This themed issue of Screening the Past focuses on what has become an increasingly significant area of interdisciplinary academic inquiry, the relation between popular music and film. Bringing together essays by scholars of film and media, popular music studies, cultural studies, language and literature, and musicology, it bears witness to the truth of Anahid Kassabian’s observation that “there are many more ways to study film music than there are film music scholars.” Likewise, articles collected here range over a wide array of topics-from U.S. “rocksploitation” cinema of the 1960s, to Australian comedy of the 1970s, to contemporary Chinese youth cinema. Yet as varied as they are in their objects of study, these essays have in common an effort to strike a balance between their attention to music’s role in the production of meaning in film texts (music’s role in generic representation, in processes of address and identification) and their consideration of economic and social contexts and the cultural uses of music (music’s relation to particular historical moments, markets and subcultures; its address to ethnically and racially defined groups; its role in constructing national identities). At the same time that these essays perform a methodological balancing act in their attention to popular music’s role on film and in culture, they are likewise characterised by an open-minded approach to the music they deem “popular.” They concern themselves with a variety of musical genres, including music that circulated and found its popularity prior to being used on screen-in documentary representation or compilation soundtracks-as well as music written especially for film that makes use of popular musical styles, composers, and performers.
What these different types of popular screen music have in common is their life beyond cinema and, consequently, their referential power. Taking as their point of departure popular music’s ability to connect cinema texts and audiences to a broad array of cultural and historical contexts, the essays collected here share certain thematic concerns. For example, many of them address the way popular music defines or responds to youth cultures on screen. This is the concern of Steve Fore’s account of rock films produced in the People’s Republic of China, Ken Woodgate’s discussion of the role played by popular music in the German ostalgie film Sonnenallee (GRM 1999), Jeff Smith’s analysis of School of Rock (USA 2003), Cory Messenger’s comparison of the “rocksploitation” of Elvis and the Beatles, David Baker’s interrogation of verité rock doc Don’t Look Back (USA 1967), and Diana Sandars’ exploration of the way techno music and rave culture have inflected the look and sound of contemporary science-fiction film. These essays consider both the representation of youth culture on screen and likewise those textual and generic innovations designed to address a youth-or youth-identified-market. Sandars looks at the way a generically hybrid blockbuster cinema of the 1990s engages with rave subcultures in its use of techno music, its choreography of dance/fight sequences, and its incorporation of rave culture’s values and aesthetics. Addressing youth culture and cinema of an earlier period, Baker considers the relationship between the values and aesthetics of late 1960s cinema verité and rock music through an analysis of Don’t Look Back that emphasises its engagement with rock’s ideological concerns, particularly rock’s cultural investment in what Baker terms “transitivity.” Smith’s essay, which focuses on the “fish out of water” comedy School of Rock, demonstrates the persistence of rock’s ideological project in a film whose comedy turns on the “nostalgic, even anachronistic” figure of substitute teacher and middle-aged slacker Dewey Finn-who carves out a place for rock at the elite Horace Green Elementary and promotes a 1970s rock’n’roll vision of youth and culture to a class of ten-year-olds. Messenger discusses the different approaches to the combination of music and cinema taken by Elvis Presley and the Beatles in the early years of their careers; comparing the formal qualities of their films, he shows how differing notions of the youth market shape their representations, narratives, and address. In the case of Fore’s account of PRC depictions of youth and music subcultures and Woodgate’s discussion of Sonnenallee, there is a shared concern for the way that a particular youth cultural moment relates to the identity formation of a nation. Both authors deal with authoritarian regimes where youth cultures are equated with dissident cultures; thus youth’s choices and uses of popular music facilitate critical relations with national identity.
Other essays in this issue focus on the way that popular music is used to address ethnic, racial, or national difference. Anahid Kassabian, revisiting the topic of her influential study Hearing Film, [1] surveys the varied ways in which affiliating and assimilating identifications are constructed in ethnic romantic comedies. In particular, she observes the role played by music in those films that conform to the Hollywood convention that demands separation from the ethnic, extended-family system and assimilation of the romantic couple into a broader culture-and compares this to music in those comedies that depart from convention, to celebrate ethnicity and move against assimilationist identifications. In her discussion of U.S. “blaxploitation” cinema, Amanda Howell argues that soundtracks composed and performed by prominent black musicians were not only a method for marketing these films, but also a means by which the over-simplified representations of blackness characteristic of the genre gained cultural relevance and specificity. Rebecca Coyle and Michael Hannan survey the role music played in the 1970s Barry McKenzie films, while Tony Mitchell discusses how the music of the Necks functions in the contemporary Australian drama The Boys (Woods, 1997). Both of these essays are concerned with the role that popular music has played at crucial points in Australian cinema history and how that music inflects these particular films’ representations of Australian culture.
In Howell’s, Mitchell’s, and Coyle and Hannan’s articles, a concern with racial or national difference is inextricably linked to a concern with gender; in particular, they focus on the way that music participates in the construction of screen masculinities identified as problematic or contested. In their analysis of the soundtracks of the Barry McKenzie films, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (AUS 1972) and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (AUS 1974), Coyle and Hannan note the way that Australian national identity and Australian masculinity are represented musically at a crucial juncture for Australia and its film industry. And, Mitchell argues that the Necks’ minimalist jazz soundtrack for The Boys contributes “cinesonic substance” to that film’s harrowing exploration of masculine violence, differentiating The Boys aesthetically and ideologically from other contemporary representations of Australia. Howell focuses on the way that influential black independent feature Sweet Sweetback’s baadasssss song (1971) incorporates fast-paced jazz-funk rhythms, African-influenced percussion and gospel-inspired vocals in a musical representation that complicates the film’s simply-drawn hero and militates against his place in the white-dominated world of the film. Diane Sandars also addresses issues of gender, as she considers the way that contemporary science fiction films’ incorporation of rave’s aesthetics and ideology affect representations of action heroism and the romantic couple.
The essays brought together in this issue, varied as they are in topic and approach, demonstrate a common concern with how cultural identities-generational, ethnic, national, racial, and gendered-are represented on screen in terms of musical conventions, aesthetics and taste cultures. They concern themselves with how popular music articulates social and cultural relations on screen, and how it addresses its listening audience. Through these discussions this issue of Screening the Past continues work on popular music and film begun in anthologies such as Celluloid Jukebox, Music and Cinema, Cinesonic, Soundtrack Available, and Popular Music and Film, [2] as well as in film music studies by scholars like Claudia Gorbman, Caryl Flinn, Jeff Smith, and Anahid Kassabian. [3] Building upon such studies, the essays collected here take as their object of inquiry the way popular music opens cinema to its cultural and historical contexts and they address the representational consequences of economic strategies to incorporate popular music into the film text. In doing so, they open avenues of further inquiry into the uses of popular music on screen and its engagement of a listening audience.
Endnotes
[1] Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York/London: Routledge, 2001)
[2] Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, eds. Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (London: British Film Institute, 1995); Music and Cinema, eds. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music, ed. Philip Brophy (North Ryde, N.S.W.: St. Leonards, N.S.W.; Australian Film Television & Radio School; Allen & Unwin, 2000); Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, eds. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Popular Music and Film, ed. Ian Inglis (London : Wallflower Press, 2003).
[3] Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), Jeff Smith, Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), Kassabian, Hearing Film.
Created on: Monday, 25 July 2005 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 July 2005