Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)

2021 ◽  
pp. 270-292
Author(s):  
Julie Hubbert
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Carl Orff ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Erik Satie

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.

Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-196
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Heterogeneous Film ◽  
Carl Orff ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Pure Immanence

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

Confessing to Leviathan: The Mass Practice of Writing Autobiographies in the USSR

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1027-1047
Author(s):  
Yury Zaretskiy
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Records Management ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Management Protocol ◽  
The 1950S

Yury Zaretskiy's article examines the mass practice of composing formal autobiographies by Soviet citizens. The major part of the study covers the period from the 1950s to the 1980s when the Soviet records management protocol requested this type of document from individuals belonging to different social groups and to different occupations. Zaretskiy reviews the concrete social circumstances in which the narrative structure of formal autobiographies was fashioned before moving on to argue that their final addressee was the Soviet state, that their content changed in line with political and ideological changes in the USSR, that the practice of writing them had much in common with Christian confession, and that the spread of this practice among millions of people functioned as a mechanism of subjectification aimed at “making them Soviet.”

Picturing Peter Bogdanovich

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Tonguette
Keyword(s):  
Growing Up ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Movie Stars ◽  
Peter Bogdanovich ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Film Critic

Drawn from interviews conducted from 2003 to 2019, Picturing Peter Bogdanovich is a unique double portrait of a filmmaker and a fan. As the director of such New Hollywood classics as The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich is considered one of the first superstar directors of the 1970s, whose celebrity equaled that of many movie stars of the era. Growing up as an admirer of Bogdanovich’s films, film critic and journalist Peter Tonguette first had the chance to interview Bogdanovich for an online magazine piece in 2003—kicking off what became a decade-and-a-half series of conversations about his life and his films. The first part of the book features Tonguette’s exhaustive, film-by-film survey of Bogdanovich’s career and personal account of getting to know Bogdanovich; the second features a Q&A drawn from sixteen years’ worth of interviews, encompassing all of his film and TV projects, his background, his triumphs, his tragedies. The result is a film book like few others in its depth and detail.

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.

scholarly journals PETER MAXWELL DAVIES IN THE 1950S: A CONVERSATION WITH THE COMPOSER

Tempo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (254) ◽  
pp. 11-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Jones
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Indian Classical Music ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Peter Maxwell Davies

The 1950s was a particularly important decade for Peter Maxwell Davies. It was the period when he established the fundamental elements of his compositional technique; the decade in which he composed his first acknowledged works; and a time, coinciding with his emergence as a composer of substance, when he travelled to Darmstadt, Paris and Rome. It was also the period that witnessed the publication of two of his own articles, and the decade in which his interest in early music – particularly plainchant – and Indian classical music began to influence his own compositional thinking and resulting works.

Radio, Memory, and the Past in the Nostalgia Film

2021 ◽  
pp. 126-156
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Radio Signal ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Communal Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Radio Broadcasting ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
Picture Show

Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.

Quentin Tarantino

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Roche
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Charge

An in-depth study of all Tarantino’s feature films to date (from Reservoir Dogs to The Hateful Eight), Quentin Tarantino: A Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction argues that, far from wallowing in narcissism and solipsism, a charge directed not only at Tarantino but at metafiction in general, these self-conscious fictions do more than just reflexively foreground their status as artefacts; they offer metacommentaries that engage with the history of cultural representations and exalt the aesthetic, ethical and political potential of creation as re-recreation and resignification. By combining cultural studies and neo-formalist approaches, this book seeks to highlight how intimately the films’ poetics and politics are intertwined. Each chapter explores a specific salient feature, some of which have drawn much academic attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality). Ultimately, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction places Tarantino’s films firmly in the legacy of Hawks, Godard, Leone and the New Hollywood, and revises the image of cool purveyor of pop culture the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career by foregrounding the breadth and layeredness of the films’ engagement with cultural history, high and low, screen and print, American, East Asian and European. The films produced by the Tarantino team are formal invitations for viewers to similarly engage with, and reflect on, the material, and delight in doing so.

“Regional” Cinema or Products of Bricolage? An Introduction to Malayalam Studio Film of the Early 1950s

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenson Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
South Indian ◽  
The Family ◽  
Stage Performances ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Cultural Pressures

This article offers an overview of the exhibition and distribution sectors in Kerala between the late 1920s and the 1940s, and the economic and cultural considerations behind the initiatives to set up production centers within this region by the late 1940s. The incipient industry identified the “family social” as a convenient format to negotiate with the industrial and aesthetic terms set by South Indian cinema, mainly based in Madras, and the cultural demands placed on it by linguistic constituencies and elite patronage in the 1950s. The industrial constraints of small budgets and a narrow linguistic market necessitated an aesthetic that could cater to a socially and regionally mixed audience. Strategies of adapting existing popular genres like mythologicals, and subordinating these to the overarching narrative structure privileging an aesthetic of contemporaneity, enabled the early studio films to negotiate commercial and cultural pressures. Jeevithanouka (The Boat of Life; Vembu, 1951 ) is discussed as an instance where elements from popular mythologicals and stage performances were appropriated to privilege rationalist values.

Teaching Americans to be International Citizens: World Music and Dance on Television's Omnibus

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (03) ◽  
pp. 305-337
Author(s):  
ANNA E. NEKOLA
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Ford Foundation ◽  
World Music ◽  
Cultural Literacy ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Literacy Campaign ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Variety Show

AbstractIn the 1950s, Omnibus, a US television variety show sponsored by the Ford Foundation, provided US viewers with their first encounters with classical music and dance from Japan and India and folk traditions from Yugoslavia. Omnibus was an important part of a popularization of world music and dance as part of a greater arts and cultural literacy campaign in the 1950s, aimed at educating and entertaining the average American. As the US government sought to “promote world peace” through the multifaceted economic interventions of endeavors like the Marshall Plan, private organizations such as the Ford Foundation also spent massive sums in the US and abroad. This article contributes to a broader understanding of US postwar cultural diplomacy by examining how international musical guests on Omnibus helped develop an American self-concept that was culturally and politically internationalist.

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