Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)

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.

Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture

This chapter examines historical presentational practices of sound film and, specifically, the extra music added to roadshow versions of films between the 1930s and 1960s—including Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It argues that such added music—which included overtures, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music—when combined with controlled theatrical lighting and use of the curtain, might have prompted a number of different cinematic listening experiences among audiences. It suggests that an understanding of these historical presentational practices might call into question comfortable assumptions about the nature of sound-film ontology and the relationship between cinema as “Text” and cinema as “Event”—issues that resonate with the discourse surrounding historically informed performance (HIP) practice in musicology.

Out of the Frame

This chapter considers the philosophy of live-score film screenings in contexts of filmic diegesis, representation, and illusion. These performances hybridize categories of spatial co-presence/absence and temporal simultaneity/anteriority in media communication, disrupting the balance between audio-visual documenting and constructing of a posited prior event. They revisit a pre-sound-era aesthetic which by nature resisted the modernist need for a centered subject position and a uniform spectatorial space in which all sounds must appear to emanate from the screen. Such cinematic listening experiences undermine theories of film as cohesive illusion by inscribing the “real” (live music) into what is “represented.” Live ensembles conjure up the dramaturgical fantasy space of the operatic orchestra pit, hindering recipients’ “disavowal of the apparatus” and yet increasing the sense of film’s Aristotelian mimetic enactment, rather than its distanced diegetic recounting. This practice invites us to rethink ideas of diegesis and music’s role in creating filmic worlds.

Hi-Yo, Rossini

This chapter discusses the use of the finale of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture (1829) as the theme of the multimedia Lone Ranger franchise, from the original radio show (1933–54) to the recent Disney film (2013). Rossini’s pre-existing piece is shown to be integral to the Lone Ranger brand, but also adaptable to suit the narratives and production circumstances of individual franchise iterations, while The Lone Ranger’s influence on listeners’ understandings of the finale—now heard as post-existing music—is argued to be significant in both semantic and structural regards. Exploration of the whole franchise reveals how Lone Ranger films appropriate pre-existing music in specifically cinematic ways. It shows that the 2013 film in particular reworks the finale to align with the modern-blockbuster style of its surrounding Hans Zimmer score, and thereby encourages audiences to adopt a blockbuster-cinematic mode of listening, not least in relation to Rossini’s original.

Hearing Secondary Explosions

This chapter uses the shot of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, as captured in the Naudet brothers’ documentary film 9/11, as a point of entry to consider how conventions of asynchronous sound in the cinema are challenged by recent forms of media production and dissemination, and, by extension, to think about whether or not we should revise our understanding of what “cinematic” might mean in relation to listening. It situates the Naudets’ 9/11 within the discourse of “performativity” in documentary film, and assesses the implications of the Naudet footage proliferating in other media outside their own film. The notion of “secondary explosions” acts as a guiding metaphor for the concept of “asynchronization,” and it leads to the argument that the proliferation of Naudet sound elements outside of the film requires an expanded notion of the work of asynchronous sound in audiovisual media.

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening

This chapter explores cinematic listening by bringing together ideas from contemporary musical and sound studies, the concept of erotics in art championed in the 1970s feminist discourse, and ideas of “new materialism” in film studies. It emphasizes the sensuousness of film form as something distinct from sensory overload, and suggests that a sensuous mode of listening is inherently musical. Focusing on films including Arrival (2016), Under the Skin (2013), Elephant (2003), and Tree of Life (2011), the chapter shows that the erotics of cinematic listening is facilitated by the practice of foregrounding the materiality of music and an increasingly integrated approach to the soundtrack.

Tasteful Networks of Attention

Many moments in the history of American exhibition illuminate the entanglement of hearing and discipline. But few point as clearly at the intertwining of listening, class, architecture, language, taste, and technology—all of which culminate in a particular dispositif of institutional indoctrination via sensory discipline—as the art house theatre and its promise of aspirational uplift for the price of good audience behavior. This chapter considers the relationship between exhibition, subtitling, sense-making lingual sound, cinephilia, spectatorship, and discipline in the late-1950s and early-1960s art house cinemas across the United States. It argues that spectators were trained for import film watching by the practice of subtitling foreign, especially European, cinema. Listening, watching, and interpreting the balance between the two thus constituted a network of proper attention that helped indoctrinate post-war spectators into post-war American taste and leisure culture.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

iPod Listening as an I-voice

Walkman and iPod devices have often been discussed in quasi-cinematic terms. This typically implies an analogy between the personal stereo user and the transcendental subject of film theory, who is allowed to see and hear without being seen or heard. This chapter offers an alternative route. Taking as starting point a cinematic moment in which iPod listening is turned into a first-person voiceover, it suggests that cinematic and personal stereo listening share not only an orientation towards privatization and individualization but also a fantasy of communication: one that blurs the lines between “self” and “other” and between listening and speaking. Analyzing a wide range of films and historical marketing campaigns by Sony and Apple, the chapter shows how mainstream cinema—through its representational tropes and modes of spectatorial address—feeds into a broader cultural construction of personal stereo listening as a highly individualized activity that is always imaginatively open-ended.

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure

Over the past fifteen years, processing fluency has become an increasingly important research topic in mapping the contours of aesthetic experience. It refers to the ease with which our minds assimilate new information, and it plays an important priming function in the pleasure or enjoyment experienced during film viewing. Fluency occurs as the result of both stimulus features and contextual factors, which include, among other things, the exposure effect, repetition, dishabituation, and spontaneous recovery. It can also play a vital role in cinematic listening, predisposing auditors toward positive judgments of films based on the ways in which they trigger efficient recall of music’s formal patterns. Processing fluency, thus, figures as an important dimension of film and music cross-promotion, either by leveraging consumer interest in music ancillaries or by enabling spectators to re-experience films through their soundtrack albums.