Klingeltonhandel finanzieren. Auch dies erklärt selbstverständlich die gewachsene Bedeutung von Songs und die ihr berechtigt zukommende Aufmerksamkeit. Jedoch ist das Interessante an der Verwendung populärer Songs als Filmmusik weniger, dass sie nie völlig aussetzte, ja beständig wenigstens Begleitelement blieb, als vielmehr die Beobachtung, dass die Art ihrer Verwendung einem ständigen Wandel unterworfen war und ist bis hin zu heutigen Erscheinungen, dass Avantgarde- und postmoderne Ästhetiktechniken wie Selbstreflexivität und bewusste Dekonstruktion moderner Werte oder Überzeugungen über Pastiche, Parodie oder Ironie selbst die Macht über Fernsehserien gewinnen.

Este libro ofrece un estudio exploratorio del documental musical chileno contemporáneo y propone categorías, así como interrogantes desde las cuales es posible interpretar este corpus y comprender las estrategias que sus realizadores uti lizan para leer lo musical desde una perspecti va documental. Más allá de plantear un relato cerrado, quisiera que estas líneas abran nuevos caminos para el análisis y la discusión en torno a las especifi cidades del documental musical en Chile, así como, más ampliamente, a los modos en que la música es presentada a través de la pantalla.

Rock bukan serta merta sebuah genre musik yang membius para remaja Amerika tahun 1970-an, namun rock dipercaya telah menjadi budaya tersendiri bagi mereka yang menikmatinya. Tulisan ini menganalisa Almost Famous - sebagai film yang ingin merepresentasikan rock dalam puncak kejayaannya.

This article examines the evolution of both the popular and the commercial aspects within the official film production support in Flanders between 1964 and 2002. The article sheds light on the policy motivations underlying the cultural-commercial tension, which was a permanent issue of conflict for the Flemish film policy actors.

Biographical films about musicians and composers are often caught between the recognition of their subjects as myths and the perceived experience of them as human beings. Many such films resolve the tension between these two cultural formations by creating characters that are both larger than life and simultaneously all too human, carefully resolving any tension between the two. Last Days, incorrectly alleged to be a film biography of Kurt Cobain, highlights the perpetual tension between the eternal and the material in the biographical film genre. The film’s writer and director, Gus Van Sant, deliberately avoids resolving the tensions he creates and, in doing so, sharpens our understanding of the ways in which biographic films routinely claim to overcome distance between what we think we know about musical celebrities and what we can actually know about them.

The combination of popular and artificial musical elements in the score of Peter Weir's film Master and commander: The far side of the world (2003) can serve as an additional interpretive level of the movie. Of particular interest in this regard is the use of Baroque, classical, and modern art music in the context of a Hollywood movie which is subject to the commercial constraints of (popular) culture. Although this is a film about war, music is surprisingly often at the center of the action, as for example Mozart's violin concerto no. 3 in G major, K.216; Corelli's adagio from the concerto grosso, op. 6 no. 8 in G minor; Bach's prelude from the violoncello suite no. 1 in G major, BWV 1007; and Boccherini's Passa calle from La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, string quintet op. 30, no. 6, G.324. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) plays a special role.
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In der Filmmusik des Peter-Weir-Films Master and Commander sind populäre und artifizielle musikalische Elemente miteinander verknüpft. Dies kann als eine zusätzliche Ebene einer Deutung des Filmes dienen. Hierbei ist vor allem die die Verwendung barocker, klassischer und moderner Kompositionen der Kunstmusik im Kontext der kommerziellen Gesetzmäßigkeiten unterworfenen (populären) Kultur eines Hollywood-Kinofilms interessant. Obgleich es sich um einen Kriegsfilm handelt, steht Musik auf der Handlungsebene des Films erstaunlich oft im Zentrum des Geschehens, so beispielsweise Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Violinkonzert Nr. 3 G-Dur, KV 216, Arcangelo Corellis Adagio aus dem Concerto Grosso op. VI/8, g-Moll, Johann Sebastian Bachs Prélude aus der Cello-Suite Nr. 1, G-Dur, BWV 1007 oder Luigi Boccherini: „Passa calle“ aus La Musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid, Streichquintett op. 30/6, G. 324. Eine besondere Rolle spielt Ralph Vaughan Williams‘ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910).

""The representation of the South is a major subject in Italian cinema. Already cent¬ral during the Neorealism, it became inescapable once the long-lived questione meri-dionale (the southern issue) exploded in the cultural discourse after the so-called “eco-nomic miracle” (1958-1963). The narratives of the socio-cultural gap between an in-creasingly industrial North and a still underdeveloped South—populated by corruption and organized crime—led Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to address the subject through a whole range of genres, including documentary, cine-inquiry, melodrama, gangster and the newborn commedia all'italiana. In my paper I illustrate the crucial role of film music in articulating the cultural di-chotomies implied in the southern issue (e.g. familiarity/otherness, primitiveness/decad¬ence, superstition/religion, honor/dishonor etc.) with special attention to the category of the grotesque. Drawing on the audio-visual analysis of a representative selection of cues, I argue how prominent composers, such as Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Egisto Macchi, Luis Bacalov and Piero Piccioni, exhibited a relatively codified vocabulary of musical procedures that profoundly emblematized this season of Italian cinema in the international scene and would be influential for ensuing generations of Italian and Italian-American filmmakers. By combining the vernacular stylization of melodic and rhythmic profiles, the insistence on timbres that were (sometimes inappropriately) considered as regional marks (e.g. the Jew’s harp for Sicily), the recourse to operatic devices, and a deft use of sound postproduction, music manages to merge traits of irony, sarcasm, ugliness, comedy, with epical and tragic tones, in a powerful grotesque portrait of the southern, and ultimately overall, Italian character.""

The 2006 film of the Beastie Boys' concert at Madison Square Garden carries the credit 'directed by Adam Yauch'. This is a somewhat misleading credit because the film is constructed entirely from footage shot by audience members and edited together by Neal Usatin.

It doesn't mark the first time bootleg footage from major concerts has been used in commercial releases. The 2003 Led Zeppelin DVD release includes a large proportion of bootleg material alongside professionally recorded footage. However it may mark the first time that audience members were commissioned by an artist to provide content for commercial release. This assignation of responsibility for content authenticates a previously assumed ownership of live music events. Audiences at live music events are both the consumer and in a certain regard the author of their own experience.

The Beastie Boys' film further complicates this authorship by providing viewers of the film with a collection of individual points of view. It is not a unified presentation for a mass audience but instead is a piece of work that seeks to attain a level of authenticity by somewhat democratising the capturing of the performance.

In 1950s Hollywood, films about the American South required a drawl. Reviewers praised so-called “Southerns” for their “authentic flavor” or “core of atmosphere.” The South was a different world from mainstream America, to be captured on celluloid and marketed on its exotic difference. Southerns also required music with an accent, which one composer mastered; in promotional materials for the 1959 adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, producer Jerry Wald claimed, “No one seemed better suited to capture and unify” this film than Alex North [1910–1991], with his “extraordinary feeling for the atmosphere of the modern South.” By that point, North had scored five of the six Southerns that he composed in the ’50s, the main period of his output of such soundtracks. My essay analyzes North’s “extraordinary feeling” for this filmic subgenre by showing how neatly he provided a sonic analog for a theoretical construct that sociologist Edgar J. Thompson called the “contrast conception” of Southern regionalism.

Thompson offered the term at a 1962 conference of social scientists gathered to examine “the directions, old and new, of Southern response to the forces of change” at mid-century. The conference’s contributors all adopted a contrast model for their explorations: white/black, rich/poor, Democrat/Republican, agrarian/industrial, and rural/urban were their principle heuristics, united under two umbrella binaries that were fundamental concepts for makers of filmic Southerns: South/Non-South and Past/Present.

These contrast conceptions shaped the films that North set, which in turn inspired starkly dualist soundtracks. I examine films from the beginning of North’s career until the end of his Southerns period. Through an analysis of the rare documentary The People of the Cumberland (1937), I show the roots of North’s musical conception of the South, designed in sympathy with the dialectic techniques of the Socialist Frontier Films Collective. On this set, North met Elia Kazan, who hired him for the 1950s’ most influential Southern, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which featured a divided South, Old and New, delusionally romantic and grittily real. I use The Long Hot Summer (1958) as a final example whose soundtrack featured similar dualist tensions whereas its dramatic attitude is apparently less troubled. I thus elucidate how theories of region shaped soundtracks beyond inclusion of stereotypical folk elements and point the way toward future studies of the relationship between film music and human geography.