Pub Date : 2021-09-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0002
Daniel Bishop
Bonnie and Clyde’s soundtrack dramatizes a conflict between historicity and the temporal immediacy of lived experience. The film’s sound design offers a self-reflexive meditation on the photo- and phonographic capturing of human presence through mechanical mediation. This capturing, the author argues, functions as a metaphor for historical narrativity, a confining discourse to which the film seeks alternatives through a stylistic language drawing upon both visceral realism and ephemeral abstraction. Bonnie and Clyde’s unique bluegrass pop score extends the soundtrack’s larger concern with sensory immersion and mechanized, alienating distance, allowing the film to acquire a countercultural cachet suggestive of the “Happening,” a concept from avant-garde art that was broadly appropriated as a way of understanding of the popular zeitgeist.
{"title":"Bonnie and Clyde and the Aural Imagination of American Counterculture","authors":"Daniel Bishop","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Bonnie and Clyde’s soundtrack dramatizes a conflict between historicity and the temporal immediacy of lived experience. The film’s sound design offers a self-reflexive meditation on the photo- and phonographic capturing of human presence through mechanical mediation. This capturing, the author argues, functions as a metaphor for historical narrativity, a confining discourse to which the film seeks alternatives through a stylistic language drawing upon both visceral realism and ephemeral abstraction. Bonnie and Clyde’s unique bluegrass pop score extends the soundtrack’s larger concern with sensory immersion and mechanized, alienating distance, allowing the film to acquire a countercultural cachet suggestive of the “Happening,” a concept from avant-garde art that was broadly appropriated as a way of understanding of the popular zeitgeist.","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"200 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114370209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0006
Daniel Bishop
As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.
{"title":"Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence","authors":"Daniel Bishop","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127348971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0004
Daniel Bishop
In Chinatown, Jerry Goldsmith’s score negotiates conflicting senses of mythic atemporality and expressive immediacy. The score draws upon avant-garde sounds, a “presentist” gesture that allegorizes the film’s tale of corruption for the world of the seventies, negating the “period” quality associated with genre pastiche. At the same, a jazz-inflected main theme and director Roman Polanski’s neoclassicist formalism balance seventies allegory with a sense of “pastness.” The tension between these two dimensions of the score suggests a mythic suspension of temporality, whereas the elemental connotations of musical timbre (water, earth) convey the film’s atmosphere of paranoia with discomforting immediacy. Drawing upon philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s work on the phenomenology of elemental images within the poetic imagination, this chapter attempts to understand musical timbre as a form of mythic immanence that allows us imaginative access to modernity’s terrors, whose actuality we must wrestle with in order to claim a position of ethical engagement.
{"title":"The Mythic Elements of Chinatown","authors":"Daniel Bishop","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"In Chinatown, Jerry Goldsmith’s score negotiates conflicting senses of mythic atemporality and expressive immediacy. The score draws upon avant-garde sounds, a “presentist” gesture that allegorizes the film’s tale of corruption for the world of the seventies, negating the “period” quality associated with genre pastiche. At the same, a jazz-inflected main theme and director Roman Polanski’s neoclassicist formalism balance seventies allegory with a sense of “pastness.” The tension between these two dimensions of the score suggests a mythic suspension of temporality, whereas the elemental connotations of musical timbre (water, earth) convey the film’s atmosphere of paranoia with discomforting immediacy. Drawing upon philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s work on the phenomenology of elemental images within the poetic imagination, this chapter attempts to understand musical timbre as a form of mythic immanence that allows us imaginative access to modernity’s terrors, whose actuality we must wrestle with in order to claim a position of ethical engagement.","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122901117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0005
Daniel Bishop
Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.
{"title":"Radio, Memory, and the Past in the Nostalgia Film","authors":"Daniel Bishop","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130042255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0003
Daniel Bishop
The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.
{"title":"The Revisionist Western and the Mythic Past","authors":"Daniel Bishop","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932688.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115747299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501736896-006
{"title":"4. Contesting the Past","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501736896-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501736896-006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"18 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117062511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501736896-009
{"title":"7. Nationalist Discourse","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501736896-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501736896-009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116135367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501736896-004
{"title":"2. Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501736896-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501736896-004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125905466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501736896-011
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501736896-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501736896-011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115616936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501736896-005
{"title":"3. Colonial Constructions of the Past","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501736896-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501736896-005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":283012,"journal":{"name":"The Presence of the Past","volume":"175 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124304570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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