Off Key When Film and Music Won't Work Together

by Dickinson, Kay

• ISBN13: 9780195326642
• ISBN10: 0195326644
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-03-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the bookexpands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, Off Key also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors havesought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged "failures" have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself. A provocative and politically-conscious look at music-image relations, Off Key will appeal to studentsand scholars of film music, cinema studies, media studies, cultural studies, and labor history.

Author Biography

Kay Dickinson is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies within the Media and Communications Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is editor of Movie Music: The Film Reader (2002) and co-editor of Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity (2004).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xiii
An Overture	p. 3
The Status and the Potential of Film-Music That "Doesn't Work"	p. 13
"The Motion Picture You're About to See Is a Story of Music": The Migration of Cinema into Rock 'n' Roll	p. 41
"It's Not Only Trivial, It's Bad, Vulgar": Ken Russell's Composer Biopics and the Uneasy Realignment of Work and Culture	p. 81
Troubling Synthesis: The Horrific Sights and Incompatible Sounds of "Video Nasties"	p. 119
Pop Stars Who Can't Act and the Limits of Celebrity "Flexibility"	p. 155
The Problems of Conclusion	p. 189
Notes	p. 199
Bibliography	p. 227
Index	p. 243
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