European Film Music

Miguel Mera and David Burnand present a volume that explores specific European filmic texts, composers and approaches to film scoring that have hitherto been neglected. Films involving British, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish and Spanish composers are considered in detail. Important issues that permeate all the essays involve the working relationship of composer and director, the dialectic between the diegetic and non-diegetic uses of music in films, the music-image synergism and the levels of realism that are created by the audio-visual mix.

In the wake of World War II, the arts and culture of Europe became a site where the devastating events of the 20th century were remembered and understood. Exploring one of the most integral elements of the cinematic experience—music—the essays in this volume consider the numerous ways in which post-war European cinema dealt with memory, trauma and nostalgia, showing how the music of these films shaped the representation of the past. The contributors consider films from the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands, providing a diverse and well-rounded understanding of film music in the context of historical memory. Memory is often underrepresented within scholarly musical studies, with most of these applications found in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music cognition, and psychology and music therapy. Likewise, trauma has mainly been studied in relation to music in only a few historical contexts, while nostalgia has attracted even less academic attention. In three parts, this volume addresses each area of study as it relates to the music of European cinema from 1945 to 1989, applying an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how films use music to negotiate the precarious relationships we maintain with the past. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War offers compelling arguments as to what makes music such a powerful medium for memory, trauma and nostalgia.

Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe is the first collection to discuss the ways in which popular music has been used cinematically, from musicals to music videos to documentary film, in Eastern Europe from 1945 to the present day. It argues that during the period of state socialism, moving image was an important tool of promoting music in the respective countries and creating popular cinema. Yet despite this importance, filmmakers who specialized in musicals lacked the social prestige of leading 'auteurs' and received little critical attention. The resulting scholarly prejudice towards pop culture created a severe shortage of critical studies of the genre. With the fall of state socialism - and with it, the need for economically viable film and media industries - brought about an unprecedented upsurge of films utilizing popular music, and a greater recognition of popular cinema as a legitimate object of study. Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe fills the gap and demonstrates why the popular music-cinema interface needs to be theorized with respect to the political, ideological, and social forces invested in popular culture.

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

This edited collection explores how contemporary western European film can reflect on and contribute to discourses of conflict and survival in the new century.

Cinema is entertainment that also communicates a set of values and a vision of the world. This book explores the complex relationship between entertainment, ideology, and audiences from the Stalinist musicals of the 1930s through cinematic representations of masculinity under Franco, to recent French films and their Hollywood remakes. It covers film from the former Soviet Union, Germany East and West, Czechoslovakia, France, and Spain, and the relationship between Europe and Hollywood.

European Film Theory and Cinema explores the major film theories and movements within European cinema since the early 1900s. An original and critically astute study, it considers film theory within the context of the intellectual climate of the last two centuries. Ian Aitkin focuses particularly on the two major traditions that dominate European film theory and cinema: the "intuitionist modernist and realist" tradition and the "post-Saussurian" tradition. The first originates in a philosophical lineage that encompasses German idealist philosophy, romanticism, phenomenology, and the Frankfurt School. Early intuitionist modernist film culture and later theories and practices of cinematic realism are shown to be part of one continuous tradition. The post-Saussurian tradition includes semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

From The Artist to The White Ribbon, from Oscar to Palme d'Or-winning productions, European filmmaking is more prominent, world-wide, than ever before. This book identifies the distinctive character of European cinema, both in films and as a critical concept, asking: what place does European cinema have in an increasingly globalized world? Including in-depth analyses of production and reception contexts, as well as original readings of key European films from leading experts in the field, it re-negotiates traditional categories such as auteurism, art cinema and national cinemas. As the first publication to explore 'Europeanness' in cinema, this book refocuses and updates historically significant areas of study in relation to this term. Leading scholars in European cinema - including Thomas Elsaesser, Tim Bergfelder, Anne Jackel, Lucy Mazdon and Ginette Vincendeau - acknowledge the transnational character of European filmmaking whilst also exploring the oppositions between European and Hollywood filmmaking, considering the value of the 'European' label in the circulation of films within and beyond the continent. The Europeanness of European Cinema makes a lively, timely intervention in the fields of European and transnational film studies.