Category Archive for: ‘Issue 18 – First Release’

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 …

Even as a folk singer, Bob Dylan moved too fast, learned too quickly, made the old new too easily; to many he was always suspect. (Greil Marcus) [1] What happened, [in the sixties] happened so fast, that people are still trying to figure it out. (Bob Dylan) [2] If necessary, [Dylan will] sing songs he repudiated. For example, he sang many songs …

Midway through The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, at an underground gig in 1970s London, the central protagonist is invited to perform a song that is described by the MC as one of his “most meaningful and urgent compositions”. Barry McKenzie prefaces Old Pacific Sea with the following introduction: G’day ladies and gentlemen, Barry McKenzie’s the name. I don’t know why me mates got me …

When one opens the window, it is natural that some flies will come inside. (Deng Xiao-ping) Flies are not lovely creatures. Their connotations in our language are negative: multiple-eyed, dirty, sickness-spreading, full of pus…and we are expecting a more hygienic, more civilized, more elegant, more orderly time of money-making. The flies and us are enemies! In major cities of China, …

“Blaxploitation” was a brief cycle of action films made specifically for black audiences in both the mainstream and independent sectors of the U.S. film industry during the early 1970s. Offering overblown fantasies of black power and heroism filmed on the sites of race rebellions of the late 1960s, blaxploitation films were objects of fierce debate among social leaders and commentators …

As with most young fields, there are many more ways to study film music than there are film music scholars. My own particular interest has always been in the processes of subject positioning and identification that take place between a film and its perceiver. My book, Hearing Film [1] took these questions as its central subject. In it, I argue that …

I did twenty-nine pictures like that. (Elvis, curling his lip during the 1968 “comeback special.”) Reporter: What do you think of the comment that you’re nothing but a bunch of British Elvis Presleys? Ringo (swiveling his pelvis): It’s not true! It’s not true! (the Beatles’ first US press conference, February 7th, 1964.) …there’s only two kinds of people in the …

Rowan Woods’ 1997 film The Boys was released at a time when Australian cinema had just reached the end of its commercially viable, but at times rather shallow and gimmicky “quirky” phase, signalled by films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (Australia, 1992) and the Abba-drenched Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Elliott, Australia 1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (PJ Hogan, Australia 1994). The Boys was an example of an entirely different …

Since cinema’s inception, the choreographed fight sequence has endured as a site of spectacular display, evolving from Douglas Fairbanks’ athletic fight sequences to the stylised showdown between Neo and Mr. Smith in The Matrix(USA 1999). [1]  In the late 1990s techno music was employed to aurally heighten the spectacle of fight scenes in science fiction films, effectively reconfiguring these scenes as …

A dumpy, middle-aged man sits before a class of third-graders at one of the most prestigious private schools in the state of Texas. The man, an aspiring rock star named Dewey Finn, is posing as a substitute teacher at Horace Green Elementary School, and Summer, one of his new charges at the school, has challenged his seemingly nonexistent pedagogy. After …

“Once upon a time there was a country, and I lived there. When people ask me how it was I say it was the best time of my life, because I was young and in love.” [1] Thus the narrator concludes his story of growing up in the German Democratic Republic in the closing stages of the film Sun Alley (Sonnenallee, Germany …

What I thought would be called Xanadu is called the World Wide Web and works differently, but has the same penetration (Nelson, 1999, interview). It was a vision in a dream. A computer filing system which would store and deliver the great body of human literature, in all its historical versions and with all its messy interconnections, acknowledging authorship, ownership, …