Abstract
This book uniquely brings together scholarship from three interrelated areas: a) the philosophy of musical time b) screen music studies c) film studies in order to explore and enhance understanding of the hitherto rarely discussed temporal functions of music in screen works. It first examines from historical and structural-aesthetic standpoints the profound and complex relationships between music and the moving image as sequential, time-based art forms, whose attributes variously overlap, complement and contradict each other. It then surveys, investigates and critiques theories of time in the contexts of music aesthetics, screen music studies and film studies, in order to develop an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing the temporal dynamics of screen scoring. This analysis is structured on three levels: the cultural-historical, the locally expressive-kinetic, and the deeper narrative-chronological. The third, and most extensive, part of the book examines a number of case studies within these differing levels: a) The cultural significance of the use of Mahler’s music within films by Mizrahi, Figgis and Noé which either interweave temporalities of structure and history, or thematize issues of time b) (i) Music’s interplay with the kinetics and localized temporal structures of abstract, commercial and documentary screen works without dialogue; (ii) the opposed temporal functions of silence (within surrounding musical contexts) and music for passages of extreme narrative ellipsis extending into montage sequences, in mainstream commercial screen works and European New Wave cinema c) The temporal functions of music in chronologically complex narrative films by Burton, Daldry, Reisz, Ruiz and Bergman This book therefore offers scholarly investigation and practical demonstration of an area within film studies and the rapidly growing field of screen music studies, which has yet to be addressed in the literature.