Changing Tunes: the Use of Pre-existing Music in Film * Film's Musical Moments * European Film Music
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjm027
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumo‘… it turns out that it was sound, not pictures, that made shocking television’. Writing for the New York Times on 2 January 2007, Alessandra Stanley described how ‘the background noise in a camera-cellphone recording of Saddam Hussein's execution – jostling and sectarian insults – belied the Iraqi government's portrait of the hasty hanging as a cool, considered meting of justice’. Perhaps the event's morbid gravity accelerated the sense of sudden discovery, but media interest surrounding silent vs sound versions of the hanging video simply foregrounded an overvaluation of visuality and underestimation of audibility common not only to media culture but perhaps also to our recollection of personal experiences. Silent images of the execution were freely distributed, making a later arrest for the unofficial video seem like a penalty for stealing a secret sound – a punishment indicating that, while images are usually the common currency, hearing had acquired a real worth to be coveted. The grotesque epiphany of an alternately silent and noisy snuff film suddenly exposes sound's potential existential and political intensity: ‘being there’ and ‘taking sides’. Under more usual circumstances, however, audition is still loaded symbolically and emotionally, even if it is far more complex and subtle. For some of us whose primary concern is understanding and creating auditory culture and experiences, the soundtrack offers more than a better understanding of film qua film. Cinema becomes a laboratory for probing hearing's place in culture, society and individual lives. Soundtrack studies grow useful not simply in engaging media, but also in mapping audition onto the landscapes of mundane experience: personal and social politics, identity, difference, sexuality and affect.
Referência(s)