Overview

2013 ◽  
pp. xii-14
Author(s):  
David Neumeyer
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commodity History

This chapterpresents an overview of the coverage of this volume, which is about film music studies. It chronicles the development of film music studies as a discipline and suggests that its rise is associated with the commodity history of feature films. It describes the evolution of the application of music in motion pictures, from the silent films era to the present time. This chapteralso provides an outline of the chapters in the volume.

A highly creative endeavour: Interview with musicologist and silent film pianist Martin Marks

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Tieber ◽  
Anna K. Windisch
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Musical Intelligence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Silent Film Music

Martin Marks holds an almost unique position to talk about silent film music: he is a scholarly musician and musical scholar. Besides his canonical book on the history of silent film music (1997), he has been playing piano accompaniments for silent films regularly for nearly four decades. In this interview we asked Martin about the challenges and complexities of choosing and creating music to accompany musical numbers in silent cinema. Martin relates how he detects musical numbers and he expounds his decision-making process on how to treat them. His explanations are interspersed with engaging examples from his practical work and based on both his scholarly knowledge and on his musical intelligence. He talks about the use of pre-existing music as well as about anachronisms in choosing music written many decades after a film was first released. In sum, this interview delivers detailed and informed insights into the difficulties and pleasures of accompanying musical numbers or other types of diegetic music in silent cinema.

And the War Came

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
War Films ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
History Of

Chapter 4 deals with the cinematic legacies of the Civil War, from very early documentary films featuring Confederate Memorial Days and battlefield reenactments to the two most significant feature films in the history of American motion pictures: The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. D. W. Griffith’s singular career, and his enduring influence of the institutional structure of the medium and industry, is a central presence here, while the extraordinary popularity of Gone with the Wind as novel and film provided a sense of continuity with earlier Civil War films sympathetic to the Confederacy and its partisans.

Indian Boarding School Gothic in Older than America and The Only Good Indian

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kella
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Boarding Schools ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Native North American ◽  
Indian Boarding School ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Boarding Schools

This article examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.

scholarly journals Is There the Holocaust without a Film Music? Analyzing a Croatian and a Serbian Film about the Holocaust

2017 ◽  
pp. 181-195
Author(s):  
Renata Jambrešić Kirin
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
The Impact

This article implies that the impact of cinematic fiction on the capability to imagine and comprehend the trauma of the Holocaust is formed at the intersection of aesthetic, moral, social and ideological frames in particular society. Cinema had a special role for the unification of the Holocaust memory since 1990. In the post-Yugoslav cinema two feature films (Lea and Darija, 2011 and When Day Breaks, 2012) represent the cinematic paradigm shift in dealing with the difficult heritage of the Holocaust in Croatia and Serbia following the break of communism. Although they suffer from apolitical approach to historical issues and mitigate the consequences of local collaboration with the Nazis, as well as take the child as „the figure of infantilization” of the Holocaust (Hirsch 2012), their influence on the “postmemory generation” and the pedagogy of trauma in the region is significant and socially relevant.

Masochistic Nationalism and the Basque Imaginary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Stone
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Explicit Content ◽  
The Erotic

This chapter investigates the curious absence of erotic content in Basque cinema (Julio Medem’s feature films are the obvious exception), an absence that, the author argues, extends well into the democratic period and therefore cannot be blamed on censorship or catholic repression. This research shows that the explicit content of Basque films often revolves around contexts of torture, revealing a certain fascination with masochist narratives that could be suggestive of nationalist martyrdom. This is explored in his Deleuzian analysis of his two main case studies, Estado de excepción/State of Emergency (dir. Iñaki Núñez, 1977) and Akelarre/Witches’ Sabbath (dir. Pedro Olea, 1984), and of a segment of Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra/The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (2003) among many other examples throughout the history of Basque cinema. This noticeable absence of erotic narratives could be part of a revolutionary intent to distance Basque cinema both from the erotic narratives of the Barcelona School and from the destape films associated with Madrid, but also a nationalist commitment to sacrifice individualistic desires and pleasures at the service of more collective aims.

Rob Roy: Britain’s First Feature Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Merz
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
English Language ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Making

What was the potential for the development of a Scottish film industry? Current histories largely ignore the contribution of Scotland to British film production, focusing on a few amateur attempts at narrative film-making. In this chapter, Caroline Merz offers a richer and more complex view of Scotland’s incursion into film production,. Using a case-study approach, it details a production history of Rob Roy, produced by a Scottish company, United Films, in 1911, indicating the experience on which it drew, placing it in the context of other successful British feature films such as Beerbohm’s Henry VIII, and noting both its success in Australia and New Zealand and its relative failure on the home market faced with competition from other English-language production companies.

From Film Score to Art Music and Back

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Julia Khait
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Sergei Prokofiev ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Film Score ◽  
Stylistic Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ivan The Terrible

Sergei Prokofiev was one of a few composers who worked equally successfully in the fields of film music and art music. His scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible are as significant for the history of film music as are his operas and ballets for musical theater. He approached film projects with the same creative rigor as his stage and symphonic works. And so we must think of his film scores not as a separate enterprise but, rather, as one of the various theatrical and dramatic genres at which he tried his hand. While the operatic features of his music for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible have become widely recognized, Prokofiev’s other film scores can also be placed in a broader context of the composer’s output. The cross-connections between genres can be traced at different levels, from common themes and literary ideas and similar stylistic evolution, to shared compositional techniques and borrowings of musical material from one work to another.

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