PennTags Feed for /tag/music+film

Blaxploitation: Funk Goes to the Movies / Dave Thompson

Thompson, Dave. "Blaxploitation: Funk Goes to the Movies." Funk. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2001. p. 207-213.

Note: this is an essay, not a chapter, from Dave Thompson's book Funk.

The essay begins talking about the recent 2000 re-release of Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson and how the accompanying score had changed from Isaac Hayes’ iconic funk soundtrack to the “urban dance” of R. Kelly, Outkast, and Too $hort. However, back in the early 1970s, the media created narrow stereotypical genres for anything outside the mainstream musical scene and thus, blaxploitation wasn’t just a film movement but a music movement and way of life as well. It originated outside the Hollywood system, where most black actors and directors felt relegated to before the blaxploitation boom. Although blaxploitation was categorized under the B-movie moniker, its connection to the large counterculture of dissatisfied, young, black people gave it a larger impact than your typical B-movie films (i.e. horror, etc.). The “A movies” featured black stars. However, they didn’t address the black audience. Blaxploitation arose out of black society’s need to be represented on screen.

Thomson introduces Melvin Van Peebles and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song as the answer to that problem. After detailing the production and financial troubles encountered by Van Peebles, he goes into the distribution of the film. However, because only two theaters played it on the opening weekend and nobody would advertise or review it, it was ignored by the media. Additionally, there was no publicity money left over from production, so Van Peebles had to use the "dynamite" soundtrack (recorded by then-unknown Earth Wind & Fire) in order to create awareness for his film. This was the first time that a soundtrack was used to market a film – something that is quite common now. The blaxploitation films that came after would follow suit, each with its own funky soundtrack – Shaft had Isaac Hayes, Superfly had Curtis Mayfield. The essay then describes summarizes the plot of several blaxploitation movies (since it is, after all, in a book about music).

This is relevant because it transformed the way many films are advertised. Instead of going through the traditional avenues of trailers and critical reviews, Van Peebles used funk, the music of the streets at that time, to get the message out that a corresponding movie that was just as funky was playing. With the success of the album, more distributors decided to show the film and eventually, it became the highest grossing independent film ever (at that point). Thus, the distribution and advertisement of this film serves as a reminder to the mainstream of culture's power to create an underground success based solely on word of mouth and music.

Music that makes a man a killer Bernard Herrmann's film scores spoke as loudly as any dialogue, says Mark Monahan

Monahan, Mark. "Music that makes a man a killer Bernard Herrmann's film scores spoke as loudly as any dialogue, says Mark Monahan." The Daily Telegraph 1 July 2006. 8 April 2008.

Mark Monahan writes about Mr. Bernard Herrmann’s musical career spanning from Citizen Kane in 1941 through Taxi Driver in 1976. Monahan asserts that creating music for motion pictures is an incredibly arduous task and that the people responsible for it are extraordinarily talented. He feels that cinema would be unimaginable if not for the fantastic and wild feelings created by film scores. Monahan writes that he considers Bernard Herrmann to be one of the leading film composers of the last 100 years. Herrmann, a Russian born immigrant attended NYU to study music and made his Broadway debut at the young age of 20. He began composing for CBS radio shows and this put him into contact with Orson Welles. Welles took Herrmann on for the film Citizen Kane, and thereby launched the composer’s long and successful scoring career. After Kane, Herrmann teamed with Hitchcock and was responsible for the musical scores of all the great Hitchcock films through the end of the 1960s. Monahan has much respect for Herrmann’s talent. He writes that, “Rather than merely setting the scene or complementing the action (though they do both magnificently), [Herrmann’s scores] virtually are the action, brilliantly elucidating the characters' gnarled inner lives.” He says that the opening scene of Citizen Kane (the ascending of Xanadu’s fence) is given “a sense of dread, regret and death of the soul…” Herrmann’s most famous musical passage is the shrieking violins of the Psycho’s shower scene. In his later career he works for French and American New Wave filmmakers.

The musical score to any film is one of the most psychologically defining aspects of the experience. The music, much like lighting, sets a mood. Before the audience even knows what will happen on screen, they can get a sense of what might happen just based on the musical foreshadowing. Herrmann brilliantly uses his musical score to set the mood and tone in Citizen Kane. In happy scenes such as those with the young Kane attending parties in his honor, the music is light and we think nothing of it. In more dramatic scenes such as the initial scene of Xanadu, the newsreel scenes, and the final scene of the film with the revelation of Rosebud, the music obviously takes a more dramatic and serious tone.

Celluloid jukebox : popular music and the movies since the 50s / edited by Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton.

. Celluloid jukebox : popular music and the movies since the 50s / edited by Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton. 0851705065 (cased) series London : British Film Institute, 1995.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML2075 .C455 1995

Celluloid Jukebox, edited by Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, is a collection of essays from famous filmmakers and musicians all regarding the relationship of popular music and film since the 1950’s. In this book, many essays make stark remarks on the influence of A Hard Day’s Night in the connection between pop music and film. Andy Medhurst’s essay, for example, entitled “It Sort of Happened Here: The Strange, Brief Life of the British Pop Film”, on numerous occasions makes the claim that “the film which irrevocably sundered that connection [between pop music and film] was A Hard Day’s Night,” and that “the kind of static on-stage set-piece that was one of the many causalities of the new approach [was] pioneered by A Hard Day’s Night.” The section of the book, however, that is most supportive of my thesis is the final section of interviews, which asked a number of famous filmmakers what their favorite pop movies are. In response to this question, Cameron Crowe, Amos Poe, and Allison Anders all claimed A Hard Day’s Night.
Allison Anders, a producer of many notable films such as Martin Scorsese’s Grace of the Heart, is quoted as saying, “the very first intoxicated experience of music and movies working together, needless to say, [was] A Hard Day’s Night.” She then went on to say, “when I went to see the movie, I didn’t see the movie itself until I saw it for maybe the tenth time because we were screaming through the whole thing. So it was like seeing a concert with all the little girls.” This quote supports my thesis that A Hard Day’s Night was the first film to successfully unite the pop cultures of film and music in a way that no film previously had, and that it in fact is the first true rock and roll film. Anders’ response to the film, like so many others’, was because of the novelty of the style of this production. A Hard Day’s Night really was like watching a concert for an hour and a half on the silver-screen, and therefore was indeed a rock and roll film. It was different than any other films that came before it, and it forever changed the way music and film interacted. This book, Celluloid Jukebox, gives a great inside understanding of A Hard Day’s Night’s influence on music’s role in film. It speaks of all the films to the present that have used pop music in a similar fashion to the 1964 Beatles’ comedy, and therefore is a great source for my thesis.

Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films

The Copyright Dilemma of the Screen Composer

Stay Free! Daily: How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel?

An interview with the makers of Mad Hot Ballroom about the copyright issues in making the film.