Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kassabian, Anahid

Titel

Songs of subjectivities: Theorizing Hollywood film music of the 80s and 90s

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1994

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Film studies' resolute concentration on film as a visual art on the one hand, and music's commitment to the production and study of a high art canon on the other, have meant that scores are at best considered a minor feature of a film's world or of a composer's opus. From the position of a film perceiver, though, film music bears meaning and conditions identification processes in ways specific to it. Critically addressing the gap between filmic and musical forms of knowledge, this project examines music as a major component of filmic identification processes. Through analyses of scores based on popular songs and on symphonic Romanticism in the context of their films, I argue that different musics condition different kinds of identification processes, and that these processes cannot be accommodated by disciplinary knowledge in either film or music studies. Specifically, I suggest that the visual track should be unseated as the sole object of film studies, since sound and music have identification processes specific to them. Similarly, music studies' long-standing disagreements over the possibility of musical meaning take on a different timbre when considered in terms of film music. Finally, I propose assimilation as a model for identification processes; this model is informed by psychoanalysis but not beholden to it, and makes possible connections among many different processes of identity formation, without reducing one to another. In the closing chapter, I use this model of assimilation to suggest some ways that U.S. American nationalism circulates in contemporary Hollywood scores and their films, arguing that many discourses of identity condense at the site of the "nation" to exclude most residents of the U.S. from the symbolic citizenship that Hollywood proffers.