Stardust

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd Whitesell
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Iconic Representation ◽  
Fundamental Goal

This chapter considers the deep-rooted association of glamour with magic powers. Glamour’s bestowal of mystique on objects, people, and emotions depends on a more fundamental goal of inspiring magical thinking, an aspect of glamour that seeks to preserve the experience of enchantment in a disenchanted world. The Hollywood phenomena of star worship and iconic representation are discussed as secular religious practices that have developed in response to the changing conditions of modernity. The chapter shows how three conventional symbols of divinity—haloes, crowns, and veils—contribute to the idolization of a star and find expression in film music according to its own sonic vocabulary.

Restrained Airs: The Diegetic Surface and Nondiegetic Depth of British Film Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-443
Author(s):  
Paul Mazey
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
The World ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Way

This article considers how pre-existing music has been employed in British cinema, paying particular attention to the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary and notions of restraint. It explores the significance of the distinction between diegetic music, which exists in the world of the narrative, and nondiegetic music, which does not. It analyses the use of pre-existing operatic music in two British films of the same era and genre: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), and demonstrates how seemingly subtle variations in the way music is used in these films produce markedly different effects. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of the music in its original context and finds that only when this bears a narrative relevance to the film does it cross from the diegetic to the nondiegetic plane. This reveals that whereas music restricted to the diegetic plane may express the outward projection of the characters' emotions, music also heard on the nondiegetic track may reveal a deeper truth about their feelings. In this way, the meaning of the music varies depending upon how it is used. While these two films may differ in whether or not their pre-existing music occupies a nondiegetic or diegetic position in relation to the narrative, both are characteristic of this era of British film-making in using music in an understated manner which expresses a sense of emotional restraint and which marks the films with a particularly British inflection.

Profaning Jewish Mores in Chochana Boukhobza's Un été à Jérusalem

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Nancy M. Arenberg
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The City ◽  
Traditional Roles

As a transnational Israeli writer, Chochana Boukhobza delves into the complex problem of crossing borders in Un été à Jérusalem (1986), a text which focuses on the unnamed protagonist's trip from Paris to visit her family during the summer months in Jerusalem. Although the narrator had resided in Israel previously, she is forced to grapple with her ‘Otherness’ in Jerusalem, especially as a Jew originally from Tunisia. The narrator's crisis of exile is defined by her sense of disconnection to her family, the city, Israeli politics, and women's traditional roles. In this essay, particular emphasis will be placed on the protagonist's penchant for profaning Jewish cultural and religious practices, which is articulated through a series of corporeal transgressions. To launch this revolt against the patriarchal structure of the nation in Israel, the narrator rejects the submissive role assigned to Jewish-Tunisian women, and, in so doing, dismantles traditional gender roles.

Diagram for Fire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Bialecki
Keyword(s):  
Southern California ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Music Reading ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
The Will ◽  
Evangelical Movement ◽  
Economic Choices ◽  
Charismatic Christianity

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-style miracles are something that all Christians can perform today. This book sees the miracle a resource and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, and as an immanently-situated and fundamentally social means of producing change that operates through taking surprise and the unexpected, and using it to reimagine and reconfigure the will. A Diagram for Fire shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices such as prophesy, speaking in tongues, healing, and battling demons; but it also shows how the miraculous as a configuration also ends up shaping other practices that seem far from the miracle, such as a sense of temporality, music, reading, economic choices, and both conservative and progressive political imaginaries. This book suggests that the open potential of the miracle, and the ironic constriction of the miracle’s potential through the intentional attempt to embrace it, has much to tell us not only about how contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity both functions and changes, but about an underlying mutability that plays an important role in Christianity and even in religion writ large.

Preliminary Report on Film Music

1947 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-302
Author(s):  
Frederick W. Sternfeld
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Report ◽  
Film Music
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