Elegies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Work ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
War Films ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
Film Form

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) introduced a new sort of movie music resounding across Hollywood war films for the last thirty years: the elegiac register. Composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, heard repeatedly in Platoon, proves the musical source for this slow, strings-only, contrapuntal, harmonious, sad, and mournful music. This chapter describes this new sort of movie music in musical terms and identifies moments in later films when composers model their original scores directly on Barber’s Adagio. Film form often follows musical form when elegiac music is used. Multiple scenes from combat films are described visually and sonically, showing how the elegiac register has been put to varied ends: to foster reflection in combat film audiences, to put a pause on the action, and, most significantly, to frame the repeated images of dead and injured American soldiers’ bodies which lie at the heart of the cultural work done by serious war films in the post-Vietnam era.

Helicopter Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Helicopter Rotors ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
Film Form

This chapter considers the sonic representation of the helicopter in combat films set in Vietnam and the Greater Middle East. The sound of unseen helicopters has frequently been used as a kind of effects-made music underlining tense narrative moments or dialogue. The sound of helicopter rotors in scenes set on or near helicopters has often been modulated (lowered in volume) or replaced entirely by music. Special attention is given to scenes of soldiers inside helicopters riding into battle and to how music has been used to shape the cinematic experience of helicopter-borne battle. Film form often follows musical form when helos take to the skies on-screen. The helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the supposedly diegetic sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now is analyzed in detail. The editor Walter Murch built the sequence on Wagner’s musical form, expressing an equivalence between musical pleasure and the pleasures of firing weapons.

Hymns for the Fallen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Commercial Space ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
Red Line ◽  
War Film ◽  
Vietnam War Films ◽  
Film Sound

Hymns for the Fallen listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to stimulate reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies—such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper—as well as lesser known films, Todd Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich, culturally resonant aspect of the cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience’s engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, music—and considers how expressive and formal choices on the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.

The Filmmaker as DJ

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-317
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Constituent Element ◽  
Film Images ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
First Time ◽  
Music Recordings ◽  
Film Form

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) is structured around a compiled score of almost sixty popular music recordings. Scorsese himself, working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and using digital editing tools for the first time, assembled and arranged a diverse body of pre-existing music into a unified score that plays for more than two of the film’s three hours. This article offers a close analysis of Scorsese acting as composer—crafting Casino’s compiled score in the manner of a DJ—and, in reciprocal fashion, editing film images and narrative to recorded music. Casino demonstrates highly varied, multivalent relationships between musical form and film form. Indeed, musical form proves a constituent element of Casino’s construction at multiple levels of magnification. The large-scale form of the score as a whole articulates the larger arc of Casino’s dual narrative. The strategic deployment of musical styles (from jazz to rock to pop) and the targeted use of lyrics as voiceover (often subtly deploying aspects of racial performance in popular styles) serve to differentiate narrative strands and fill out otherwise unspoken characterization. Scorsese builds several sequences in Casino on a direct, often audible relationship between song forms and narrative unfolding, creating song scenes in which compiled tracks heard as musical wholes grant a musical shape to discrete narrative units. Casino’s complex use of music does not, however, penetrate the inner lives of the film’s three primary characters, who seem unaware of the musical flow Scorsese employs to set their story dancing. The analysis draws upon the filmmaker’s own words about his creative process and offers select comparisons to other Scorsese films with compiled scores.

Soundtracks and Scores

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
War Films ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Musical Scores ◽  
Musical Patterns ◽  
Full Metal Jacket ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
Almost Continuous

This chapter describes the large-scale narrative and musical patterns of serious Hollywood combat films made after Vietnam. Two larger narrative shapes are identified: two-part forms (such as training camp followed by battlefield) and alternating action-reflection forms. Then, the overall shape and content of combat film musical scores are described in a comparative context. Four strategies for the use of music in war films are described: films with very little music of any sort, films which alternate between scored and unscored scenes (Saving Private Ryan), music-laden films with music noticeably present much of the time (Born on the Fourth of July), and films with almost continuous music. The frequently blurry distinctions between sound effects and music, the role of popular music (Full Metal Jacket), the importance of diegetic silence, the ambiguous authorship of some film scores (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker), and the shifting nature of the soundtrack mix are also considered.

Movies and Memorials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
War Film

This chapter defines the serious Hollywood war film of the post-Vietnam era within industry, genre, visual style, and reception history. These movies engage seriously with historical fact from the point of view of the individual soldier and veteran and reflect their makers’ sense of moral urgency. Several of these films have sparked larger national conversations about specific American wars. The various discourses and practices of authenticity undergirding these films are discussed. The capacity of young men to read ostensibly anti-war films as celebrations of war is noted. The four overlapping cycles of serious war film production after Vietnam are outlined: films about Vietnam made between 1978 and 1989, four films about US military involvements in the Middle East in the 1990s, the long-lived World War II cycle begun in the late 1990s, and the twenty-first-century cycle of combat films about ongoing American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Vietnam Veterans ◽  
Film Music ◽  
War Films ◽  
Vietnam Veterans Memorial ◽  
American Soldier ◽  
War Memorials ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Combat Films

The introduction lays out the structure of Hymns for the Fallen in broad strokes, noting the chronological scope of the study (35 war films made after the close of the Vietnam War), the subgenre (prestige combat films) and the book’s larger approach to film sound and film music. The three elements of the soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects, and music—and their relationship analytically within the book are also introduced. The book’s larger analogy between serious war films and war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is drawn by comparison of scenes from Hamburger Hill (1987) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The formative impact of the Vietnam War on Hollywood combat film production is also noted. The figures of the American soldier and veteran are presented as central both to combat film narratives and to the target audiences for these films.

Social Cognition in Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 243-249
Author(s):  
Ronja Weiblen ◽  
Melanie Jonas ◽  
Sören Krach ◽  
Ulrike M. Krämer
Keyword(s):  
Tourette Syndrome ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mirror Neuron System ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Decision Making System ◽  
Social Decision Making ◽  
Work Done

Abstract. Research on the neural mechanisms underlying Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) has mostly concentrated on abnormalities in basal ganglia circuits. Recent alternative accounts, however, focused more on social and affective aspects. Individuals with GTS show peculiarities in their social and affective domain, including echophenomena, coprolalia, and nonobscene socially inappropriate behavior. This article reviews the experimental and theoretical work done on the social symptoms of GTS. We discuss the role of different social cognitive and affective functions and associated brain networks, namely, the social-decision-making system, theory-of-mind functions, and the so-called “mirror-neuron” system. Although GTS affects social interactions in many ways, and although the syndrome includes aberrant social behavior, the underlying cognitive, affective, and neural processes remain to be investigated.

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