Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR

by Stilwell, Robynn J.; Powrie, Phil

• ISBN13: 9780253349767
• ISBN10: 0253349761
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-30
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie begin to redress the dearth of scholarship on the vibrant, productive, politically charged and yet under-researched period of film music in Germany and the Soviet Union before WWII. The book looks at the role of cultural politics, including propaganda, in the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and how composers from Germany and the USSR drew on ideals of a mythic past in order to promote their existing ruling powers. A focus on the theoretical and aesthetic writings of the period necessarily highlights the influence of two key figures: the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the USSR, and the film composer Hanns Eisler in Germany. Essays also address political influences on the scores of Sergei Prokofiev, Edmund Meisel, and Herbert Windt, as well as the impact of cinema on Alban Berg's opera Lulu. While most of the chapters concentrate on pre-1940 topics, two chapters look at the continuation of earlier aesthetics in more recent film and music products.

Author Biography

Phil Powrie is Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Most recently, he is co-author (with Bruce Babington, Ann Davies, and Chris Perriam) of Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (IUP, 2007).

Robynn Stilwell is Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Art, Music and Theatre at Georgetown University. She is co-editor (with Phil Powrie) of Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Germany
Film Music in the Third Reich	p. 19
Herbert Windt's Film Music to Triumph of the Will: Ersatz-Wagner or Incidental Music to the Ultimate Nazi-Gesamtkunstwerk?	p. 39
Alban Berg, Lulu, and the Silent Film	p. 54
From Revolution to Mystic Mountains: Edmund Meisel and the Politics of Modernism	p. 75
New Technologies and Old Rites: Dissonance between Picture and Music in Readings of Joris Ivens's Rain	p. 93
"Composition with Film": Mauricio Kagel as Filmmaker	p. 106
The USSR
Eisenstein's Theory of Film Music Revisited: Silent and Early Sound Antecedents	p. 125
Aleksandr Nevskiy: Prokofiev's Successful Compromise with Socialist Realism	p. 148
In Marginal Fashion: Sex, Drugs, Russian Modernism, and New Wave Music in Liquid Sky	p. 161
List of Contributors	p. 179
Index	p. 181
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