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2024年4月25日发(作者：)

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Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice:

Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s

The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and

Television

Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and

Cultural Context

Annette Davison. , Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the

1980s and 1990s. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 221 pp.

K.J. Donnelly. , The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. lLondon: British Film

Institute, 2005, 192 pp.

Carol Vernallis. , Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York, NY:

Columbia University Press, 2004, 341 pp.

Next Section

The last time a collection of screen music-related books was the subject of a Screen

review, the reviewer Simon Frith was moved to note each work's ,self-defeating …need to

draw attention to their subject's neglect’ as well as the very limited manner in which the

authors seemed ‘to be engaged with each other). 1 Judging by the books grouped together

in the present review, the scholarship in the area is now much more collegiate, and the

requirement on the authors to self-diagnose academic isolation seems to have become

unnecessary. Annette Davison, K.J. Donnelly and Carol Vernallis share a plethora of critical

references on music-image relationships, from Theodor Adorno to Philip Tagg and many

points in between.

A substantial canon of academic writing on music in narrative film now exists, and it can

no longer be claimed that music video is a scholarly blind spot (as Vernallis admits). Of the

various media formats discussed in the books under review, only television music remains

relatively under-represented academically (though Donnelly's two chapters on the subject

begin the process of addressing this absence).

In this context, the authors' task would appear to be to present alternatives to existing

work, or to bring new objects of study to critical light. All three studies make claims for

their own originality by referencing a model of ‘classical’ narrative film music practices: a

conceptualization of the soundtrack's role as fitting in with classical cinema's perceived

storytelling priorities. For all the books' individual merits, the regular recourse to notions

of the classical, even in the service of its refutation, raises interesting questions about the

possibility (or impossibility) of doing without such a concept entirely. Thus, these works

reveal the ‘classical’ to be a category as problematic yet insistent in writing on music-

image relations as it is in other areas of screen studies enquiry.

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As its title suggests, Davison's

Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema

Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s

ngages with classical film music theory most

explicitly. Indeed, about a quarter of the book is devoted to the explication of, first,

Classical Hollywood Cinema as it has been conceived academically, and second, the

classical scoring practice associated with it (which Davison sees revived in the so-

called ,post-classical’ Hollywood of the mid 1970s onwards). This provides the ground on

which Davison makes her key claim: The central argument of this book is that, by

operating as a signifier of classical - and, indeed, New Hollywood cinema - the classical

Hollywood score offered those making films outside and on the margins of Hollywood

cinema in the 1980s and 1990s a further means by which they could differentiate their

cinemas from Hollywood's, through the production of scores and soundtracks which

critique or refer to this practice in particular ways (p. 59). There follow close analyses of

four films whose soundtracks, according to Davison, refer to the classical model at the

same time as they offer an alternative. Through her sequencing of the case studies,

Davison outlines possibilities of alternative practice that range from a total deconstruction

of the classical soundtrack's conventional storytelling functions (as witnessed in Jean-Luc

Godard's

Prenom: Carmen

[1983]) to the identification of a scoring practice that mimics

certain aspects of the classical in its collaborative nature, yet provides a utopian alternative

to it (as seen through David Lynch's

Wild at Heart

[1990]). In between, she explores the

notion of the soundtrack as a ‘liberating’ force (Derek Jarman's

The Garden

[1990]), and

the potential for a compromise to be found between classical and alternative models (Wim

Wenders'

Wings of Desire

[1987]).

Davison's reading of each film is imaginative and very well detailed. She demonstrates a

particular facility for identifying, and ascribing a significance to, different types of sound

on the same soundtrack. This is done with particular success in her readings of

The

Garden

and

Wings of Desire

Her analysis does not seek to hide her evident musical

training, but, in nearly all cases, remains intelligible and persuasive to non-musicologists

such as myself (who will just have to accept the occasional use of musical notation as

pretty pictures).

It is questionable how much of the extremely comprehensive scene-setting undertaken by

Davison in the book's early sections is necessary for an appreciation of the individual film

analyses. Nevertheless, her summaries of discussions about classical and post- classical

Hollywood cinema and the classical film score are exemplary, and they are conducted with

a thoroughness which is understandable, perhaps, in a book which takes its place in the

publisher's Popular and Folk Music series rather than in a screen studies collection.

There remains a mismatch, however, between the concentration on Hollywood as an

institutional, industrial and ideological force in the early chapters of the book, and the

auteurist bent of the analysis that follows in later chapters. For example, the chapter

on ,New Hollywood cinema and (post-?) classical scoring’ concludes with statistical

information about US cinema's growth in the overseas market during the 1980s. Yet this

detail seems unnecessary in the light of the subsequent interpretation of the various non-

Hollywood soundtracks as

imaginative

responses to mainstream practices on the

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