Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)

CINEMAGOGIC ECHOES? from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

A real-time comparison, for scholarly purposes, of Len Lye's 1958 experimental animation FREE RADICALS and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film  LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS/HOUR OF THE FURNACES

[Len] Lye's Free Radicals (1958) […] is a black and white scratch animation short, cut to the insistent rhythmic accompaniment of an African drum solo.* It immediately calls to mind the unforgettable opening scenes of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas' Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).** While equally exciting and radical, these strikingly similar films hint at the extent to which the world and the political landscape had changed in the decade between their respective release dates, and between then and now. We have no way of knowing if Getino and Solanas knew of Len Lye's film. We know, however, that films exchange ideas, talking to one another across time, and that the conversation between radical aesthetics and radical politics is ongoing, with both daring to 'make it new' and set the world on its feet, by turning it upside down. [Jerry Whyte, 'Free Radicals', CineOutsider.com, December 11, 2011. Online at: http://www.cineoutsider.com/articles/stories/f/free_radicals_1.html]

A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed. [Nicole Brenez, 'Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces', Sight and Sound Magazine, 8 March 2012. Online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaceshttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaces]

'Agogics' is a musical term that designates the use of agogic accents, that is accents consisting in a lengthening of the time-value of the note. The philosopher Étienne Souriau extended the use of the term to include all the arts existing in time. He defined 'agogics' as \what characterizes an artwork that takes place in time, through movement, and specifically through the creation of a fast or slow pace, or the use of different rhythms.' For musicians, the notion is related to gesture, to physical movements, to a bodily interaction with their instrument, to a sense of speed, an energy, a precise handling of a piece. [Christian Jacquemin et al, 'Emergence of New Institutions for Art-Science Collaboration...' [date unknown], Online at: seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jacquemin_final1.pdf. Hyperlinks added by FSFF] 

Souriau developed his idea of the agogic as an explicit reaction to the ‘rather banal description [of] arts of space in contrast to the phonetic and cinematic arts’. [Of] interest is Popper’s use of the term to describe the quality of temporal pattern that he identifies in a range of works. At one extreme [..].] is the velocity and dramatic choreography of a Len Lye installation. The term agogic conflates speed, acceleration and duration and would appear to be a significant aspect of kinetic form. [Jules Moloney, Designing Kinetics for Architectural Facades: State Change (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 64.]

Film Studies For Free's author has been a tad busy elsewhere lately - and there will be lots to catch up with at this blog in due course.

But today FSFF is thrilled to present its (by distance) contribution to a teach-in which took place earlier today. This video was produced in a few hours this morning, using readily available materials for quotation (see above and below), in solidarity with a campus occupation that you can choose to read more about here.

Staff and students of media and cultural studies, working in a deeply personal, activist capacity, gave short presentations on their research and thinking about ideas of resistance, occupation and neoliberalism in the context of the university and beyond, in order to consider how research in their fields might offer new and diverse perspectives on activism and resistance.

FSFF has always liked its politics, like its film studies, to have rhythm and timing, so its research project today foregrounds those elements. You can find its author's scholarly discussion of this kind of "real-time" videographic comparison here: 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', MEDIASCAPE: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013.

FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema and revolutionary aesthetics in the past. See especially this bumper post and this more recent one. 

And you can find the two films quoted from above, in low-res online video versions, as per the details and links below.

• Free Radicals by Len Lye (1958). Online at: http://video.frieze.com/film/len-lye-free-radicals/
• La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (1968). Online at: youtu.be/jQOXKoMHOE0

More about → Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)

Corrected entry (February 12): FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media

'Snakes&Funerals' by Emily Jeremiah, James S. Williams and Gillian Wylde. Taking Jean-Luc Godard’s canonic film Le Mépris / Contempt (1963) as a starting-point, Snakes&Funerals set out to explore the queer possibilities of image and sound, especially of colour and of ‘straight’ repetition. First published in Frames, Issue 1, July 2012.

Film Studies For Free [thought it had] had a lovely surprise today. It found, through Google Scholar, that NINE full issues of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (including the most recent five issues) were freely accessible through the Digital Commons of its publisher Wayne State University Press. It jumped to the pleasing conclusion (encouraged by the use of the word Commons + free access), that this great journal had turned to open access publishing.

Then, on February 11, FSFF received a very courteously worded email with the following message from a very nice representative of Wayne State University Press:

Unfortunately, this journal is not open access, and we have no plans to make it so at this time. I'm writing to you so that you have the correct information about Framework. 

When you visited the site, BePress (administrator of Digital Commons) had not yet activated the toll-access barrier to the journal content. That was an error on our part, one that we have since rectified. Those who click on the links you have posted on your blog will not be able to download the article for free. Instead, a $5 fee is charged before access is granted. I apologize for the confusion [...].

$5 is much, much cheaper than most traditional "gated" online academic publication access, for sure. But FSFF must apologise to its readers -- who, up until a short while ago, will have been able to access contents for free -- for drawing a premature conclusion.

More about → Corrected entry (February 12): FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media

ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Framegrab from Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)

In his discussion of the work of Hal Ashby ['When is the Now in the Here and There?'], Aaron Hunter contributes to the emerging body of scholarship on the technique of “trans-diegesis”. Taking Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) as a case study, Hunter shows how Ashby’s use of trans-diegetic music—music that crosses narrative layers—forms part of a consistently playful approach to cinematic form and functions on several levels: as a tool that allows for a merger between moments in time, as a device to create a transition between incongruent events within the diegesis, or as mechanism to create a temporal confluence between apparently sequential events. [Alphaville, 3, 2012 Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine]

 
Once again, Film Studies For Free salutes the online journal Alphaville. Its latest issue, just out, treats the important topic of sound, voice and music in film and television and boasts some excellent contributions.

FSFF enjoyed them all, but particularly liked Michael Dwyer's The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film and Michael Charlton's Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical, along with the discussion of Hal Ashby's film by Aaron Hunter. There are also some great book reviews and rewarding conference reports, too, perhaps most notably James MacDowell's detailed discussion of  The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures.

All the contents are linked to below.


Alphaville, Issue 3, Summer 2012
Sound, Voice, Music Edited by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

• The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film by Michael D. Dwyer, Arcadia University
• Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical by Michael Charlton, Missouri Western State University
• When is the Now in the Here and There? Trans-diegetic Music in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home by Aaron Hunter, Queen’s University Belfast
• Beneath Sci-fi Sound: Primer, Science Fiction Sound Design, and American Independent Cinema by Nessa Johnston, University of Glasgow
• Cultural Innovation and Narrative Synergy in R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet by Ioana Literat, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
• Emotion Capture: Vocal Performances by Children in the Computer-animated Film by Christopher Holliday, King’s College London

Book Reviews Edited by Jill Murphy

• Media and Memory, by Joanne Garde-Hansen (2011) Reviewer: Elena Caoduro, University of Southampton
• Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, by Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong (2011) Reviewer: Fiona Lee, City University of New York – The Graduate Center
• Music Video and the Politics of Representation, by Diane Railton and Paul Watson (2011) Reviewer: Antonio Sanna, Università degli Studi di Cagliari (Italy)
• Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, by Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.) (2009) Reviewer: Penny Spirou, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia)
• Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores, by Peter Franklin (2011) Reviewer: K. A. Wisniewski, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)
• Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir, by Robert Miklitsch (2011) Reviewer: James A. Wren, San José State University

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Dysfunctionalities. Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Science (GfM) Postdam, Germany, 5-8 October 2011 Reporter: Patricia Prieto Blanco, Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema Montreal, Canada, 1-6 November 2011 Reporter: Daniel Fitzpatrick, DAH, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures University of Kent, Canterbury, 21-22 January 2012 Reporter: James MacDowell, University of Warwick

More about → ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Reassessing Anime: Japanese cinema and animation

Anime is a visual enigma. Its otherworldly allure and burgeoning popularity across the globe highlights its unique ability to be more than just another type of animation. Originally a novelty export from post-war Japan, anime has now become a subtle yet important part of Western popular culture. Furthermore, it remains a key area of audience and fan research that crosses all generations – children, teenagers, and adults. From Osamu Tezuka to Hayao Miyazaki, Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), anime’s extraordinary characters and oneiric content still enable it to be regarded as one of the most awe-inspiring visual spectacles going into and during the twenty-first century.
    Keenly aware of anime’s rich history, cultural and global context, and increasing presence and influence on Western art, literature and film, the theme of this issue of Cinephile is ‘Reassessing Anime.’ The six articles included herein aim to address and tackle some of the overlooked aspects of anime. Such a reassessment by each author hopes to encourage future academic scholarship into the evolution and value of anime and, moreover, its impact not only on film but also on TV, comic books, video games, music videos, and corporate marketing strategies. [Jonathan A. Cannon, Editor's Note, Cinephile, 'Reassessing Anime', 7.1, 2011. FSFF's hyperlinks]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the Spring 2011 issue of Cinephile, the excellent film journal edited out of the University of British Columbia, Canada, has just been made available for download for free as a single PDF file.

As signalled above, this issue is dedicated to "Reassessing Anime" and it features great, original articles by internationally renowned animation scholars Paul Wells and Philip Brophy, as well as illustrations by Vancouver-based artist Chloe Chan.

The issue's table of contents is given below, and below that, FSFF has also provided a handy, clickable index of its own popular posts on anime and Japanese cinema.

The latest issue of Cinephile, available for purchase now, is on Contemporary Realism. It features original articles by Ivone Margulies and Richard Rushton. There is also a call for papers on "The Voice Over".

• 'Playing the Kon Trick: Between Dates, Dimensions and Daring in the films of Satoshi Kon' by Paul Wells
• 'The Sound of an Android’s Soul: Music, Muzak and MIDI in Time of Eve' by Philip Brophy
• 'Beyond Maids and Meganekko: Examining the Moe Phenomenon' by Michael R. Bowman
• 'Reviewing the ‘Japaneseness’ of Japanese Animation: Genre Theory and Fan Spectatorship' by Jane Leong
• 'The Higurashi Code: Algorithm and Adaptation in the Otaku Industry and Beyond' by John Wheeler
• 'Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: Thinking Before the Act' by Frédéric Clément 

Film Studies For Free on Anime and Japanese Cinema

• On Japanese Cinema July 27, 2010
• Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) August 25, 2010
• 'Imaginary and Fantastic': Hayao Miyazaki Studies November 25, 2009
• Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources November 14, 2011
• Mickey Mouse and Animation Links November 18, 2008 
• War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction December 6, 2010

More about → Reassessing Anime: Japanese cinema and animation

Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

Last updated January 20, 2012

FSFF's entry for Press Play's VERTIGOED Contest.
Still three more days to submit your own entry!

A psychosexually obsessed man wanders the streets of 1950s San Francisco; he spies [on] seemingly unavailable blonde women; he makes a woman fall from a height; she drops into water; the scene is filled with circle imagery, especially circles within circles.....  [See the original sequence]

As Film Studies For Free's readers may have heard, Kim Novak, co-star of Vertigo, took out an ad in trade magazine Variety to protest about the recent use of an excerpt from Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film in Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 modern silent film The Artist. "I want to report a rape," went the headline. "I feel as if my body - or at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist," Novak wrote. She went on to criticise the “use and abuse [of] famous pieces of work to gain attention and applause for other than what they were intended.”

There was quite a strong international reaction to Novak's intervention. Some were dismayed by her recourse to the lexicon of rape; others were more sympathetic to her stance and background as someone very much not from the digital age of remix and creative appropriation; still others remind us that, in 'Scene d'Amour', the musical Vertigo theme in question, Herrmann was, of course, inspirationally reworking some of Richard Wagner's motifs from his Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Good artists copy; great artists steal?

Enter the story the PRESS PLAY blog which launched a contest inviting readers to re-use Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music in their own mash-up, inspired by the idea that "Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression."

Film Studies For Free's author was only too happy to have a go, joining the legions of those who, like Hazanavicius, have used Herrmann's music in their work, in large or very small ways. Her choice of film sequence? One borrowed from The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk's 1952 film noir, with its own, obsessed, wandering male protagonist and San Francisco setting.

The Sniper was one of the films that probably directly inspired Vertigo, as well as Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho -- see critic Dave Kehr's thoughts on this. The above mash-up chooses, then, to marry Herrmann's lush Wagnerian romance with the key 'amusement park' sequence from Dmytryk's brilliant film, with its astonishing performance of overt misogyny by Arthur Franz as Edward "Eddie" Miller -- perhaps the perfect, filmic, mirror-image of James Stewart's unforgettable, unconsciously misogynist, John "Scottie" Ferguson.

FSFF's author was excited to experience at first-hand the scholarly possibilities of remixing film clips in this way (the contest rules state that the original film sequence cannot be re-edited in any way -- except, if you choose to, by removing its sound -- in order not to cheat with the creative re-juxtaposition process).

Remixing is an astonishingly good (and amazingly easy) way of really -- almost literally -- getting inside a film sequence. It is thus a truly great exercise for all students of film with access to the right digital tools. Analysing just how the mash-up adapts the meaning of the original music and original sequence is rather educational and fun, too!

If you get your skates on with the Vertigo score exercise, there are still three days left for Press Play's contest entries. Click here to watch the (over 60) entries at present.

FSFF's favorite entry to the contest, so far, is a mash-up which, rather like its own, plays on the conscious or unconscious connections between an earlier film and Vertigo. It's Matthew Cheney's wonderful work with Mädchen in Uniform (the brilliant 1931 film by Leontine Sagan). But there are loads of other imaginative and highly satisfying remixes that you will enjoy checking out. UPDATE: the videographic legend that is Steven Boone just added a late Vertigoed entry which is FSFF's new favourite: a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

If you want to see even more brilliant, Vertigo mash-up work -- actually, a work of remix in a completely different, utterly sublime class -- you simply must check out The Vertigo Variations by remarkable critic-filmmaker B. Kite.

And, for more vertiginous sublimity, don't forget FSFF's very own Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo entry.

The Sniper's amusement park sequence without Herrmann's music

The original 'Scene d'Amour' sequence from Vertigo

The mash up video at the top of the post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, with non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in January 2012. 

More about → Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema

Blackmail, silent version (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Blackmail, sound version

Hitchcock's use of sound in Blackmail and Murder is important in three respects. As historical documents the two films overturn some accepted notions of what was technically possible in filming with immobilized cameras and uneditable sound systems. As personal documents they represent Hitchcock's first major experiments in combining sound and image in ways that would not subordinate pictures to dialogue. As films that extend Hitchcock's expressionistic interests into the sound era, they reveal Hitchcock's earliest efforts to use aural techniques to convey a character's feelings. In addition, Blackmail already establishes Hitchcock's predilection for integrating music and sound effects with plot and theme, and it introduces most of his favorite aural motifs. Both films are interesting historically, but Blackmail is the more successful work of art because its aural techniques and motifs are an integral part of a stylistic whole. [Elisabeth Weis, Chapter 2: "First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder", in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcocks Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 28]

A new academic year is upon us and Film Studies For Free's author is very happily gearing up to teach, inter alia, Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail for the umpteenth time.

It's a truly great teaching topic, one which usually takes off from the fact that Hitchcock converted his silent film to sound during its production. And it has very fruitfully inspired today's entry on scholarship about sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

There are some excellent, openly accessible resources linked to below, most notably Elisabeth Weis's wonderful book on this topic, now added to FSFF's permanent listing of online and freely accessible Film Studies e-books.

• Richard Allen, 'Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense Theory and Practice' in Allen, Richard, Malcolm Turvey (eds), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)

• Alan Andres, 'Telescope: A Talk with Hitchcock (1964)', The Bernard Herrmann Society, February 2000

• Giorgio Biancorosso, 'Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination', Echo, Volume 3 Issue 1 (Spring 2001)

• David Butler, 'The Days Do Not End: Film Music, Time and Bernard Herrmann', Film Studies, Volume 9 (Winter 2006)

• Stephen Deutsch, 'Psycho and The Orchestration of Anxiety', The Soundtrack, 2010

• Nathan Fink, 'The Sound of Suspense: an analysis of music in Alfred Hitchcock films', 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, University of Bologna, 2006

• Kurt George Gjerde, 'Bernard Herrmann A Celebration of His Life and Music', The Bernard Herrmann Society, April 1999

• Catherine Grant, 'Framing Fascination: Studies of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window', Film Studies For Free, February 16, 2011

• Catherine Grant, 'Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo', Film Studies For Free, November 22, 2010

• Stephen Husarik, 'Transformation of “The Psycho Theme” in Bernard’s Herrmann’s Music for Psycho', Interdisciplinary Humanities, 2009

• Amy Lawrence, 'Blackmail (1929)', in Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

• Richard Littlefield, '[Review of] Steven C. Smith. A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann', The Journal of Film Music, 1.2/3, 2003 

• Gary McCarron, 'Undecided Stories: Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and The Problem of Moral Agency', Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (2008) 65-80

• Stuart Y. McDougal, 'The Director Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock Remakes Himself', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998

• David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1'' and 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 2', Offcreen Journal, Vol. 12, 2008

• Ellen J. Nasto, 'Bernard Herrmann: An Annotated Index of Materials', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 1999

• Stephen Rebello, 'Sound in Psycho', excerpt from Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (London: St Martins Press (Trade); 1999)

• Nick Redfern, 'Hitchcock and shot scales', Research Into Film, November 18, 2010

• William H. Rosar, 'Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?', The Journal of Film Music, 1.2/3, 2003 

• Tom Schneller, 'Unconscious Anchors: Bernard Herrmann's Music for Marnie', Popular Music History Vol.5, Number 1, (2010), pages 55-104 

• Tom Schneller, 'Death and Love: Bernard Herrmann's Score for Vertigo', Cuadernos de musica, artes visuales y artes escenicas, Vol. 1, Number 2 (April-September 2005), pages 189-200

• Tom Schneller, '[Review of ] Jack Sullivan: Hitchcock’s Music', The Journal of Film Music, 2.1, 2007

• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbookand David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir', The Journal of Film Music, 2.1, 2007

• Jack Sullivan, 'Overture', Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006) 

• Constantine Verevis, 'Remaking Film', Film Studies, Vol. 4, Summer 2004 (pp 87-103)

• Steve Vertlieb, 'Herrmann and Hitchcock: The Torn Curtain', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 2002

• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

• Elisabeth Weis, 'The Sound of One wing Flapping', Filmsound.org, [date unknown]

• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007

• Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982)

• 1. Introduction (p 13)
• 2. First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder (p 28)
• 3. Expressionism at Its Height: Secret Agent (p 63)
• 4. Consolidation of a Classical Style: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (p 77)
• 5. Music and Murder (p 87)
• 6. The Subjective Film: Rear Window (p 107)
• 7. Aural Intrusion and the Single-Set Films (p 125)
• 8. Beyond Subjectivity: The Birds (p 136)
• 9. Silence and Screams (p 148) Appendix filmography

• Brian Wise, 'Bernard Herrmann: Remembering an Original who Changed Film Music',WQXR, June 30, 2011

• Bill Wrobel, 'The Nature of Bernard Herrmann's Music', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 2008

• Slavoj Zizek, 'Why Hitchcock is still our contemporary?', Alternative Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, 94-105, October 2010

More about → Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema

Latest five volumes of REFRACTORY: A Journal of Entertainment Media

Frame grab from Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002). Read Samatha Lindop's 2011 article on this film here. For another interesting, psychiatrically-informed account of Cronenberg's film, see here

Thanks to Adrian Martin (whose video version of his Ritwik Ghatak talk is now online, by the way), Film Studies For Free heard about the latest issue of the online Australian journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. And thanks to that, FSFF realised it hadn't really mentioned an issue of Refractory since Volume 14, 2009 in its entry on "Split Screens". So, below are direct links to all of the contents of this great journal since that issue. And FSFF promises not to be quite so pommily slow next time this journal publishes one of its characteristically excellent collections of film and media studies...

Refractory, Volume 19, 2011

1. Blockbusters for the YouTube Generation: A new product of convergence culture – Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller


2. ‘Out wiv the old ay plumma?’ The Uncanny Marginalized Wastelands of Memory and Matter in David Cronenberg’s Spider – Samantha Lindop


3. A Moving Image Experience: Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June-July, 2010 – Wendy Haslem


4. “A series of emotional remembrances”: Echoes of Bernard Herrmann -Daniel Golding


5. Don Draper On The Couch: Mad Men and the Stranger to Paradise – Mark Nicholls

Refractory, Volume 18, 2011

1. Editorial: Transitions in Popular Culture – Matthew Sini and Angie Knaggs  


2. “Never my soul”: Adaptations, Re-makes and Re-imaginings of Yeşilçam Cinema – Can Yalcinkaya  


3. Looking Past Seeing: Imaginative Space and Empathetic Engagement in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and There Will Be Blood – Elliott Logan


4. Struggling to find their place: Indigenous youth, identity, and storytelling in Beneath Clouds and Samson and Delilah – Samantha Fordham


5. Transgeneric Tendencies in New Queer Cinema – Matthew Sini


6. Before Priscilla: Male-to-Female Transgender in Australian Cinema until the 1990s – Joanna McIntyre


7. From Night and Day to De-Lovely: Cinematic Representations of Cole Porter – Penny Spirou


8. (Em)Placing Prison Break: Heterotopic Televisual Space and Place – Angie Knaggs


9. “Think Smart”: multiple casting, critical engagement and the contemporary film spectator – Nicole Choolun

Refractory, Volume 17, 2010

1. From Cult Texts to Authored Languages: Fan Discourse and the Performances of Authorship – Karolina Agata Kazimierczak


2. The Pinball Problem – Daniel Reynolds


3. The Invisible Medium: Comics Studies in Australia – Kevin Patrick


4. Acculturation of the ‘Pure’ Economy: Sci Fi, IT and the National Lampoon – Rock Chugg


5. Subversive Frames: Vermeer And Lucio Fulci’s SETTE NOTE IN NERO – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas


6. Ringu/ The Ring: Tracing the Analog Spirit in a Digital Era – Michael Fisch


7. Keaton and the Lion: A Critical Re-evaluation of The Cameraman, Free and Easy and Speak Easily – Anna Gardner


8. Rosy-Fingered Dawn: The Natural Sublime in the work of Terrence Malick – Dimitrios Latsis

Refractory, Volume 16, 2009

1. Editorial ‘All Your Base Are Belong to Us’: Videogames and Play in the Information Age : Tom Apperley and Justin Clemens


2. A Critique of Play – Sean Cubitt


3. ‘The code which governs war and play’: Computer games, sport and modern combat – Jeff Sparrow


4. Being Played: Games Culture and Asian American Dis/identifications – Dean Chan


5. “I’m OK”: How young people articulate ‘violence’ in videogames – Gareth Schott


6. How to Do Things With Images – Darshana Jayemanne


7. Myths of Neoconservatism and Privatization in World of Warcraft – Kyle Kontour


8. Babelswarm -Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash

Refractory, Volume 15, 2009

Double Issue: General Issue and Television Issue, Editors: Angela Ndalianis and Lucian Chaffey

1. Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne – Anna Notaro


2. The Neo-baroque in Lucha Libre - Kat Austin


3. Ryan Is Being Beaten: Incest, Fanfiction, and The OC – Jes Battis


4. Mobile Content Market: an Exploratory Analysis of Problems and Drivers in the U.S. – Giuseppe Bonometti, Raffaello Balocco, Peter Chu, Shiv Prabhu, Rajit Gadh


5. Televisual control: The resistance of the mockumentary – Wendy Davis


6. The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia - Stephen Rowley


7. Digital Intervention: Remixes, Mash Ups and Pixel Pirates – Amanda Trevisanut


8. The Bill 1984 – 2009: Genre, Production, Redefinition - Margaret Rogers


9. Guiding Stars – Carly Nugent

More about → Latest five volumes of REFRACTORY: A Journal of Entertainment Media

The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. (Also see Keathley's 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008)

 Richard Brody on Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1967)

Auteurism got film studies into the academy, but it was 1970s “semiotic” theory (with its amalgam of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) that secured film studies a position as a discrete discipline. With this critical shift, however, the obvious became obscure: for in effect, the semiotic approach rendered in need of interpretation many films that appeared transparent. But while films by directors like Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli seemed tailor-made for this method—with their implicit interrogation of the social relations of post-war life in America (bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual, capitalist)—Preminger’s films aren’t, due to their both narrative and stylistic approach. While Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli mounted their critique of American capitalist society indirectly, through their carefully designed mise-en-scène that communicated visually things that couldn’t then be addressed directly, Preminger took the opposite approach: addressing controversial social issues (sexual affairs, drug abuse, homosexuality) head- on, so that any “symptomatic” interpretation was rendered superfluous. The social issues under interrogation in Preminger’s films were not subtextual—they were the manifest content. Indeed, to point out that there is a subtext of incest in Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Bunny Lake Is Missing is merely to state the obvious. As a result, since the early 1970s, Preminger has been a severely under-examined filmmaker.  [Excerpt from Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Christian Keathley's video essay on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, part of an impressive body of scholarship on this director's films by this US based academic, that it immediately set to work on assembling an accompanying collection of direct links to other high quality and openly accessible studies of this filmmaker's oeuvre, as well as to one or two other interesting discussions of other directors' work which mention Preminger's films.

And below you have it. That is all. 

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985

• Michael Buchler, '“Laura” and the essential ninth: were they only a dream?', Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, v. 17, n. 29, julho a dezembro, 2006

• Mary Ann Doane, 'Scale and the Negotiation of “Real” and “Unreal” Space in the Cinema',NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 1, Number 20 (December 2008), 1-38

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Otto Preminger', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Noah Isenberg, 'Script Doktor', Bookforum, Jan/Feb 2008

• Oscar Jubis, 'From Suspicion to Trust: Biegler and Manion in Anatomy of a Murder', FilmLeaf, June 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 2007

• Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, 'Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality', Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 

• Ronny Loewy, 'Pure Flight or Exodus: Otto Preminger's film about Israel', First published in: Filmgeschichte. Newsletter der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Nr. 13, Juni 1999

• Miguel Marías, 'The Head and Eyes of Otto Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze', Undercurrent, Issue 3, 2006

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Camera Movement Revisited', 16:9, 2, 2009

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'The Shape of a Western- Visual Design in Winchester '73 and The Man from Laramie', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007 

• Martha P. Nochimson, 'Betty Grable Finally Dances... (That Lady in Ermine, Otto Preminger, 1948), Senses of Cinema, 5, 2000

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• David Ray Papke, 'From Flat to Round: Changing Portrayals of the Judge in American Popular Culture',  Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 31, 2006-2007

• Luca Prono, 'Whatever Happened to Nelson Algren ?: Otto Preminger’s Adaptation Of The Man with the Golden Arm', Links and Letters 6, 1999

• Dahlia Schweitzer, 'Who is missing in Bunny Lake?', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Valerie Stulman, 'Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions', Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, January 2007 

• Boris Trbic, 'Where the Sidewalk Ends', Senses of Cinema, 8, 2000

More about → The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

30 Online Film Studies Books and PhD Theses from OhioLINK

Image from When Night is Falling (Patricia Rozema, 1995), a film discussed by Jamie L. Stuart

Film Studies For Free shakes itself out of an uncharacteristic, unseasonal, hot-weather related torpor to bring you one of its regular reports (and lists of links) from a University research repository. Today, it's the turn of the utterly brilliant repository at the OhioLINK ETD Center, gathering theses and books (in bold below) by film studies scholars at Ohio State University, Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, and Case Western Reserve University.

As usual, these links will be added in due course to FSFF's permanent listings of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses and Open Access Film E-books List.

• Savas Arslan Hollywood alla Turca: A history of popular cinema in Turkey, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Dyrk Ashton, Using Deleuze: The Cinema Books, Film Studies and Effect, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, Imaging the Almeh : Transformation and Multiculturalization of the Eastern Dancer in Painting, Theatre, and Film, 1850-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents Through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rebecca H. Bias, From golden age to silver screen: French Music-Hall Cinema from 1930-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rose Mary Bremer, Screening gender and sexuality in contemporary Quebec film adaptation, PhD, Ohio State University, 2004

• Marie Katheryn Connelly, The films of Martin Scorsese: A critical study, PhD, Ohio State University, 1991

• Carolina Siqueira Conte, Bonds: A Theory Of Appropriation For Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice Realized In Film, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Stefan Hall, "You've Seen the Movie, Now Play the Game": Recoding the Cinematic in Digital Media and Virtual Culture, PhD, Ohio State University, 2011

• Cheryl Lynn Hindrichs, Lyric narrative in late modernism: Virginia Woolf, H.D., Germaine Dulac, and Walter Benjamin, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006 (available from May 19, 2011)

• Daniel O. Jones, The Soul That Thinks: Essays on Philosophy, Narrative and Symbol in the Cinema and Thought of Andrei Tarkovsky, PhD, Ohio University, 2007

• Se Young Kim, A Sociohistorical Contextual Analysis of the Use of Violence in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2010

• Joanna Klein, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays (1985)

• Yo-Hsin Cindy Liu, The Examination of the Appearance and Use of French Horn in Film Scores from 1977 to 2004, DMA Thesis, Ohio State University, 2005

• Cileine I. de Lourenco, Negotiating Africanness in national identity: studies in Brazilian and Cuban cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 1998

• Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question (1989)

• Denis Mueller, John Dewey and Documentary Narrative, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2007

• James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds), Understanding Narrative (1994)

• Rob Prince, Say Hello to My Little Friend: De Palma's Scarface, Cinema Spectatorship, and the Hip Hop Gangsta as Urban Superhero, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2009

• Barbara L. Romanczuk, Screening Zola’s women, PhD, Ohio State University, 2002

• John Edward Ryan, Ordinary people: The cinema of John Sayles, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, 1994

• Thibaut Schilt, Marginal pleasure and auteurist cinema: the sexual politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon, Ohio State University, 2005

• Lisa K. Stein, The Travel Narrative as Spin: Mitigating Charlie Chaplin's Public Persona in My Trip Abroad and "A Comedian sees the World", PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2006

• Joan Marie Titus, Modernism, socialist realism, and identity in the early film music of Dmitry Shostakovich, 1929-1932, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Maruta Zane Vitols, From the Personal to the Public: Juris Podnieks and Latvian Documentary Cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Stacey A. Weber-Fève, There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Marilyn Yaquinto, Policing the World: American Mythologies and Hollywood’s Rogue Cop Character, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Yi-hui Huang, An Interpretivist Study of Knowledge Provided by Seamless Digital-Synthesized Photographs, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Rui Zhang, Feng Xiaogang and Chinese cinema after 1989, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005 

More about → 30 Online Film Studies Books and PhD Theses from OhioLINK

Federico Fellini Studies

Richard Dyer talks about his research project at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) Weimar. Period of fellowship: February 2009 – July 2009. Also see Richard Dyer's IKKM-Site.

“What is a movie, in the beginning? A suspicion, a hypothetic[al] story, a shadow of ideas, blurred feelings. And, still, [from that] first impalpable contact, it already seems to be itself, complete, vital, pure.” (Federico Fellini, Fazer um filme (“Making a Movie”). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 2000., 204 and 205, translated by Marcelo Moreira Santos and cited by him in 'Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art', Signs, Vol. 3, 2009: pp. 30-40)

“The movie tells its worlds, its stories, its characters, through images. Its expression is figurative, like [that] of dreams. (...) The movie tries to reproduce a world, an environment, in a vital manner. It tries to remain in this dimension, trying to recreate the emotion, the enchantment, the surprise.” (Fellini, cited in op. cit. 139 and 154)

Inspired by the video, above, of the sublime Richard Dyer talking about "The Wind in Fellini" in simply one of the best Film Studies lectures currently available on the internet, Film Studies For Free today brings you some choice links to openly accessible, and high quality, studies of and further viewing on the work of director Federico Fellini, and of his collaborators, like Nino Rota (the subject of a wonderful new book by Dyer).

Just so you know, FSFF is off on a trip shortly and will be back, joyously labouring away to track down such wondrous links as these below, in just over a week. See ye efter!

• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010

• John Baxter, 'Juliet of the Spirits', The Criterion Collection: Notes, March 11, 2002

• Peter Bondanella, 'Federico Fellini: A Life in Cinema' - excerpt, The Films of Federico Fellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• Peter Bondanella, 'Amacord', The Criterion Collection: Notes, November 22, 1999

• Robert Castle, 'Orchestra Rehearsal Reconsidered: In which "Fellini takes us beyond our frailties and chaos', Bright Lights, Issue 40, May 2003

• Adrian Danks, 'Roma', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Richard Dyer, 'The Ending of 8 ½ (1963)', in James Walters and Tom Brown (eds), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (2010)

• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2010)  (27 free pages) Book info. 

• David Ehrenstein, 'La Strada', The Criterion Collection: Notes, March 7, 1988

• Federico Fellini, 'Nights of Cabiria', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 6, 1999

• Federico Fellini, 'And the Ship Sails On', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 27, 1999

• Manuela Gieri, 'Character and Discourse from Pirandello to Fellini: Defining a Countertradition in an Italian Context', QUADERNI d'italianistica Volume XHl. No. 1, 1992

• David Hannah (with Richard Dyer), 'Film composer Nino Rota's collaborations' (Viewing: 3:24), BBC website, August 31, 2010

• Tullio Kezich, '8¹⁄2: When "He" Became "I"', The Criterion Collection: Notes, December 3, 2001

• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

• David Lavery, 'News From Africa: Fellini-Grotesque', originally published in Post Script 9.1 and 2 (1990): 82-98

• Tony Maraini, 'An Interview with Federico Fellini', Bright Lights Journal, Issue 26, November 1999

• Todd McGowan, 'Fantasy and Showing Too Much', The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (Albany: State University of New York, 2007)

• Pu Miao, 'The Two Themes: Settings in Fellini's Films', Places, 7.3, 1991

• Marcelo Moreira Santos and cited him in 'Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art', Signs, Vol. 3, 2009: pp. 30-40

• Gary Morris, 'Nights of Cabiria', Bright Lights, Issue 22, September 1998 

• Catherine O'Rawe, '‘"I padri e i maestri": Genre, Auteurs and Absences in Italian Cinema', Italian Studies, 63.2, 2008

• Tom Piazza, 'I Vitelloni: A Trip to the Station', The Criterion Collection: Notes, April 23, 2004

• George Porcari, 'Fellini Goes To The Beach', Cineaction, Issue 75, 2008

• Megan Ratner, 'Knocking on Modernity's Door: Fellini's I Vitelloni." Bright Lights Film Journal, vol. 41, August 2003

• Dana Renga, 'Irony and the Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Fellini, Zanzotto and Casanova's Redemption', QUADERNI d'italianistica, Volume XX, No. 1-2, 1999 

• Sam Rohdie, 'Amarcord: Federico of the Spirits', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 4, 2006

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'The White Sheikh', The Criterion Collection: Notes, April 28, 2003

• Andrew Sarris, 'Variety Lights', The Criterion Collection: Notes, August 28, 2000

• Ajay Sekher, 'Ways of Seeing the Self, Subjectivity and History: Filmic Autobiographies, Biopics and Historicals', Academia.edu, date unknown

• Alexander Sesonske, '8¹⁄2: A Film with Itself as its Subject', The Criterion Collection: Notes, December 3, 2001

• Antonia Shanahan, 'Federico Fellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002

• Domenic Siracusa, 'Casanova, Marinetti and the Art of Seduction', Carte Italiane, 2.6, 2010

• 'Agnès Varda on Amacord', Viewing (10:49), BFI Live, May 5, 2010

• Marguerite Waller, 'Whose Dolce Vita is this anyhow? The Language of Feliini's Cinema', QUADERNI d'italianistica, Volume XI, No. 1, 1990

• Peter Wuss, 'Dreamlike Images in Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky’s The Mirror: A Cognitive Approach', Avila, Fall 2003

More about → Federico Fellini Studies

On Film Music and Digital Media

Film Music and Digital Media 
(Moderator: Martin Marks with Paul Seiko Chihara and Dan Carlin) MIT, April 2, 2009 (Running Time: 1:55:26)

Film Studies For Free really enjoyed the above highly insightful and well-illustrated video and it very much hopes you will, too. The discussion covers, with wit and great intelligence, many of the practical considerations that are part and parcel of contemporary film scoring. As it is quite long, the below text will let you know a little of what you can expect.

For more on film music studies, check out FSFF's entry "Music to the Eyes: Film Music Essays and Resources Online", as well as its other references to film music here.

About the Lecture

In a panel that at times resembles a late-night ramble and conversation, three film music professionals discuss changes in their industry, with some no-holds-barred dishing and kvetching.

Martin Marks sets the scene historically, starting with the revolutionary introduction of sound to film. He plays a clip from the original 1933 film King Kong, which he describd it hopes es as both a technological and aesthetic landmark of soundtrack production. Paul Chihara continues the story, explaining that the score’s creator, Max Steiner, was part of the first wave of film composers, classically trained musicians, fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Steiner drew on the music he knew best, the kind performed by the Vienna Staatsoper, for his King Kong score, so we get a movie that’s “wall to wall music, filled with leitmotifs,” played by a giant orchestra.

Cut to 2005, and the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. In what he describes as “an electro-acoustic seminar on how digitally sound is enhanced,” Chihara plays several clips of the same scene that demonstrate the evolutionary leap in soundtrack scoring since 1933. The process involves the demo track, a score with digital sampling and no acoustic instruments intended to help the filmmaker imagine how music will work with the film; next an acoustic score; and the final dub version, where acoustic and digital music sources combine, and the rest of the sound elements are added in post production (dialogue and sound effects).

The new scoring process can prove dangerous to composers, as Dan Carlin reveals. “We have a term called ‘demo love,’ describing how the director gets attached to the very first track offered by the composer.” This is a digitally sampled score often drawn from other composers’ work. The editor and director become accustomed to it, and test audiences watch films with demo tracks. “So the composer comes in with a new approach, and often gets fired at this point.” This has led to composers fearful of originality. Carlin says starting in the ‘90s, generic romantic and action scores began to emerge: “Everything starts to sound alike.” He also describes how composer Georges Delerue went to see Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and heard one of his own themes, which had started as a temporary music cue but then was essentially plagiarized. This led to a very lucrative law suit. Marks notes that “one of America’s film music geniuses,” Elmer Bernstein, essentially dropped out of the business because of the insistence on demo tracks over original music.

Panelists also bemoan the demise of orchestral recording sessions at production studios, as digital audio tools put the composer’s work in the hands of directors and editors, who play with increasingly authentic sounding software-based instruments. Companies are buying up the rights to the sounds of famous symphony orchestras, down to the staccato and legato notes of strings and horns in different keys and pitches. The craft involved in composing music, then conducting an orchestra through a movie scene, has become obsolete. Chihara concludes sadly, “It’s an unnecessary art.”

More about → On Film Music and Digital Media