Final Music

The Thin Blue Line

(1988; dir Erroll Morris, music Philip Glass)

2001: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

(dir. Ang Lee, music by Tan Dun) -won the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score

Cinema Paradiso

(dir. Giuseppe Tornatore, music by Ennio Morricone) -a film that exoticizes the past and normalizes life in a post WWII Italian town -the music plays a major role in a study of multiple contexts: real life vs filmed life, Italian film, and how movies in general can create a believable yet fantastic world

minimalism

- a style originating in the USA in the 1960s in strong opposition to modernism -pared-down means of composition -no sense of time-oriented direction: stasis and repetition replace the melodic lines, tension and release, and climaxes of conventional tonal music -a reaction against modernism: minimalism is tonal or tonal or modal where Modernism is atonal, rhythmically regular and continuous where Modernism is aperiodic and fragmented, structurally and texturally simple where Modernism is complex

Bollywood films, contrasting with Indian "art cinema," operate at the levels of narrative and of spectacle

- in a cinema tradition that prioritizes emotional engagement over realism, there is no need to legitimate musical performance through such elaborate devices as a show within the film, as in some Hollywood musicals - the scale of a dance number can symbolize the degree of a hero and heroine's love for each other - Bollywood song picturizations strongly influenced by style of MTV, which arrived in India in 1993

preexisting songs used in Wong's Fallen Angels

-Because I'm Cool -Only You -Go Away from the World -Speak My Language -Wanj Ji Ta -Simu de Ren

shifting movie genres from Hong Kong

-Cantonese opera -detective Charlie Chan movie series -martial arts films -1960s and 1970s: rise of the superstars (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) -1980s: action films (John Woo) -1990s stylized art-house movies by Wong Kar Wai and Ann Hui

audience interaction

-Philip Glass Ensemble: brass, winds, singers, and farfisa keyboards -film influenced later commercials and music videos

For Americans, filmic-musical exoticization began in the 1950s

-biblical and distantly places epics (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia) -films by Federico Fellini (La Strada, La Dolce Vita) -Bollywood (Bombay) and films about India (Gandhi 1988)

Indie movies often

-fragment narrative and eschew narration -accentuate low production values, DIY aesthetics -emphasize whimsicality and quirkiness (individuality of style) -stress single moments over any story -often rely on compilation soundtracks rather than traditional nondiegetic scoring -rely on music, sometimes by single songwriters, to provide continuity and cohesion -emphasize the mediated materiality of the music (as played on cheap equipment, old scratch LP2

Bollywood musicals

-length, much longer than Hollywood movies -music made first, story second -playback singing, actors not actually singing -Bollywood music has replaced the face of Indian music

The New Millennium

-minimalist styles in film and music -new overlaps between film and concert music -more electronic music in film and TV scores

Reasons for reemergence of compilation soundtracks

-suffering finanical problems in the late 1960s, studios aim for the lucrative but underdeveloped youth market -they recruit a young "film school generation" and give them new degrees of artistic license; for some directors, music became a crucial aspect of their personal cinematic style -industry recession also encouraged studios to form closer ties with the music industry; compilation soundtracks coincide

filmakers and composers can decide to

-use a Western style only (romantic, modern, popular) -reflect setting with ethnic elements in diegetic music -add ethnic instruments to the (western) studio orchestra -use musical aspects of the other culture in the underscoring -create an entirely and believably "authenic" score

Easy Rider

1969, dir Dennis Hopper, music by Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Byrds, Steppenwolf, The Electric Prunes, Roger McGuinn -iconic late 60s counterculture film, same year as Woodstock

Altered States

1980 dir. Ken Russell, music by John Coriliano

The Red Violin

1998, dir. Francois Girard, music by John Corigliano

The Hours

2002, dir. Stephen Daldry, music by Phlip Glass

Lost In Translation

2003, dir Sofia Coppola music supervisor Brian Retizell, choosing songs by Kevin Shields, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Squarepushes, The Pretenders

Slumdog Millionaire

2008, dir. Danny Boyle -is an essay in mainstream Hindi cinematic themes

Phillip Glass

American composer, early pioneer of minimalism in the concert hall, the theater, and movie scores

music-video-style moment in Blue Velvet

Ben lip-syncs Roy Orbison's In Dreams to Frank; Frank ruthlessly beat Jeffrey to In Dreams

Lost in translation karoke scene

Charlotte sings Pretenders "Brass in the Pocket" Bob picks Costello arrangement of Nick Lowe's "What's So Funny Bout Peace, Love and Understanding"

Cong Su

Chinese conservatory-trained composer of art music, now teaches in Germany

Gu zheng, erhu, pipa

Chinese zither, Chinese two-string fiddle, Chinese verical lute

a revival of animated features

Disney Studios begin a comeback with The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991)-scores mostly by Alan Menken, who began his career in Broadway musicals

And these Disney animated movies have in turn come back as Broadway shows

Disney-produced musicals have the most successful run after Andrew Lloy Webber's last smash hit in 1986 (Phantom of the Opera)

Fallen Angels

Do Lok Tin Sai, 1995, dir Wong Kar-Wait, songs by Laurie Anderson, The flying Pickets, Marianna Faithful -is equal parts music video, film noir, hard boiled action flick, and absurdist student art-film project

a few famous earlier generic HK films

Enter the Dragon (1973), Fearless Hyena (1979), A Better Tomorrow (1986)

The Little Mermaid (1989)

Hans Christian Anderson's tale given a happy ending and contemporary songs ranging from English folk to French cabaret, lively Caribbean, Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and showstopping Broadway "Under the Sea": Oscar-winning song in calypso style

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Japanese techno star, pianist and composer, now primarily a film composer using world music, samples, musique concrete, glitch and orchestra

Disney's Beauty highly influenced by French director

Jean Cocteau's romantic-surrealist film Belle et la Bete

John Corigliano

New York Composer of modernist-cinematic-phantasmagoria convert works and film scores and (in the case of The Red violin) a film score that has become a concert work

two famous early music videos of the non-action, visually-oriented type

Queen-Bohemian Rhapsody, Sinhead O'Connor Nothing Compares 2 U

David Byrne

Scottish-American art-pop composer, with a taste for dada; spearheaded late 197-s New Wave pop as original member of the Talking Heads

Bollywood films incorporated diverse influences

Shakespeare, Persian lyric poetry, Indian folk traditions, and Sanskrit drama; they involve operatic structures integrating songs into the narrative, dominant genres being the historical, mythological, and romantic melodrama

China as exoticist kitsch

Shanghai Express (1932) The Good Earth (1937)

first Hong Kong film made in 1909

Stealing the Roast Duck, as an offshoot project of the Shanghai movie industry

early compilation score examples

The Last Picture Show (songs by Hank Williams, Tony Bennett, Lefty Frizell, Pee Wee King, and Frankie Laine), American Graffitit (songs by the Big Bopper, Chuck Berry, Flash and the Cadillacs, the Flamingos, the Platters, the Diamonds, )

among the postmodern allusions in The Matrix:

Trinity's rooftop chase sequence, which references Hitchcock's Vertigo

Pulp Fiction

Vincent and Mia dance to Chuck Berry's "You can Never Tell" (only point in the film where narrative and music are fully integrated)

the east-west hybridity of Tan's music reflects the huge impact

Western art music had on him starting in the late 1970s

Happy Together

Wong Kar-Wai, 1997

Tan Dun

a composer "swinging and swimming freely among cultures" Tan has drawn inspiration from nature, Chinese philosophy and his childhood memories of folk music during the Cultural Revolution

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001, dir. Karan Johar; songs by Jatin Lalit, Sandesh Shandilya, and Aadesh Shrivastava)

a family struggles to accept their adopted son's marriage to a girl of a lower cast -11 songs

subculture

a group or class of lesser importance or size with specific beliefs, interests, or values different from those of the general culture

popular Hindi films tend toward melodrama

a narrative genre featuring sharp oppositions of good and evil, obvious displays of emotions, and moral rather than psychological conflicts

By the end of the 1970's,

a new practice had emerged, one that significantly challenged the sound, purpose, and authorial control of a conventional orchestral score

counterculture

a radical culture, esp amongst the young that rejects established social values and practices; a mode of life opposed to the conventional or dominant

Cameron returns to the disaster-movie genre of the 1970s, only with a huge production budget

adds a Romeo and Juliet love story representing classic differences

song sequences form

an extra narrative funciton of linking a film to Indian tradition, often quoting classical performances or depicting religious imagery

Indie

an independently produced film; by extension applied to other individuals and institutions, as distributors or cinemas, engaged independently in film or television

in the 1970s, world music became an important marketing term for commercially available music of non-Western origin and circulations, as well as musics of dominated ethnic minorities within the Western world

as discussed originally by ethnologists, "world musics" contested the idea -world music contested idea that the only music of value was Western art music

Bollywood movies commonly reference Hollywood musicals

but there is no such things as a Bollywood musical-most popular Hindi films could be called musicals in some way

blue velvet becomes a fetish for Frank Booth and a song about innocent love becomes a symbol of murder and perversion

by using the same song to represent both wholesomeness and perversion, Lynch musically signifies both worlds as fantasy

Lynch relies heavily on sound as well as songs

calls music just "another effect" and says he love to "push the pressure" in a scene sending a lot of stuff to the subwoofer

auteur idea starts by French critics and then American critics in 1960s

decades later (in the 1980s) a new kind of auteurism starts under the influence of music videos: these cinematic stylizations are music inspired and music based -David Lynch and Tarantino give pop songs that kind of centrality once reserved for the script

The Last Emperor 1987

dir. Bernardo Beertolucci; music by Ryuichi Sakamato, Cong Su, David Byrne

American Graffiti

dir. George Lucas, nostalgia is for early rock 'n' roll: The Big Bopper, Chuck Berry, Flash and the Cadillacs, the Flamingos, the Platters, the Diamons, and the Monotones

Koyaanisqatsi

dir. Godfrey Reggio, music by Philip Gass -unusual genre of "non-narrated documentary" -Glass's repetitive, ultra-tonal, minimalist score as analogy to structural rhythms of this pioneering non-narrative film (both music and film styles require a new kind of audience interaction)

Titanic (1997)

dir. James Cameron, music by James Horner

Stranger than Paradise

dir. Jim Jarmusch, music by John Lurie -Eva play and replays a tape of Screamin' Jay Hawkin's "I put a Spell on you" Lurie's original nondiegetic music is scored for string quartet

Raging Bull

dir. Martin Scorsese

Magnolia

dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, songs by Aimee Mann Anderson Anderson: the film "came out of" Mann's song -extreme metadiegetic music moment in Magnolia: all the characters separately start singing Aimee Mann's "Wise up"

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

dir. Peter Sollett, songs by Chris Bell, Devendra Banhart, Bishop Allen, Vampire weekend, The Dead 60s

Nashville

dir. Rovert Altman

Run Lola Run (1998)

dir. Tom Tykwer, music by Tykwer -robbing a store scene: synthesized techno scoring, independent of the screen action

The Matrix (1999)

dir. Wachowski brothers; music by Don Davis -slick dystopian futurism, with a musical score combining minimalism, techno, and heavy metal

The Exorcist

dir. William Friedkin

minimalism preserves a

distance with the onscreen emotional and narrative content

Tarantino loves using California surf music

eg Dick Dale and Del Tones, for its distinct kind of musical intensity of style"- becomes signature sound for Pulp Fiction

Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou (1990)

first mainland Cinese film nominated for a foreign language Oscar

Tarantino's "situational use" of music

he has characters choose and celebrate songs (Mr. Blonde picks just the right music for torturing Marvin in Reservoir Dogs)

Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch: music by Angelo Badalamenti)

including Bobby Vinton's gong "Blue Velvet"), Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", Ketty Lester's "Love Letters"

Indexical signs

indicates things that are not visible in themselves: a fever indicates sickness, dark clouds in the west are an index of impending rain, (when it does signify, music signifies most often through indexical signs)

"Song and dance number" in Hollywood

is in Bollywood called "song picturization"

classic Hollywood film and film musicals have come to represent

mainstream film-making and American commercialist values

Kill Bill 2

music from old spaghetti westerns, country songs, Bernard Herrmann scores, Japanese pop guitar, martial arts flicks

With new auteurs of the 1980s and after

music is involved with the widening gap between script and cinematic experience (the script is no longer the central, all-determining aspect of the film)

ellipt for 'indie music'

music typical of independent record labels, freq characterized as unpolished or uncommercialized

Films that are specifically about music, musicians, or musical performance are called

musicals by Hindi filmakers

music-video-inspired auteurs

new audiovisual techniques (ex. rapid montage, edits, crosscutting) became inextricable from music -speeds of event raised or lowered -demphasis of traditional aspects of narrative and characterization -obliterating time and place -instead, a new concentration on situation -heightening of iron and ambiguty

auteur idea

notion that a film can be defined stylistically by a single cinematic "author" usually the director

exotic

of or pertaining to, or characteristic of a foreigner, or what is foreign (now rare), hence outlandish, barbarous, strange, uncouth (or strange and glamorous)

Bollywood

prolific and box-office oriented popular Hindi language film industry situated in Bombay (renamed Mumbai)

Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is an example of

recent films showing a "music video aesthetic" in which "musical moments not only break narrative continuity, they are also frequently self-consciously non-realist in style" (Tincknell & Conrich)

the Disney formula:

recreating a classic fairy tale with a strong female role, comic sidekicks, casting of well-known entertainers as voice actors, and new and engaging songs

These films displayed a growing diversity of rock n roll styles

reflecting an audience that was increasingly fragmented into discrete demographics and giving the score and soundtrack album broader appeal

the mainstream is constatnly

responding and incorporating subcultures and countercultures (including indie films and music)

scene: the English master and Pu Yi having lunch

scored by Cong Su, using mostly Chinese instruments

scene: Pu Yi tries to escape the Forbidden City to see his dead mother

scored by Sakamoto and Byrne

in classical Hollywood studio practice, music gives voice to the sentiments and insinuations that the

script cannot

the kung fo dojo training between Neo and Morpheus:

seamless integration of Asian percussion (Japanese taiko and gong) techno (from Lunatic Calm) and minimalist orchestral underscoring

the compilation soundtrack

selecting and fathering music from preexisting, often varied, sources -new practice of selecting and placing music in film; identified in the 1960's and 70's as a form of youth culture -compiled soundtracks, contrasting with original scores by using music with a host of extrafilmic associations, had broad allusive powers that added to a film's narrative power

symbolic signs

something signifies by convention: punctuation marks, traffic signs, national flags, etc

Bollywood films usually function as song collections for an audience that sources its popular music through films

songs are in simple style and serve as the starting point even the raison d'etre, prioritized over the visuals, and usually filmed before the rest of the movie, become stand-alone set pieces in the film

orientalism

the West exoticizing the East

exoticism

the charm and allure of the unfamiliar

Be Our Guest sequence references

the elaborate Busby Berkley dance routines

Hindi films tend to be much longer than Western movie because of

the episodic nature of the narrative and the inclusion of song sequences, comic interludes, and subplots -popular Indian cinema as a "cinema of interruptions" where elements such as song sequences and the interval interrupt the narrative

the distinguishing feature of popular Indian cinema

the ever present song-and-dance routines

Iconic signs

the sign resembles or imitates its signified object in that it possesses some of its qualities: a cartoon, sound effects, a statue, etc

idea of the gaze

the visual manifestation of power; one who looks is in a position of power over one who is looked at (domination of the male gaze, western gaze, white gaze) -The Last Emperor makes a case for the exoticizing gaze as a mode native to the movie camera

even more than the classic Disney animated features,

there movies are patterned after Broadway reviews

exoticize

to make something exotic

David Lynch

uses popular music not simply as an old-fashioned cue for fantasy (Over the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz) but as a screen upon which fantasy is projected

Horner's score is both orchestral and synthesized

uses representative themes (Leitmotifs) that aren't transformed

songs have a variety of functions in a compilation soundtrack:

• to authenticate the film's time and setting (the music typically fragmented and distorted, coming from car radios and jukeboxes • foregrounding the music, using whole songs In extended montage sequences, letting the lyrics speak for characters, or commenting on screen action • in the case of classical compilations, the music also often follows scoring conventions by being placed "under" action or dialogue to set a mood or tone for a scene.