Dismissal and elevation: Mamoulian’s musical numbers and the early sound era

Though the musical numbers in Applause (1929) and Love Me Tonight (1932) are decidedly different, they share two characteristics: both were highly unusual at the time of their release, and both were directed by the same man: Rouben Mamoulian. This article examines these differing numbers as the work of a director with a surprisingly unified vision of cinema, and assesses their level of innovation within the early sound era. In these films, Mamoulian, an unabashed intellectual, put into practice theories of medium specificity and stylization that he had developed in his theatre work, theories that have received little scholarly attention. Believing that an artist uses medium-specific tools to transform the subject matter so as to express an artist’s personal viewpoint on the material, Mamoulian sought cinematic ways to stylishly dismiss and deride his numbers in Applause and elevate them in Love Me Tonight. In doing so, Mamoulian charted early and important ways in which musical numbers could be conceptualized and executed.

The singing film star in early French sound cinema

In the early years of synchronized sound film, cinema’s relationship to live theatre was a topic of debate. Many stars from the Parisian stage successfully transitioned to the screen, becoming important figures in establishing a French national sound film style at a time when the medium’s future remained uncertain. Not only did French audiences take pleasure in hearing French stars speak on-screen, but the French singing voice also had an equally influential, if less examined, effect. Songs performed on-screen by stars from the French stage bridged theatrical traditions and sound cinema’s emerging audio-visual aesthetics. This article examines the singing star in early French sound cinema. Drawing on scholarly approaches to stardom in France and abroad by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, I focus on musical numbers in early French sound films that feature three singers already famous on the Parisian stage: Fernandel, Henri Garat and Josephine Baker. I consider how these songs are visually structured around the singing star’s stage presence, and how the soundtrack was likewise constructed around their voices familiar to audiences from recordings and stage performances. Through my analysis, I show how the singing star contributed to a broader acceptance of sound cinema in France.

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

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.

Musical moments and numbers in Austrian silent cinema

Although the film musical as a genre came into its own with the sound film technologies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, several characteristic features did not originate solely with the sound film. The ‘musical number’ as the epitome of the genre, can already be found in different forms and shapes in silent films. This article looks at two Austrian silent films, Sonnige Träume (1921) and Seine Hoheit, der Eintänzer (1926), as case studies for how music is represented without a fixed sound source, highlighting the differences and similarities of musical numbers in silent and sound films. The chosen films are analysed in the contexts of their historical exhibition and accompaniment practices, Austria’s film industry as well as the country’s cultural-political situation after the end of the monarchy. These two examples demonstrate that several characteristics of the film musical are based on the creative endeavours made by filmmakers during the silent era, who struggled, failed and succeeded in ‘visualizing’ music and musical performances in the so-called ‘silent’ films. In reconstructing their problems and analysing their solutions, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of musical numbers during the silent era and on a more general level.

Rewind, revisit, relisten: Transport, spatial displacement and mixtape environments in Small Radios Big Televisions

Small Radios Big Televisions (2016) guides the player through a series of abandoned modern factories to locate objects and solve puzzles, including cassette tapes that transport them to virtual locations. Each tape presents a diorama-like environment, ranging from natural environments, including forests and beaches. Throughout Small Radios Big Televisions players must warp and electronically distort music and sounds, magnetizing tapes. These musical disruptions of the tape tracks are a core game mechanic. This article draws on autoethnographic gameplay, material and spatial analysis to investigate how players explore abandoned worlds stored on glitchy analogue cassettes full of visual and sonic noise.

Music as temporal disruption in Assassin’s Creed

The Assassin’s Creed video game series incorporates real-world historical elements. While some historically derived musical elements are referenced from the time period and geographic setting of the game, in the first game of the series, Assassin’s Creed 1 (2007), these historical snippets are subsumed within a modern musical setting emphasizing digital sound. The effect is a bleeding-over of ancient with modern that mirrors the plot of the game. This new spin on the time travel narrative creates a disconnect for the player and invokes disruption in a number of ways: through plots, visual distortions and sound/music effects. Musically, disruptions invoke a sense of aural discomfort in the player, which mimics aspects of the game narrative such as the protagonist’s physical distress. In order to better understand the interrelationship between these components, this article uses graphic transcriptions to categorize the musical, visual and narrative functions into fiction, interface and hypervisual/hypersonic components.

‘Listen to the atmosphere!’: On spectator sounds and their potentially disruptive role in a football simulation video game

This article aims to specify the role of spectator sounds in football simulation video games as exemplified by FIFA 19: what are the structures and functions of spectator sounds and how are these sounds related to the visuals of the video game and the player’s actions and potential experience of disruption? Although the examination generally adds to the understanding of a prevalent and purportedly significant yet hitherto rather underexplored type of video game sound, the examination also motivates a modification of certain positions within previous research that has routinely highlighted the non-obtrusive role of video game sounds. Specifically, the article shows how the disruptive potential of the spectator sounds is attributional both to what they sound like, why they occur and how and from what perspective the player is called upon to listen to them.

Hail the nightmare: Music, sound and materiality in Bloodborne

This article investigates the usage of music and sound in the 2015 video game Bloodborne, exploring how the game’s aesthetics of difficulty and maximalism exert a disruptive influence for a struggling player. In particular, it focuses on how the soundtrack attenuates the series of escalating monster boss battles around which the game is structured. Combining ‘Gothic’ and ‘Weird’ horror tropes with the techniques of musical modernism, these composite ‘musical monsters’ gesture, disturbingly, towards new kinds of monstrous materialities that challenge a simple distinction between sound and image.