Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
Historical Past

In film culture of the late sixties and seventies, often between the cracks of more dominant forms and topics of discourse, we can locate a concern with the historical past as a complex field of imagined experiential presence. This concern was fueled by and found expressive purchase in the era commonly known as the New Hollywood cinema. This “presence” of the past played out not just as cultural allegory, but as a complex dialectic of presence and absence that became tangible in diverse genres and aesthetic sensibilities. These sensibilities were mutually inscribed into broader culture discourses of the sixties and seventies, as well as into the transformational changes of film culture, criticism, theory, and industrial filmmaking. Stylistically, they also become significant to the increasing diversity and eclecticism of film music and the development of the creative category of sound design.

The Presence of the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Historical Past

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

Conclusion

Lewd Looks ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Gorfinkel
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Past

There is no better place to end than in the desires for the future of the past, of sexploitation cinema’s febrile imaginary, materialized by a sex film and reflexively about the sex film as a waning form. In the year 2427, a futuristic culture lives on in what remains of Los Angeles, which was ravaged by an earthquake in 1969. The society is ruled by “Master Computer” and a secret group of cult film viewers gathers each week to view cherished “underground” films from the film historical past, “decadent films which have been outlawed in these enlightened times.” These covert rebels, led by Liana and Jorel, screen sex films from 1969; they espouse the beauty and allure of an extinct film culture that appears to be the “last hope for our civilization.” Our fearless cinephile, Liana, acts as the master of ceremonies, informing her polyamourous congregants—who lie about a mod white set in gold and silver metallic garments—that before censorship was outlawed by Master Computer, such “highly moral films” still existed and circulated freely, artifacts of a culture invested in love and romance....

Voicing the Cinema

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Narrow Concept ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

The introduction sets up the scope and framework of the volume as a whole. Over the past three decades, the study of the film soundtrack has developed into a rich scholarly discipline, characterized by diverse approaches and methodologies. As an object of theoretical focus, the voice has helped correct the long-standing ocularcentrism of film theory discourse. Yet, the voice as a narrow concept is itself problematic in that it limits our understanding of how it functions among the various components of the soundtrack. Understood as part of an integrated soundtrack—that is, a soundtrack where the various components have a sense of being planned or composed and where sound design and music are blended into a kind of conceptual unity—the voice assumes a somewhat different role and allows for a more complex and interpretively richer conceptual framework. This volume aims to reconsider and broaden our notion of what the voice as a concept can do for studies of film music and sound. The introduction explores theoretical concerns relating to film dialogue, vococentrism, the spectacle of the singing voice, film music’s commentative function as voice, as well as the voice of various cinematic authorship and production. It concludes with a brief summary of each chapter in the volume. Considering these many different conceptions of “voice” can provide new perspectives on how we consider the relationship between voice and cinema, broadly defined.

Film Culture: 'New Hollywood Cinema'

Screen ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Cowie ◽  
S. Neale
Keyword(s):  
Film Culture ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood

Re-centering the Cinema Experience in a Multi-Platform, Digital Age

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
E. W. Nikdel
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Film History ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
Multiple Media

With the advent of online distribution and the rise of multiple media devices, claims of the cinema’s imminent death have surfaced with greater intensity than ever before. Of course, with an ever-widening array of platforms these accounts have placed a newfound emphasis on the cinema as a distinctive physical space, one that plays host to a very particular and much cherished cultural activity. This article considers the substance of these claims by tracing a very particular historical route. Firstly, be revisiting Baudry’s notion of the dispositif, this article detects the importance of the physical environment in the process of film consumption. Secondly, I relate this emphasis on the physical to the traditional notion of the cinephile, a practice that ritualises the cinema experience. Many accounts across the spectrum of film history will attest to the profound ways in which the physical experience of the cinema summons a rich emotional response. Lastly, I consider how the cinema and the collective nature of film consumption provides an authentic trace to the past and a very certain time and place in history. In turn, despite competition from cheaper and more convenient platforms, this article will endeavour to show how the cinema retains its place at the centre of contemporary film culture. KEYWORDS Cinema, dispositif, cinephilia, cultural memory.

Performing States-Of-In-Between: Dogs, Parrots, and Other Humans in Recent Austrian Performances

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilke
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Recent Developments

Every late spring since 1951, the Wiener Festwochen bring performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles and present them to a Viennese public that seems to be increasingly open to experimentation. These festival weeks solidify a specific form of Viennese self-understanding and self-representation as a culture that is rooted in performance. This essay seeks to link two recent Austrian performances—one of them was part of the Wiener Festwochen in 2016, the other was staged in downtown Linz during the past few years—to this Austrian and specifically Viennese culture of performance by reading them as contemporary articulations of a tradition of radical performance art that can be traced back to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties and later feminist articulations in the seventies and eighties. They play on the dramatic effect of these actions, specifically their joy in cruelty, chaos, and orgiastic intoxication, by staging regressions and thus making visible what has been dammed up and repressed in contemporary society.1 Just as their historical models, these two performances merge the performing and the fine arts and they highlight provocative, controversial, and, at times, violent content. But they do it in an interspecies context that adds an entire layer of complexity to the project of societal and cultural critique.

scholarly journals Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

The Birth of the National Historical Writing in England and France

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Palamarchuk ◽  
◽  
Ekaterina Terenteva ◽  
Sergey Fyodorov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Complex Analysis ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Prevalent Form ◽  
Xviith Century

The monograph is a study of main trends of emergence and evolution of the national historical writing in Western Europe in the XVIIth century. Based on a complex analysis of several phenomena which defined the development of the Early Modern historical writing, it provides a comparative analysis of the regional schools of historical writing (particularly those of the English antiquaries and French érudits) in the process of their respective growth and formation accomplished by the end of XVIIth century with the advent of the national historiography. The conceptual unity of the book is verified within the context of the rise of the national states in England and France, which stipulated a consistent demand for reinforcing the nationally orientated discourses not only in a historical writing but also in legal and political thought. The perception of England as an empire, entrenched in the insular historical and legal consciousness, recurring during the reigns of the Stuarts and extending to the whole British archipelago, determined the establishment of chorography as a prevalent form characteristic of the English historiography. Chorographic structure of the narrative unfolding the space of the territorial “empire” to the reader corresponded to the method of “intellectual appropriation” of the British Isles by the English antiquarians which could be defined as “cultural-historical”. A considerable role was devoted to reactualization of ethnogenetic myths at different levels: while some of them (primarily – the Galfridian myth) were regarded as relevant to the pan-British cultural and historical past, others emphasized autonomous dimensions of the past and present of distinct composites (Scotland, Ireland, Wales) The continental French variant of proto-national historiography also utilized the idea of empire but in a different mode defined by the formula “rex in regno suo imperator est”. The emerging school of érudits modelled principles of its narratives on patrimonial structures rooted in the feudal medieval society (dynasty; royal family; aristocratic lineages; seigneurial rights and vassal obligations; the system of offices created by the monarch stemming from the royal household etc.). The unity of the subjects of the French kingdom was ensured not by the shared territorial commonality but by their loyalty to the king. Therefore, the French variant of “intellectual appropriation” was developed in a socio-political direction in contrast to the territorial.

scholarly journals Inventing the Past, Re-Writing the Present

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Jurgita Staniškytė
Keyword(s):  
Current Understanding ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hybrid Approaches ◽  
Reality Effect ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Historical Past

In recent years an increasing number of performances on the Baltic theatre stage attempt to escape the dominant understanding of “performing history” as a repetition or reinforcement of the monumental representations of the historical past or as a (re)production of “mythistory” (Joseph Mali). Lithuanian creators of performances about history increasingly choose hybrid approaches of representation, merging memorialization and critique, imagination and fact, documents and speculative inventions as forms of engagement with the past. This playful re-imagination of the historical past serves as a creative laboratory, where audience ability to recognize and/or resist historical manipulations as well as to embrace plural and polyphonic nature of memory are tested. In some cases, however, Lithuanian theatre creators are interested in “truthful” or “authentic” representations of personal memories, rather than a performative investigation ofmechanisms of production of the “reality effect” in historiography and their impact on audience perception. This article examines the ways in which historical events are represented on the contemporary Lithuanian theatre stage and, at the same time, addresses the larger issues around the implications of particular theatricalstagings of the past on the current understanding of the subject of history.

scholarly journals Supernatural Characters in the Quasi-Historical Discourse of Modern Ukrainian Literature: Specificity and Functions

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Oleksandra Nikolova ◽  
Kateryna Vasylyna
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Global Problem ◽  
The Past ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
The Early 21St Century

: The article is aimed at the study of Ukrainian quasi-historical novels of the early 21st century, characterized by the renunciation of “objectivity” of the narrative and emphasized the role of imagination. These are the pieces by Bakalets and Yarish (“From the Seventh Bottom”), Vynnychuk (“The Pharmacist”, “Lutetia”), and by Yatsenko (“Nechui. Nemov. Nebach”). The study reveals the features and functions of fantastic characters in the abovementioned novels. These fictional images of modern Ukrainian quasihistorical literary discourse are characterized by infernality, grotesque anthropomorphism, destruction of traditional antinomy “otherworldly– earthly/human”, philosophical and ironic coloring. Interpreting the fantasy in quasi-historical novels is expedient in the context of the global problem of perception of historical past by people of the 21st Century, with an emphasis on significant changes in public consciousness motivating writers to “Re-write/Reimagine the past”. The spread of this phenomenon reveals public distrust of the authorities, offering “correct” answers to the questions about past events, protest against permanent manipulation of historical facts (the tendency of growing consciousness and intellectualization of society).

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