Soundtrack, The - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2011

Two 1970s films by the German-Australian experimental film-maker Paul Winkler visually capture a duo of significant Sydney icons, Sydney Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach, the visuals in each film supported asynchronously with minimal soundtracks. In this article Michel Chion’s (2009) notions of palimpsest (the idea of sound film as silent film overwritten with sound) and porosity (the connections between different structural layers of a film), are examined and used as the basis of an analysis of the deployment of sound in these two films. Dominique Nasta’s focus on psychologically imagined sound (subception) is then explored, with various possible imagined sounds subjectively derived from the Winkler visuals presented. Finally, existing and imagined sounds are discussed in relation to what Alex Gerbaz refers to as Winkler’s ‘fragmented aesthetic’.

This article explores the recurrent use of jazz music in some of the early films of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman: Kris/Crisis (1946), Till glädje/ To Joy (1949), Sommaren med Monika/Summer with Monika (1953), En lektion i kärlek/A Lesson in Love (1954), Kvinnodröm/Dreams (1955) and Tystnaden/The Silence (1963). In these films jazz is presented as derived from the corporeal body, as powerfully erotic and as culturally alien; it is also directly connected to a potentially destructive form of ‘modern’ female sexuality that is socially damaging. In each of the films this leads to social embarrassment, personal failure or even tragedy for the characters involved. The article considers the relationship between Bergman’s use of jazz to express distaste for modernity in relation to the cultural and social transformation of Sweden during the post-war period, and argues that the director’s attitude to the genre reflected a broader, often racist, approach to American popular culture generally and to African American music specifically within Swedish intellectual life.

Contemporary film music analysis recognizes the intertextual relations at stake when a film uses ‘stock music’. This article demonstrates the significance of variant readings in intertextual analysis, using the example of Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004), whose soundtrack includes extracts from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. The article considers different levels of readings and how to avoid over-interpretation when it comes to intertextuality.

For his 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese had the Bernard Herrmann score of the original adapted by Elmer Bernstein. This article first examines that Herrmann score, before showing how it was effectively ‘re-composed’for the later film, with Bernstein taking its basic components and redeploying them in often entirely new musical and filmic contexts, while also combining them with his own newly composed music and further pre-existing material from Herrmann’s rejected score for Torn Curtain (Hitchcock, 1966). The motivations for the reuse of Herrmann’s music, and issues of interpretation arising from the 1991 score’s compilation status will be considered. The article aims to be relevant not only for scholars of music in moving-image media, but also for those interested in remakes and media intertextuality more generally.

This article analyses the effectiveness of the leitmotiv derived from the song ‘Moon River’ in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This leitmotiv is a musical element with the narrative functions of denotation (signifying a character or idea like Holly’s yearning) and connotation (emotion, mood, anticipation). The frequent diegetic use of ‘Moon River’ increases recognition, meaning and pleasure, and binds the theme to the character’s representation because the song is mood congruent and well integrated into the text. The productive collaboration between Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini enables the narrative use of music in this way because the editing and dialogue leave sufficient space for the music while from the beginning, the leitmotiv is used sparingly to denote Holly’s yearning, and the score employs contrasting themes with a clear musical logic. Mancini’s score renders theleitmotiv wholly congruent with the film, thus increasing the narrative power of the music and the pleasure it induces.

Why make a video that focuses exclusively on a speaker’s lip-syncing mouth? In the early 1970s, multiple artists made short films and videos that answer this description. This article considers three such works and offers an explanation of their significance. The videos and film shorts in question were made between 1969 and 1974 by Steina Vasulka, Bruce Nauman, and the collaborative team of Richard Serra and Nancy Holt. Each of these works presents a close-up view of the artist’s mouth. In two cases, these mouths fill nearly the entirety of the screen for the work’s duration. The mouths in question speak or sing; in each case, the audio track of the resultant sounds is imperfectly synced to the visible movements of the speaker’s mouth. As a result, lip-sync becomes not just an element of these works but their primary locus of interest. This article examines how each of these artists uses the recorded voice and the represented body to grapple with questions about the nature and meaning of existence in a mediated world. The alienation of sound from image that lip-sync failure makes visible is a metonym for a more generalized condition of alienation. In the 1970s critics hypothesized that this alienation could be ascribed to the emergence of audio/visual recording and the proliferation of the mediated experiences these technologies made possible. In response to such concerns, the artists I consider produced works that posed a challenging question: can mediated, virtual forms of experience possess positive values that accord with traditional humanist ideals, or are they characterized exclusively by alienation and absence? Using lip-sync to figure these concerns, these video artists come to different conclusions. Their lip-sync failures function variously to document, to criticize and to celebrate the postmodern debasement of auditory presence at the level of the subject’s body.