Abstract
This chapter addresses a long-standing issue in the aesthetics of screen music: the ontological relationship of music to the narrative, diegesis or world of a screen work. It critically and historically contextualizes the widely accepted diegetic/non-diegetic model within the field of screen music studies, identifying a multiply dialectic problem at the root of significant challenges that have been made to its validity. Examples from the repertoire of the earliest sound films produced in Weimar-Republic Germany are examined for the ways in which they tend to collapse the terms of the dialectic through pervasive musicalization of the screen diegesis. These findings are considered in the light of the most recent theoretical explorations of the topic, and finally applied to a work of mainstream Hollywood cinema.