scholarly journals Crossover: Sam Katzman'sSwitchblade Calypso Bop Reefer Madness Swamp Girlor ‘Bad Jazz,’ calypso, beatniks and rock 'n' roll in 1950s teenpix

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-455
Author(s):  
Peter Stanfield
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Serial Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Latin Music ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Musical Genres

AbstractThis essay challenges the received wisdom that teenpix of the 1950s were dominated by a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll. I argue that this cycle of film production was marked by a diversity of musical genres, styles and types. Not only rock 'n' roll, but rhythm 'n' blues, folk, rockabilly, swing, West Coast jazz, bebop, Latin music such as the mambo, the rhumba, the cha cha chá, and Caribbean calypsos were all heavily featured in these films. This study is carried out through a focus on the temporal arrangements – fads, cycles, trends – that govern serial production and consumption of movies and popular music. Following Philip Ennis' thesis that rock 'n' roll is best defined by its ability to ‘crossover’ musical boundaries – to move, for example, across the pop, country, and rhythm 'n' blues charts – I argue that the film industry chose not to overly limit the music it had on offer and instead provided a varied package, some of which, it expected, would crossover and appeal to diverse and capricious teenage tastes.

Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya-Feng Mon
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Media Convergence ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
And Control ◽  
Depth Interviews

This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience-yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.

From ‘My Blue Heaven’ to ‘Race with the Devil’: echo, reverb and (dis)ordered space in early popular music recording

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER DOYLE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Ordered Space ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
The Devil

With the dramatically improving fidelity of electric sound recording in the 1920s, aural spatiality – traces of room ambience and reverberation – became a factor in record production. Drawing on prior radio broadcast practice, a split occurred whereby ‘fine’ orchestral musics were recorded with relatively high levels of ambient or atmospheric sound while dance music, popular songs, humorous recitations and other ‘low’ forms were generally recorded with little or no reverberation. Through the 1930s and 1940s, popular recording occasionally, though increasingly, made use of mechanically fabricated echo and reverb to present a kind of sonic pictorialism, especially on singing cowboy and popular ‘Hawaiian’ recordings. Hollywood film sound practice in this period employed similar sonic space-making devices to denote states of terror, mystical revelation and supernatural transformations. The coming of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, with its characteristic big echo and reverb production sounds, may be seen as the radical recombining of these contradictory antecedents, effected in such a way as to allow (and promote) disordered, non-pictorial sound spatialities.

Rock ’n’ Roll

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Marketing Concept ◽  
Black Race ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Hillbilly Music

This chapter discusses the romantic genealogy of rock 'n' roll and how its style resulted from the happy integration of white hillbilly music with black “race music” or, as it came to be known in the 1950s, “rhythm and blues.” Supported by recent scholarship that has delved into the files of record companies, analyses affirm that rock 'n' roll represents a blatant appropriation of black music by white entrepreneurs. A postmodern view might regard rock 'n' roll not even as music, but as simply “a marketing concept that evolved into a lifestyle.” The chapter also analyzes how Bill Haley's recording of “Rock Around the Clock” turned the tide of American popular music in late 1955.

scholarly journals The Product of Film Industry - a Cultural Good in Commodity Form

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Mikhail I Zhabsky
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Societal Needs ◽  
Cultural Good ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Commodity Form

In consideration are the essence characteristics of a theatrical feature as a product of film industry. The focus of attention is a contradiction between the psychic-cultural use value of film-industry products and the commodity form of their production and consumption. As the object of spectatorship needs, the product of film industry distinguishes itself in the capacity of a story narrated in the language of cinema, interestingly to the targeted movie-goer. Spectatorship needs are emotional, intellectual and other psychic impetuses of the individual, requiring satisfaction through ones immersion in the image world of cinema. A difference is drawn between the spectators needs toward cinema and those of society as a whole. The film production aimed at a profitable satisfaction of individual needs is incapable of explicating and meeting certain societal needs. Psychological mechanisms of immersing spectators in a film world are the processes of empathy and identification, regression and projection, imparting cinema with some sort of magic. The modern film industry has grown on the soil of commodity film production to which some essential demerits are endemic. Picture of the world created by it is a function of the films commodity form, thus rendering the picture mongrel in many respects. The magnitude of the box office, functioning as a code for establishing and maintaining interaction between the societys cultural highs and lows, entails certain dysfunctional consequences. In the modern conditions of globalization the national commodity-film production is forced to adapt to the demands of Americanized mass audience. With the irreversibility of an objective law, there crops up a certain loss of the national productions own face. In this regard, consideration is given to the issues of authentically expressing and reproducing the nations identity by the means of cinema.

scholarly journals ‘Mod Movement in Quality Street Clothes’: British Popular Music and Pantomime, 1955–75

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-276
Author(s):  
Gillian A. M. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Modern History ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

From the late 1950s onwards, young rock ‘n’ roll musicians and popular singers were introduced into commercial Christmas pantomime productions. While this practice, which constituted an extension of their involvement in the broader sphere of variety theatre, has been previously noted, it is seldom accorded much sustained attention. In this article Gillian Mitchell explores the impact which such performers made upon pantomime, while observing the ways in which involvement in pantomime productions affected their careers and aspirations. ‘Pop stars’ brought much-needed revenue to struggling theatres, and, while their presence onstage alongside experienced pantomime performers sometimes attracted criticism, they also contributed in many ways to a reinvigoration of the medium, whether by offering fresh scope for topical gags, or by giving ambitious producers the chance to more more experimental types of production. The article also questions the notion that, by the late 1960s, pantomime had become a ‘last refuge’ for those popular musicians who were apparently unable to maintain a foothold in the increasingly ‘serious’ world of rock music. Gillian A.M. Mitchell is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. This article forms part of a larger project which explores adult reactions to popular music and inter-generational relations in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s.

From Film Practice to Data Process

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Data Process ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Digital Film ◽  
Contemporary Britain

From Film Practice to Data Process critically examines the practices of independent digital feature filmmaking in contemporary Britain. The business of conventional feature filmmaking is like no other, in that it assembles a huge company of people from a range of disciplines on a temporary basis, all to engage in the collaborative endeavour of producing a unique, one-off piece of work. The book explicitly interrogates what is happening at the frontiers of contemporary ‘digital film’ production at a key transitional moment in 2012, when both the film industry and film-production practices were situated between the two distinct medium polarities of film and digital. With an in-depth case study of Sally Potter’s 2012 film Ginger & Rosa, drawing upon interviews with international film industry practitioners, From Film Practice to Data Process is an examination of film production in its totality, in a moment of profound change.

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