From The Shadows Of Film Sound

No matter what continent you are on, the distinct professional language of radio and television broadcasters and film and video makers remains the same. Still the only reference that is international in scope, The International Dictionary of Broadcasting and Film, Second Edition is a comprehensive guide to professional filmmaking and broadcasting terminology. Entries also include information on professional organizations, festivals and awards. Appendices contain tables of international television and film standards, frequencies and channels, and a list of national and international news agencies and their standard abbreviations. This book has been substantially revised and updated to include coverage of the new digital technology, plus information on the history of film and broadcasting. It is a valuable reference to professionals in broadcasting and filmmaking, as well to students in these fields.

This title surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (id est Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large.

The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, this work explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow,” which figures both the material reality of the screen image and its racist past. Discussing early “race subjects,” Alice Maurice demonstrates that these films influenced cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to determine the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book examines how motion picture technology related to race, embodiment, and authenticity at specific junctures in cinema’s development, including the advent of narratives, feature films, and sound. In close readings of such films as The Cheat, Shadows, and Hallelujah!, Maurice reveals how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film. Moving beyond analyzing race in purely thematic or ideological terms, Maurice traces how it shaped the formal and technological means of the cinema.

As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War.

By examining three case studies of award-winning soundtracks from cult films-Barton Fink (1991), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and The English Patient (1996)-it becomes clear that major American film communities, when confronted with the initial technological changes of the 1990s, experienced similar challenges with the inelegant transition from analogue to digital. However, their cultural and structural labor differences governed different results. Vanessa Ament, author of The Foley Grail (2009), rather than defining the 1990s as an era of technological determinism-a superficial reading-it is best understood as one in which sound professionals became more viable as artists, collaborated in sound design authorship, and influenced this digital transition to better accommodate their needs and desires in their work.

Silent films were, of course, never silent at all. However, the sound that used to accompany the screen picture in the early days of cinema has been neglected as an area of study. Altman explores the various musical, narrative, and even synchronized sound systems that enriched cinema before Jolson spoke.

Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.