The new soundtrack
Launched by Edinburgh University Press in March 2011, The new soundtrack (ISSN 2042-8855; EISSN 2042-8863) presents cutting-edge academic and professional perspectives on the complex relationship...
View ArticleTransnational cinemas
Recent shifts in global film cultures and how we understand them inspired Intellect Books to launch the journal Transnational cinemas (ISSN 2040-3534) in 2010. Dynamic new industrial and textual...
View ArticleThe day Herrmann’s score stood still
Bernard Herrmann’s score for Robert Wise’s The day the earth stood still (1950) is widely celebrated among film historians, and its use of theremins and other electronic instruments makes it the first...
View ArticleCitizen Kane and the Isle of the Dead
A five-note motive in Rahmaninov’s Ostrov mërtvyh (The isle of the dead, op. 29), which evokes the opening of the Dies irae melody used by Berlioz and Liszt, is strikingly similar to what Bernard...
View ArticleStravinsky and film
Although Stravinsky’s transplantation to the glamour-conscious culture of Los Angeles may have seemed completely out of character, he genuinely thrived there. Still, his inability to relinquish...
View ArticleFrogs and films
Spontaneously recorded music and natural noise, once they are chosen and ordered in a film’s soundtrack, acquire a dignity that was at first unexpected, entering into harmony, rivalry, and sometimes...
View Article“Something wild” and identity shifts
Jonathan Demme included excerpts from over 40 recorded songs in the soundtrack for his film Something wild. As a late–20th-century update of screwball comedies, traits common to the genre—shifts in...
View ArticleRandom film accompaniment
Soon after the Cinematograph Act came into force in 1909, small orchestras became more common in London cinemas than the lone pianist that some previous histories have identified. Rather than...
View ArticleCape Fear redux
For his 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film Cape fear, Martin Scorsese had the Bernard Herrmann score of the original adapted by Elmer Bernstein. The score was effectively re-composed for the...
View ArticleWerner Schroeter and Kulturscheisse
Schroeter’s films abound with the artifice, staginess, recontextualizations, and quotations typical of both camp and kitsch. His achievement in Der Bomberpilot (1970) involves overturning mainstream...
View ArticleABBA’s film renaissance
ABBA’s music has often been denigrated as bland, mass market pop. However, viewed from the point of view of reception, the ABBA phenomenon is a highly complex text that offers contemporary music...
View ArticleFilmMusik
In 2014 Edition text + kritik launched the series FilmMusik with Ennio Morricone, a collection of essays edited by Guido Heldt, Tarek Krohn, Peter Moormann, and Willem Strank. Compiled in the year of...
View ArticleJazz and early cartoons
Jazz and animation enjoyed an organic relationship in the developmental period for both forms. From the 1920s to the early 1930s jazz provided frequent animation soundtracks. For the most popular and...
View ArticleDumbo and psychedelia
Some commentators have suggested that the films of Walt Disney led to the emergence of the youth counterculture in the 1960s. The Disney film Dumbo (1941), particularly the sequence in which Dumbo the...
View ArticleBarbarella’s intergalactic lounge music
The soundtrack of Barbarella (1968) combines the popular lounge style of music from the 1960s with futuristic exotica to create a fun, sometimes psychedelic, experience that acts as a tool to propel...
View ArticleTritonal crime
In an experiment, over 100 listeners reported associations with crime and detectives when presented with musical examples that were not originally intended to evoke such responses. These examples all...
View ArticleSyrtaki redux
Though Greek people rarely perform it among themselves in their own country, where the dance is mainly a tourist attraction, the internationally renowned syrtaki choreography by Giorgos Provias from...
View ArticleÈjzenštejn, sound, and time
Sergej Mihailovič Èjzenštejn’s collaborations with Prokof’ev, along with his essays from the same period, illuminate the director’s reconceptualization of his editing practices in relation to the...
View Article2001’s visionary soundtrack
In the broadest sense, 2001: A space odyssey imbues the concept of music with the philosophical gravity it enjoyed in an earlier age, delineating the various planes on which the term once operated by...
View ArticleSchizophonic transmogrifications of Balinese kecak
Audio recordings of Balinese kecak performances are de- and re-contextualized in two landmark films: Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood simple (1984). Kecak’s use in...
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