All That Jazz: The Diegetic Soundtrack in Melodrama

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Film Texts ◽  
Creating Meaning ◽  
Emotional Capacity ◽  
Women's Films

As modern film audiences, we are well aware of the capacity of music soundtracks to perform a multitude of functions in film. Music, whether diegetic (a part of the world of the film) or non-diegetic (outside of the world of the film), has the capacity to create emotion or humour; to be narrative or symbolic; to create atmosphere or provide information about a setting; and in its various forms, music is integral in creating meaning about film characters. This chapter looks at the use of music in melodramas of the 1940s and the 1950s. Melodrama is a film genre that notoriously makes use of music for its emotional capacity and for its ability to generate meaning about female protagonists in film texts that have been historically labelled as ‘women’s films’ or ‘female weepies’. In this discussion, I am interested in the use of diegetic music in melodrama, the function of which appears more difficult to outline. Diegetic music is also crucial in providing semantic information about characters and in establishing time and place. Yet what links can be drawn between diegetic music and the representation of gender in melodrama?

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.

Billy Graham Was a Transfer Student

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Transfer Student ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
Bob Jones University ◽  
The World ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Time Faculty

By the 1950s, tensions within the world of fundamentalism led to a new effort at reform. Self-proclaimed neo-evangelical reformers hoped to strip away some of the unnecessary harshness of fundamentalist traditions while remaining truly evangelical Christians. Often these reforms were personified in the revival campaigns of evangelist Billy Graham. The network of fundamentalist schools struggled to figure out its relationship to this new divide in the fundamentalist family. Some schools embraced the reform, while others decried it. At the same time, faculty members at all the schools wrestled with strict supervision of their religious beliefs and teaching. From time to time, schools purged suspect faculty members, as in the 1953 firing of Ted Mercer at Bob Jones University.

Christian Radicalism and the Enactment of Secular Theology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Brewitt-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Secular Theology ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Student Christian Movement ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines three examples of how secular theology was put into practice in the 1960s: Nick Stacey’s innovations in the parish of Woolwich; the radicalization of the ‘Parish and People’ organization; and the radicalization of Britain’s Student Christian Movement, which during the 1950s was the largest student religious organization in the country. The chapter argues that secular theology contained an inherent dynamic of ever-increasing radicalization, which irresistibly propelled its adherents from the ecclesiastical radicalism of the early 1960s to the more secular Christian radicalism of the late 1960s. Secular theology promised that the reunification of the church and the world would produce nothing less than the transformative healing of society. As the 1960s went on, this vision pushed radical Christian leaders to sacrifice more and more of their ecclesiastical culture as they pursued their goal of social transformation.

From Economic Miracle to Standort Deutschland: Exchanging Economic Metaphors in the Federal Republic of Germany

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-65
Author(s):  
Ben Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
German Economy ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Economic Achievement ◽  
The World ◽  
German Model ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S

The history of the Federal Republic of Germany is closely connected with economic achievement. Enjoying a striking economic recovery in the 1950s, the FRG became the home of the “economic miracle.” Maturing into one of the most powerful economies in the world, it became known as the “German model” by the 1970s. Now, however, the chief metaphor for the German economy is “Standort Deutschland,” and therein lies the tale of the new German problem.

The “all‐inclusive” concept in the Caribbean

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Issa ◽  
Chandana Jayawardena
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
The World ◽  
Inclusive Concept ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Necessary Evil

Seeks to review the all‐inclusive concept in the context of the Caribbean. The origin of all‐inclusives in the world and the Caribbean is analysed. The concept was first introduced in holiday camps in Britain during the 1930s. Club Med is credited for popularizing the concept globally in the 1950s. However, the credit of introducing a luxury version of the all‐inclusive concept goes to a Jamaican hotelier and co‐author of this article. In defining the concept of all‐inclusives, one cannot ignore the significant role Jamaica has played. Currently, Jamaica has 17 of the best 100 all‐inclusive resorts in the world. Even though all‐inclusives are occasionally criticized, they are seen as a necessary evil. Concludes by predicting that all‐inclusives are here to stay in the Caribbean and will play a major role in tourism for the foreseeable future.

scholarly journals Finding the Right Balance: Financial Self-Help Organizations as Sources of Security and Insecurity in Urban Indonesia

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (S8) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hotze Lont
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Financial Arrangements ◽  
Main Shortcoming ◽  
The Way

Financial self-help organizations can be found in many parts of the world, and the cities of Java are among the areas where they are particularly widespread. Since about the 1950s, interest in these institutions among anthropologists and development sociologists has increased considerably. Analyses of financial self-help organizations have most often focused on their economic or their social function; few scholars have pointed to their function as providers of security and identified self-help organizations as typical forms of local social security institutions. The main shortcoming of most of these studies is that they base their conclusions solely on an analysis of the financial arrangements provided by these self-help organizations, neglecting the accommodating practices that people undertake in order to fit the provisions of self-help organizations to their own household needs. This essay explores the observation that financial self-help organizations do not simply provide security through the different kinds of insurance mechanisms they might contain, but that, particularly through the way in which people use them and participate in them, these institutions become meaningful for coping with insecurity. It examines the question of whether participation in financial self-help organizations contributes to the ability of households to cope with adversities and deficiencies in a concrete social context. Research aiming to answer this question was conducted in Bujung, an urban ward on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.

Translator’s Note

2019 ◽  
pp. 227-228
Author(s):  
Naomi Seidman
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Shed Light

IN 1933 the Central Secretariat of Bnos Agudath Israel in Poland issued Sarah Schenirer’s Collected Writings, after advertising the upcoming publication in the pages of the Bais Yaakov Journal. The book included many articles that had previously appeared in the journal or elsewhere in Bais Yaakov publications; among them were reflections on Jewish themes, reports on events important to the world of Bais Yaakov and Bnos, and ethical instructions to young pupils. But it also included previously unpublished writings, including a brief but fascinating memoir that shed light on Sarah Schenirer’s childhood and on the beginnings of the Bais Yaakov movement. As a frontispiece, the book included a drawing of Sarah Schenirer, one which circulated widely in the movement in the absence of a photograph (it was well known that she refused to have her photograph taken). Advertisements for the upcoming volume sometimes provided a table of contents, which promised that it would include excerpts from Schenirer’s diary. In fact, those excerpts did not appear in the published work, although a few entries—whether the ones originally intended for publication or others is not clear—did appear in the 1950s in Hebrew translation. For more on this diary, see Appendix A....

Naruse, Mikio (1905–1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Neville Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Japanese Film ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Outside Money

Naruse Mikio was a popular and critically renowned Japanese film director who was active from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. He completed eighty-nine films, of which sixty-seven survive. From a poor family and raised by his sisters, he began work as a prop assistant at Shochiku studios at the age of fifteen, where he would direct his first film ten years later. Beginning with slapstick comedies, Naruse’s interest in urban poverty and strong, if ill-fated female characters drew him to the josei-eiga (woman’s film) genre. By the mid-1930s he had moved to PCL (Photo-Chemical Laboratories, later incorporated into Toho Studios), where he would work for the following three decades, undertaking additional projects at Shintoho and Daiei. While his prewar silent pictures display early experimentation with voice-over, flashbacks, and montage sequences, his work in sound and later widescreen and color is characterized by exacting mise-en-scène, and quick unrelenting cuts following performers’ gestures and expressions. Naruse’s modernist economy of style moves at the pace of urban life, thrusting his female protagonists (often Takamine Hideko, who starred in seventeen of the director’s best-known films) into the financialization of interpersonal relationships, whereby yearning for love outside money and family is dulled by having to survive the daily hardships of patriarchal society and monetary debt.

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