Talks by Rebecca Fülöp
Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia is not always “directed toward the past…but rather sideways” ... more Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia is not always “directed toward the past…but rather sideways” (2001), an apt description of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Whereas the novel did gaze sideways at a futuristic contemporary parallel universe, the 2015 Amazon series looks backward at an alternate 1962 more reminiscent of the 1950s. The novel presents a world in which the Axis powers won World War II, and the Nazis have eradicated Black culture; rock ‘n’ roll never happened, and jazz belongs to an almost forgotten past now coveted by Japanese collectors. While the Nazis surpass their technology, colonizing Mars and accomplishing intercontinental travel via rockets, the Japanese look backward to an America that no longer exists, with its Mickey Mouse watches, Civil War-era pistols, and Jean Harlow posters. This world, Cassie Carter argues, parodies American colonialism by showing America colonized by a caricature of itself (1995). The show, however, translates the novel’s representation of imperialism within the context of present day anxieties about race, nostalgia, and post-colonialism, portraying a past alternate reality rather than a contemporaneous Cold War parable. This paper explores how the show’s musical choices situate an audience looking backward at a fictional past steeped in nostalgia for a problematic “white” history stripped of African-American musical and cultural influence. This nostalgia is made ambiguous, however, with the inclusion of racially coded songs. From a Nazi agent listening to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to the surprising appearance of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” in the season finale, the show undermines Dick’s deconstruction of American imperialism, questioning what can be considered “authentic” American culture and drawing disturbing parallels between the fictional subjugation of white Americans and the actual discrimination of African Americans.
Conference Presentations by Rebecca Fülöp
The 1940s “woman’s picture” commonly portrayed women as sources of inspiration for men, often i... more The 1940s “woman’s picture” commonly portrayed women as sources of inspiration for men, often in stories featuring male musicians. The woman serves as his muse but is ultimately overwhelmed by his music’s devastating emotional excess. As argued by Heather Laing (2007), while the male artist demonstrates emotional control over music, women—essentially emotional creatures according to contemporary gender ideology—are too “feminine” to withstand this power. Diegetic musical performance, therefore, demonstrates a great danger to these female protagonists.
This paper investigates the impact age and experience have on the representation of the muse by comparing two films featuring male musicians and the women who inspire, or wish to inspire, their musical genius. In The Constant Nymph (1943) Joan Fontaine is the innocent and fragile muse to Charles Boyer’s worldly composer; in Humoresque (1946) Joan Crawford is the sophisticated older woman who must compete for virtuoso John Garfield’s love with his violin, his true muse. Both films end with the woman effectively killed by the musician’s music, overwhelmed by its emotional power. The relationship each woman has to the music that destroys her, as well as her relationship to the artist, reveals the construct of the muse and her narrative role to be closely tied to contemporary, ageist notions of women and their functional roles.
Described by Claudia Gorbman as a mélomane—a filmmaker whose auteurism includes his or her use of... more Described by Claudia Gorbman as a mélomane—a filmmaker whose auteurism includes his or her use of music—Quentin Tarantino is highly regarded for the care he takes in choosing his films’ musical soundtracks. His films generally feature popular songs, often of a bygone era, with strong cultural resonance to frame the story, as in “Bang Bang” in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, “Misirlou” in Pulp Fiction, and “Across 110th Street” in Jackie Brown. As has been noted by Lisa Coulthard and Ken Garner, Tarantino’s use of popular music helps develop character and creates intertextual cinematic references; but more than this, it also has the ability to create a more varied, ambiguous, and at times egalitarian world of gender relationships and hierarchies than has traditionally existed in American film. As Tarantino’s only film to feature a Black woman as its main character, Jackie Brown (1997) provides a unique opportunity to examine how the filmmaker uses music to offer complex musical identifications between the characters and audience. Specifically, different song choices offer both the title character, her partner-in-crime Max Cherry, and villain Ordell Robbie unique points of identification with the audience, shifting the lens through which the audience understands the film from male to female, and white to Black, and providing alternatives to the male gaze that so often frame Hollywood narratives. This paper demonstrates how the clichéd female character archetypes of Hollywood film both influence and provide a point of departure for Tarantino in Jackie Brown.
This plenary session draws together three scholars that engage with the cinematic soundtrack in u... more This plenary session draws together three scholars that engage with the cinematic soundtrack in unique ways, demonstrating three methods of addressing the functions and effects of music and sound in film. The panelists together will address Alex Garland’s provocative 2015 film Ex Machina, a richly ambiguous film that incorporates both original and preexisting music, engages in interesting and problematic ways with gender representation, and strikes a uniquely affective register. Rebecca Fülöp looks at how the film’s music interacts with questions of gender representation and gendered subjectivity, asking whether the film’s score allows for identification with its central female character. Jeongwon Joe’s paper focuses on the use of classical music—the Prelude of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-flat minor, and the silent presence of Mozart—exploring the structural and signifying function of these classical pieces with particular attention to their role as the maternal voice as theorized in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Mark Durrand directs our attention to the film’s considerable impact on the senses;
that is, toward its sensate properties. It is thus not precisely the audience that “makes sense” of the film, but the film that “makes sense” of the audience.
Papers by Rebecca Fülöp
Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
This dissertation examines the musical construction of gender in films of the classical Hollywood... more This dissertation examines the musical construction of gender in films of the classical Hollywood era of approximately 1935 to 1960. Just as gender expectations shaped these films' narratives, music created under the studio system also helped construct gender identities and archetypes, typically reinforcing and occasionally undermining dominant gender ideologies. In addition to employing musical tropes for stock characters, such as the damsel-in-distress or the femme fatale, Hollywood composers used a musical trope that I call the "Feminine Romantic Cliché" to accompany an idealized type of female behavior. Use of such clichéd music helped create female characters who served as complementary figures to male-driven plotlines and constructed musical boundaries around their agency. Chapter 1 traces the feminine romantic cliché over several decades, integrating archival material, critical reception, analyses of dozens of film scores, and transcriptions, and culminating in a longer analysis of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, comp. Erich Wolfgang Korngold). The establishment of gendered clichés also encouraged some composers to find alternative methods of scoring female characters, which is the subject of chapter 2. Rather than overdetermining their characters with typical bad girl musical clichés, Jezebel (1938, Max Steiner) and Duel in the Sun (1946, Dimitri Tiomkin) use multiple themes and different kinds of music to create complex characterizations. Gender expectations for Hollywood pictures were so powerful, however, that at the end of each of film, each composer reverts to scoring strategies that emphasize the necessity for the women's downfalls. Scoring gender also presents unique x challenges in films without women. Chapter 3, which focuses on Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Maurice Jarre) and The Great Escape (1963, Elmer Bernstein), examines how film composers negotiated the depiction of masculinity and emotion without female characters present to bear the burden of musical emotionality. The final chapter explains how music contributes in performative fashion to the projection of femininities and masculinities onto cinematic bodies. Drawing on analyses of the scoring practices in Laura (1944, David Raksin) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Duke Ellington), I argue that musical representations of masculinity are often seemingly "naturalized" upon male bodies, while musical representations of femininity are exposed as "unnatural" and externally constructed. Throughout the dissertation, I look at how intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality shape the way characters are represented by their musical accompaniment and how they either conform to or resist categorization into gendered archetypes. same. 9 Thus can we understand, as Mary Ann Smart explains, "the tension between Beethoven's trousered, vocally omnipotent Leonore and the traditional soprano archetype: behind even Leonore's most forceful vocal moments, the image of a soprano victim remains, always available for exploitation by a director, singer, or conductor." 10 Shinobu Yoshida has also identified female character types in the operas of Giacomo Puccini, including the "sentimental heroine," the "femme fatale," and the "New Woman." 11 Like the Hollywood character types that would emerge in the decades following Puccini's death, these archetypes are based on male fantasies, fears, culturally held expectations of idealized feminine behavior, and emerging realities of new possibilities for women with the advent of women's suffrage and first-wave feminism. Characters in opera often sang in styles that accentuated their gendered character, such as Lucia's hysterical coloratura in the mad scene of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, or the sensuous and racialized dance rhythms sung by the title character of Georges Bizet's Carmen. But music in opera differs from classical Hollywood film music in one very crucial way: characters in film do not own and embody their music the way opera characters do; instead they are usually accompanied by non-diegetic music that only the audience hears. 12 If this music attempts to illustrate character, its relationship with that character is essentially different from that of an opera character-for even if Carmen is seen by the audience as a villain, her powerful
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2017
This dissertation examines the musical construction of gender in films of the classical Hollywood... more This dissertation examines the musical construction of gender in films of the classical Hollywood era of approximately 1935 to 1960. Just as gender expectations shaped these films' narratives, music created under the studio system also helped construct gender identities and archetypes, typically reinforcing and occasionally undermining dominant gender ideologies. In addition to employing musical tropes for stock characters, such as the damsel-in-distress or the femme fatale, Hollywood composers used a musical trope that I call the "Feminine Romantic Cliché" to accompany an idealized type of female behavior. Use of such clichéd music helped create female characters who served as complementary figures to male-driven plotlines and constructed musical boundaries around their agency. Chapter 1 traces the feminine romantic cliché over several decades, integrating archival material, critical reception, analyses of dozens of film scores, and transcriptions, and culminating in a longer analysis of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, comp. Erich Wolfgang Korngold). The establishment of gendered clichés also encouraged some composers to find alternative methods of scoring female characters, which is the subject of chapter 2. Rather than overdetermining their characters with typical bad girl musical clichés, Jezebel (1938, Max Steiner) and Duel in the Sun (1946, Dimitri Tiomkin) use multiple themes and different kinds of music to create complex characterizations. Gender expectations for Hollywood pictures were so powerful, however, that at the end of each of film, each composer reverts to scoring strategies that emphasize the necessity for the women's downfalls. Scoring gender also presents unique x challenges in films without women. Chapter 3, which focuses on Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Maurice Jarre) and The Great Escape (1963, Elmer Bernstein), examines how film composers negotiated the depiction of masculinity and emotion without female characters present to bear the burden of musical emotionality. The final chapter explains how music contributes in performative fashion to the projection of femininities and masculinities onto cinematic bodies. Drawing on analyses of the scoring practices in Laura (1944, David Raksin) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Duke Ellington), I argue that musical representations of masculinity are often seemingly "naturalized" upon male bodies, while musical representations of femininity are exposed as "unnatural" and externally constructed. Throughout the dissertation, I look at how intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality shape the way characters are represented by their musical accompaniment and how they either conform to or resist categorization into gendered archetypes. same. 9 Thus can we understand, as Mary Ann Smart explains, "the tension between Beethoven's trousered, vocally omnipotent Leonore and the traditional soprano archetype: behind even Leonore's most forceful vocal moments, the image of a soprano victim remains, always available for exploitation by a director, singer, or conductor." 10 Shinobu Yoshida has also identified female character types in the operas of Giacomo Puccini, including the "sentimental heroine," the "femme fatale," and the "New Woman." 11 Like the Hollywood character types that would emerge in the decades following Puccini's death, these archetypes are based on male fantasies, fears, culturally held expectations of idealized feminine behavior, and emerging realities of new possibilities for women with the advent of women's suffrage and first-wave feminism. Characters in opera often sang in styles that accentuated their gendered character, such as Lucia's hysterical coloratura in the mad scene of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, or the sensuous and racialized dance rhythms sung by the title character of Georges Bizet's Carmen. But music in opera differs from classical Hollywood film music in one very crucial way: characters in film do not own and embody their music the way opera characters do; instead they are usually accompanied by non-diegetic music that only the audience hears. 12 If this music attempts to illustrate character, its relationship with that character is essentially different from that of an opera character-for even if Carmen is seen by the audience as a villain, her powerful
BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute
equinoxjournals.com
Dracula, Hammer Film Studies carries a curiously paradoxical distinction: although its films were... more Dracula, Hammer Film Studies carries a curiously paradoxical distinction: although its films were deplored by the majority of critics when they were releases and even today are often dismissed as B-movies, Hammer has been credited with 'usher [ing] out the trashy ...
Uploads
Talks by Rebecca Fülöp
Conference Presentations by Rebecca Fülöp
This paper investigates the impact age and experience have on the representation of the muse by comparing two films featuring male musicians and the women who inspire, or wish to inspire, their musical genius. In The Constant Nymph (1943) Joan Fontaine is the innocent and fragile muse to Charles Boyer’s worldly composer; in Humoresque (1946) Joan Crawford is the sophisticated older woman who must compete for virtuoso John Garfield’s love with his violin, his true muse. Both films end with the woman effectively killed by the musician’s music, overwhelmed by its emotional power. The relationship each woman has to the music that destroys her, as well as her relationship to the artist, reveals the construct of the muse and her narrative role to be closely tied to contemporary, ageist notions of women and their functional roles.
that is, toward its sensate properties. It is thus not precisely the audience that “makes sense” of the film, but the film that “makes sense” of the audience.
Papers by Rebecca Fülöp
This paper investigates the impact age and experience have on the representation of the muse by comparing two films featuring male musicians and the women who inspire, or wish to inspire, their musical genius. In The Constant Nymph (1943) Joan Fontaine is the innocent and fragile muse to Charles Boyer’s worldly composer; in Humoresque (1946) Joan Crawford is the sophisticated older woman who must compete for virtuoso John Garfield’s love with his violin, his true muse. Both films end with the woman effectively killed by the musician’s music, overwhelmed by its emotional power. The relationship each woman has to the music that destroys her, as well as her relationship to the artist, reveals the construct of the muse and her narrative role to be closely tied to contemporary, ageist notions of women and their functional roles.
that is, toward its sensate properties. It is thus not precisely the audience that “makes sense” of the film, but the film that “makes sense” of the audience.