Search Results

Eisler’s writings on Hollywood film music are interpreted from three different vantages: initially from afar as a committed Marxist in Europe; later as an émigré in New York at the New School for Social Research supported by the Rockefeller Foundation on a study about film music; and finally as a film composer working in Hollywood. The discussion traces this intellectual progression, which eventually culminates in Composing for the Films, a politically controversial and infamous book written in collaboration with Theodor Adorno. The discussion interprets the book and its political ideology and treats the thorny question of authorship, the various editions, and the book’s publication history, as well as Adorno’s problematic role in the creation of the work.

In classical Hollywood practice a musical theme often plays over the opening credits and reoccurs periodically until the end of the film. But because film noir so often centers corrupt, endangered, or weak characters, the opening song can become closely associated with failed love and betrayal. By the end of the film, the song must disappear lest it contaminate the upbeat endings of Hollywood films. In Out of the Past (1947) and The Blue Gardenia (1953), love songs are associated with lovers until the affairs turn sour, at which time the songs effectively vanish. Robert Altman has fun with this tradition in The Long Goodbye (1973) by presenting a song that could conceivably be associated with lovers if only the film featured a real love affair. Altman is especially perverse in making sure that the song is never heard in its entirety. In all three films, the song is heard both diegetically and non-diegetically in a variety of treatments, everything from swing bands to mariachi bands to doorbell chimes to Muzak in a convenience store.

The introduction examines the significance and history of Alfred Hitchcock’s partnership with Bernard Herrmann. It also demonstrates the enduring appeal and legacy of the partnership in cinema from the 1970s onwards, especially as Herrmann worked with other directors steeped in the Hitchcock tradition.

This chapter considers dialogue in relation to the film soundtrack as a whole, arguing that careful approaches to dialogue in American independent cinema extend to include a creative strategy when combining dialogue, music and sound effects. Analysis of the interaction of music and sound effects with dialogue includes: how musical choices made by characters are verbally contextualised, and how indie filmmakers blur the boundaries between sound effects and dialogue. It is argued that by incorporating portions of inaudible dialogue, American independent cinema can position audience members as eavesdroppers rather than sanctioned listeners – calling on us to listen selectively, and engaging us in the process. The chapter extends Claudia Gorbman’s concept of ‘melomania’ by thinking about characters’ discussion of music as related to her focus on music loving directors. The examination of the integrated soundtrack also considers lyrical speech in relation to polyglot (multilingual) cinema and repetition. Through a case study of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), the chapter also theorises the links between both language and music as markers of time.

The study of pre-existing music confirms the poetics and politics of these films come together in the very contemporary notion that everything, notably art and identity, is a re-representation. If the songs featured on the original motion picture soundtracks have unquestionably played an important role in constructing the Tarantino brand as an emblem of cool retro, their functions in the films have always been varied and complex: reinforcing and establishing structural and thematic relationships (notably regarding character relations), endowing specific scenes with a certain tone or emotional ambience, and also highly contributing, on a metafictional level, to the political subtexts by way of intertextuality.