Music and the Moving Image

Neo-Riemannian theory offers an auspicious toolkit for probing film music, a repertoire in which dramatic exigency takes precedence over functional tonal logic. Its ability to model harmonic progressions as dynamic and contextually-determined, particularly with associatively-loaded chromatic motions, suits it eminently to Hollywood scoring practice. This transformational approach is tested on James Horner’s score to the film A Beautiful Mind. There, Horner illustrates the mental life of the mathematician  John Nash with wildly chromatic but firmly triadic music. A group generated by the operators L, R, and S provides a fount for a “Genius complex” that represents intense intellection. Three cues from A Beautiful Mind are analyzed, with their tonal spaces revealing a distinctly transformational contribution to narrative and characterization. These readings further evince a tension between the logical telos of sequential patterning with the radically contingent, even game-like quality of Horner’s triadic manipulations.

Often referred to as the grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague, the French director Agnès Varda has produced a body of films over the last half-century that show prodigious inventiveness in their uses of images, sounds (especially the voice), and music. When she was already a highly recognized photographer (as the official photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire under Jean Vilar), Varda made her first film in 1954, the visually stunning La Pointe-Courte-predating by several years the first features of Truffaut, Godard, and the other main New Wave figures; she would become the most visible female cinéaste in what came to be called the New Wave. Her remarkable career has alternated fiction films and personal documentary; as distinct as they may be in mode, the fiction films feel like documentaries and vice versa. Her survival as an artist has benefited from her early establishment of her own production company, Ciné-Tamaris. Varda's longevity may be matched by some of her former New Wave colleagues-Godard, Marker, Resnais, Chabrol, and Rohmer are also still at work-but in recent years Varda in particular has tried her hand at a variety of new formats and genres. At the invitation of the French government, she created an installation in the Panthéon honoring The Just, the ordinary citizens who helped hide Jews from the Nazis during World War II. She has done other installation work, as well. 1 In addition, under her exacting supervision, Ciné-Tamaris has released handsome DVD restorations of Jacques Demy's and her own films, with generous quantities of extras. The DVD "boni" (Varda's playful term) exemplify both the eighty-year-old's embrace of new media and her impulse to elevate the DVD to the status of a new auteur medium.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur la spécificité expressive du vidéoclip musical. Á partir de l’analyse de quatre clips, il déploie les enjeux liés à la « primauté » chronologique et compositionnelle de la musique sur les images à l’intérieur de ce secteur de création. Au-delà de sa contribution sur le plan épistémologique (comment pourrait-on approfondir l’approche esthétique de l’objet-clip ?), il vise ainsi une meilleure compréhension de l’expérience sensible et signifiante que les clips font vivre à leurs audio-spectateurs. Il encourage donc à ne pas analyser les clips seulement à l’aide des catégories mobilisées pour les autres formes audiovisuelles (cinéma, télévision, etc.), mais aussi et surtout à adopter une méthodologie d’ensemble respectueuse de leur singularité musico-visuelle.

This article is based on two complementary definitions of the music video : as a media and cultural format on the one hand ; and as a principle of musical and visual creation on the other hand. The main hypothesis of our paper is that we can’t fully understand the global phenomenon of the music video if we fail to raise the issue of its expressive singularity – that is, if we continue to consider music video as an audiovisual message as any another, to reduce it to its semantic content and to ignore the particular aesthetic experience it provides to its audio-viewers: that of a specific association between music and images.

The rich and burgeoning literature on film music, which has for some years enjoyed substantial critical exploration, contrasts strikingly with the current under-theorization of its televisual counterpart. While a small number of fascinating analyses of aspects of music for television have recently appeared, those by Julie Brown, Robynn Stilwell, and K. J. Donnelly being particularly worthy of note, much research nevertheless remains to be conducted in this vast yet still largely untapped area. 1 The article on television in the latest edition of the foundational New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians -which crystallizes around the televised performance of operas, concerts, and masterclasses, as well as educational documentaries and commentaries about music -is emblematic of the limited musicological scrutiny hitherto received by other elements that are surely equally deserving of serious attention, such as the wealth of original (under)score. 2 One reason for the relative dearth of dedicated research on music for television, and of academic This chapter has its origins in two conference papers: "'I Believe the Subtext Here is Rapidly Becoming Text':

Henry Strauss is a twentieth-century industrial filmmaker and producer whose three decades of work included a series of groundbreaking human relations training films produced in a period when the postwar renegotiation of industrial relations was extremely tense and uncertain. In this article I examine Strauss's work as a human relations innovator who produced and employed industrial film in a sociologically influenced manner to bridge labor conflicts in the postwar era. An examination of Strauss's films illustrates the ways that social science -in particular, a new theory of small-group human relations-helped shape interactive practices embedded in the stories, technologies, even the architecture of communication in the workplace.

Working beyond mainstream practice, Derek Jarman creates films that are unusually musical. Caravaggio, a biography of the artist, is a case in point. Jarman’s collaboration with composer Simon Fischer Turner from the start of the filmmaking  process enables music to assume a structural role, a procedure that turns common music-image interaction
on its head in two ways. First, rather than strive for the audio-visual fusion common to many mainstream films, music and image are here uxtaposed. Second, as music becomes audible, the film’s illusion of realism is destroyed. This article explores how Jarman’s challenge to conventional filmmaking procedure can expose the fragility of reception history by comparing visual, literary, and musical versions of Caravaggio’s
biography.

interviewed, the spectator can see the letters ICAIC on the side of a truck. 2 Por primera vez reflects a belief in cinema as an art form that could have a direct relationship with society, and thus in its social and political role in shaping the human mind. The composition and editing, and the montage of the film as a whole, reflect the film style of the ICAIC, which was engaged in an urgent social quest for new forms of communication. For Cuban filmmakers, ‗hacer cine revolucionario fue cambiar totalmente la concepción de hacer cine, además, la posibilidad de hacer la revolución en el cine'. 3

New Nollywood refers to a segment of Nigerian cinema that began in 2012. The industry is based in Lagos and focuses on Hollywood-style approaches to film and film music. Generally, very little has been written about technologies in the film music of Nigerian cinema. This article is the first to focus explicitly on the impact of modern music production technology in New Nollywood soundtracks. Adopting descriptive as well as survey and historical methods of research, this article reveals what the specific and available technologies for film music in New Nollywood were and currently are; how the practitioners have employed them; as well as how the effects of such technologies have shaped the industry's cultural and economics choices. In addition to a review of the broad literature on cinema and film music, the methodology also relies on studio observation sessions with current industry practitioners as well as an analysis of the New Nollywood film The Bling Lagosians (2019). Taken ...

Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building.

Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.

This introduction on 'Speaking in Tongues' examines experimental film and video in 1980s Britain through a critical reassessment, mapping histories of these practices in relation to critical writing of the period, and the concept and use of the sounded voice in experimental works made at this time.

This historiographical analysis utilises material contained in The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, part of the Museum at Central Saint Martins (UAL).

This study establishes the voice as a key theme in relation to both constructed narratives in historiographical writing and in works from this time. Employment of oral, primary source accounts frames analyses of voices in preexisting written histories and acts as a means to explore aural strategies and components within film and video works.

In the thesis, initial analyses of ‘historical recovery’ before, during and after the 1980s are followed by first considering how stories are recounted by voices, before investigating works that responded to events at the time and exemplified the struggles of voices during this significant period in British history. Focus on the voice frames a critical exploration of lexicons related to ghosts which appears later in the thesis. Jacques Derrida’s lecture and publication Specters of Marx (1994) is referenced to develop discussion of ghosting in relation to myths and historical sources in analysis of Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983), in which Derrida muses on ghosts and recording.

An exploration of recording technologies and media informs a critique of writing history in order to reflect upon British film and video of the 1980s. The thesis identifies a cacophony of voices – political, critical, activist and artistic – as characteristic of the times and a key element in the composition of the works and historical accounts of the moving image.

Access to this thesis is restricted due to its use of historical visual materials and archival source images. To view and read the full thesis, please see UAL research (and request a copy) – http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/10771/