Selected Articles
“The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Hollywood Cinema"
In the “golden days” of Hollywood film scoring—roughly from the mid30s to the early 50s, during the time of Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, and Max Steiner, —most background film music was composed in a neo-romantic style. Although many of the composers working for the studios were European émigrés who’d been trained in a late romantic style, this article digs deeper to explore some of romanticism’s aesthetic and ideological assumptions and the problems they created for composers working in the decidedly unromantic, highly regimented studio industry.
Originally published in and rights controlled by Cinema Journal (1990)
"Music and History in the New German Cinema"
The New German Cinema was a diverse film movement dedicated to examining Germany’s postwar connections to fascism, and to make publicly “visible” a past that many people (including government and big business) were trying to ignore during the movement’s peak in the late 60s to early 80s. Taking films of directors like RW Fassbinder, A Kluge, and H-J Syberberg, this article shows show how their innovative use of music enlists listeners to consider historical and political issues, such as Germany’s ongoing connection to the past, to Hitler, to fascist nationalism, and to fascist beliefs in ethnic and national purity, each director with different implications and results. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is singled out for detailed consideration.
Originally published in Music and Cinema (2000). Rights maintained by the publisher
“The `Problem' of Femininity in Theories of Film Music"
I was in graduate school when I published this article, which became the basis of future work, culminating in my first book, Strains of Utopia. The piece looks at how existing work on Hollywood music—be it from critics, composers, to the studio films themselves—tended to assign a feminine function to film music. It was supposed to be unnoticed, elusive, passive, and above all, “emotional.” In this article I examine some of the problematic aspects of that approach to music in the cinema.
Originally published in and rights controlled by Screen (1986)
“The Deaths of Camp”
Camp—an ongoing personal and intellectual fascination for me—is often linked to outdated, outmoded artifacts, beliefs, and people. All of these things are often deemed “past their prime” or otherwise “too much”: think of lava lamps, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Austin Powers, Joan Crawford, Cher. Nowhere is this more true when you think of the physical bodies of camp icons like John Waters’s Divine or “fat Elvis.” Not all camp is considered equal, and this piece looks at how its more vindictive, bitchy forms are imposed on certain human bodies more than others.
Published in the journal Camera Obscura (1996) and in the anthology Camp, A Reader University of Michigan Press (1999).