Description
Book SynopsisFrom the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. This title aims to fill this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.
Trade Review“
Soundtrack Available represents a great leap forward in the analysis of film soundtracks. It is a smart, lively book that moves nicely between the detailed analysis of individual cases and broader, theoretical issues. The editors are to be commended for a collection which covers so many historical periods and national cinemas, and for staking out exciting new directions for scholarship. At the same time, this is a compelling, refreshingly jargon-free read for the non-specialist interested in film, music, or media.”—Will Straw, McGill University
“From Bollywood to Hollywood, Wim Wenders to Wong Kar-Wai, popular music permeates movies. Rigorous scholarship has finally begun to catch up with this phenomenon to make sense of its rich and varied cultural meanings. Wocjik’s and Knight’s first-rate collection is muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity.”—Claudia Gorbman, University of Washington
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Overture / Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojcik
I. Popular vs. “Serious”
Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition / Rick Altman
Surreal Symphonies: “
L’Age d’or and the Discreet Charms of Classical Music / Priscilla Barlow
“The Future’s Not Ours to See”: Song, Singer, and Labryinth in Hitchcock’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much / Murray Pomerance
“You Think They Call Us Plastic
Now . . . “: The Monkees and
Head / Paul B. Ramaeker
II. Singing Stars
Real Men Don’t Sing Ballads: The Radio Crooner in Hollywood, 1929–1933 / Allison McCracken
Flower of the Asphalt: The
Chanteuse Realiste in 1930s French Cinema / Kelley Conway
The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema / Neepa Majumdar
III. Music as Ethnic Marker
Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The “Jewish” Case / Andrew P. Killick
Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film / Barbara Ching
Crossing Musical Borders: The Soundtrack for
Touch of Evil / Jill Leeper
Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha’s
I’m British But . . . and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities / Nabeel Zuberi
IV. African American Identities
Class Swings: Music, Race, and Social Mobility in
Broken Strings / Adam Knee
Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in
The Bridges of Madison County / Krin Gabbard
V. Case Study: Porgy and Bess
It Ain’t Necessarily So That It Ain’t Necessarily So: African American Recordings of
Porgy and Bess as Film and Cultural Criticism / Arthur Knight
“Hollywood Has Taken On a New Color”: The Yiddish Blackface of Samuel Goldwyn’s
Porgy and Bess / Jonathan Gill
VI. Contemporary Compilations
Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre / Corey K. Creekmur
Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema / Jeff Smith
VII. Gender and Technology
The Girl and the Phonograph; or the Vamp and the Machine Revisited / Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
