Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"Affect and Film Music in Wildly Uncaring Circumstances"
Using DANCER IN THE DARK, BREAKING THE WAVES, MOULIN ROUGE, and THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, this article considers how film music operates in a post 9/11 landscape, in which Americans are encouraged to participate in particular affective and emotional ways. The four films demonstrate how popular music's emotional, affective pulls often fall in line with some of the wider affective responses encouraged through the country's "war on terror."
Published in Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia and Sound (Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna 2010).
"The music that Lola ran to"
Tom Tykwer's 1998 Run Lola Run was an international art film hit and put the young director, screenwriter, and composer firmly on the map. Its techno soundtrack contributed greatly to the film's hipness, and also established its frenetic sense of energy and pace. This essay explores the cultural and ideological underpinnings of that music, and argues that for as innovative as it seemed, the score also served some rather traditional and conservative functions, especially in terms of promoting the film.
Published in Sound Matters (Berghahn 2004).
"Strategies of Remembrance: Music and History in the New German Cinema"
During the 1970s and 1980s, the New German Cinema was part of the country's first large-scale attempt to come to terms with its recent past. This article examines how the music in these films participated in that project, paying special attention to the use of established, often canonical works such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Such "masterpieces" of German culture were often reproduced in fragmented or other distorting ways, as if commenting on the country's difficult relationship to its own past and sense of national and cultural identity.
Published in Music and Cinema (Wesleyan 2000).
“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Camp—an ongoing personal and intellectual fascination for me—is often linked to outdated, outmoded artifacts, beliefs, and people.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 first in the journal Camera Obscura (1996) and later in the anthology Camp, A Reader (University of Michigan Press 1999).
“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).
"Sound, Woman and the Bomb: Dismembering the 'Great Whatsit' in Kiss Me Deadly"
For decades, film noir has long fascinated critics and academics, but when this article was written, few film scholars paid much attention to the soundtrack, preferring to concentrate on the arresting visual style of these films. This piece (my very first publication) explores Robert Aldrich's bleak film noir, KISS ME DEADLY, whose sound track offers a way to push against that visual preoccupation and way of understanding. Alongside that focus, the article examines how gendered divisions informed the visual bias of noir scholarship of the time.
Published in Wide Angle (1986).
“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)
Using DANCER IN THE DARK, BREAKING THE WAVES, MOULIN ROUGE, and THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, this article considers how film music operates in a post 9/11 landscape, in which Americans are encouraged to participate in particular affective and emotional ways. The four films demonstrate how popular music's emotional, affective pulls often fall in line with some of the wider affective responses encouraged through the country's "war on terror."
Published in Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia and Sound (Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna 2010).
"The music that Lola ran to"
Tom Tykwer's 1998 Run Lola Run was an international art film hit and put the young director, screenwriter, and composer firmly on the map. Its techno soundtrack contributed greatly to the film's hipness, and also established its frenetic sense of energy and pace. This essay explores the cultural and ideological underpinnings of that music, and argues that for as innovative as it seemed, the score also served some rather traditional and conservative functions, especially in terms of promoting the film.
Published in Sound Matters (Berghahn 2004).
"Strategies of Remembrance: Music and History in the New German Cinema"
During the 1970s and 1980s, the New German Cinema was part of the country's first large-scale attempt to come to terms with its recent past. This article examines how the music in these films participated in that project, paying special attention to the use of established, often canonical works such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Such "masterpieces" of German culture were often reproduced in fragmented or other distorting ways, as if commenting on the country's difficult relationship to its own past and sense of national and cultural identity.
Published in Music and Cinema (Wesleyan 2000).
“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 first in the journal Camera Obscura (1996) and later in the anthology Camp, A Reader (University of Michigan Press 1999).
“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).
"Sound, Woman and the Bomb: Dismembering the 'Great Whatsit' in Kiss Me Deadly"
For decades, film noir has long fascinated critics and academics, but when this article was written, few film scholars paid much attention to the soundtrack, preferring to concentrate on the arresting visual style of these films. This piece (my very first publication) explores Robert Aldrich's bleak film noir, KISS ME DEADLY, whose sound track offers a way to push against that visual preoccupation and way of understanding. Alongside that focus, the article examines how gendered divisions informed the visual bias of noir scholarship of the time.
Published in Wide Angle (1986).
“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)