Books
Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman
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Author: Caryl Flinn Paperback: 556 pages Publisher: University of California Press; November 30, 2007 ISBN-10: 0520229428 ISBN-13: 978-0520229426 |
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Broadway star Ethel Merman's voice was a mesmerizing force and her vitality was legendary, yet the popular perception of La Merm as the irrepressible wonder falls far short of all that she was and all that she meant to Americans over so many decades. This marvelously detailed biography is the first to tell the full story of how the stenographer from Queens, New York, became the queen of the Broadway musical in its golden age. Mining official and unofficial sources, including interviews with Merman's family and her personal scrapbooks, Caryl Flinn unearths new details of Merman's life and finds that behind the high-octane personality was a remarkably pragmatic woman who never lost sight of her roots.
Brass Diva takes us from Merman's working-class beginnings through the extraordinary career that was launched in 1930 when, playing a secondary role in a Gershwin Brothers' show, she became an overnight sensation singing "I Got Rhythm." From there, we follow Merman's hits on Broadway, her uneven successes in Hollywood, and her afterlife as a beloved camp icon. This definitive work on the phenomenon that was Ethel Merman is also the first to thoroughly explore her robust influence on American popular culture.
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Strains of Utopia
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Author: Caryl Flinn Paperback: 212 pages Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 5, 1992) ISBN-10: 0691006199 ISBN-13: 978-0691006192 |
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Description: When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality.
Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.
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The New German Cinema
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Author: Caryl Flinn Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: University of California Press; (February 9, 2004) ISBN-10: 0520238230 ISBN-13: 978-0520238237 |
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Description: When New German Cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter raised issues of national, political, personal, and sexual identity in their films, music and film style had key roles. Most studies of this film movement sidestep music’s relationship to these concerns--a strange oversight given its importance to German culture and nation-formation. The New German Cinema reverses that trend, identifying different styles of historical remembrance in which music participates, concentrating on how films urged listeners to interact with difference---including Germany’s difficult past---rather than try to “master” or “get past” it.
Unlike other books, Flinn’s argues that the film scores encouarge filmgoers to interact with different historical issues, experiences, and even fantasies. It also takes into account the diverse audiences and reception frameworks that the films of the New German Cinema have had. Not everyone saw these films in Germany when they first came out in the late 70s and 80s, and some of the films have had quite extravagant afterlives. Each chapter of New German Cinema examines a different stylistic strategy used to explore national and personal identity, and assesses music’s role in each, giving special attention to queer strategies like kitsch and camp.
Author's note: One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in my life came from this book. I was able to meet and interview my favorite film composer, Peer Raben, who collaborated with Fassbinder on most of his films. The interview took place in Munich in 1998. We were assisted by an interpreter. Raben was still recovering from a stroke which affected his speech; that, along with compromised recording quality, created a number of blips in our exchange. Raben died in 2006. Read my interview here.
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Music and Cinema
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Editors: James Buhler , Caryl Flinn, David Neumeyer Paperback: 405 pages Publisher: New England Press; (September 1, 2000) ISBN-10: 0819564117 ISBN-13: 978-0819564115 |
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Description: Music and Cinema brings together leading scholars from musicology, music theory, film studies, and cultural studies to explore the importance of music in the cinematic construction of ideologies. The 15 essays include "Songlines: Alternative Journeys in Contemporary European Cinema" by Wendy Everett; "Strategies of Remembrance: Music and History in the New German Cinema" by Caryl Flinn; "Designing Women: Art Deco, the Musical, and the Female Body" by Lucy Fischer; "Kansas City Dreamin': Robert Altman's Jazz History Lesson" by Krin Gabbard; "Disciplining Josephine Baker: Gender, Race, and the Limits of Disciplinarity" by Kathryn Kalinak; "Finding Release: Storm Clouds and The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Murray Pomerance, and many more.
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