Abstract In 1919, D. W. Griffith made a film, Broken Blossoms, in which he extended the domain of cinema to encompass an acted prologue, lighting and color effects, and four different orchestras. The effect was, a critic wrote, “not a motion picture at all, but something new that had never been seen before.” In this article I outline the components that contributed to this “new” art and discuss their critical reception, drawing freely on contemporaneous reports. No attempt is made to unpack the complexities of race and Orientalism (the hero, for example, ostensibly Chinese, was played by a Westerner); rather, my focus is on the need to consider the implications of the components of Griffith's vision when presenting a screening with performance today and when considering the transition from “silent” to recorded sound film.
Abstract In Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), Beethoven's Ninth Symphony accompanies scenes of persecution (in synthesizer arrangement by Wendy Carlos in collaboration with Rachel Elkind) and scenes of deviant sexuality bordering on perverse violence; yet—also—perseverance (in uncredited original orchestration produced by Deutsche Grammophon records). I read the contrasting representations of the piece onscreen as intertextual reinforcement of its exemplary heteronormative and hegemonic masculine discourse that was then-perseverant in musical scholarship and remained largely unacknowledged until the intervention of Susan McClary among others in the 1990s. Where scholars suggest the violent use of Beethoven's Ninth in this film may have provided bases for the work of McClary and subsequent scholars, I explore how the contrasting timbres of the Ninth in A Clockwork Orange reflect aspects of the reception history of the work and foundational values of musicology that remained unchallenged until the dawn of “new musicology” in the decades following the release of the film.
Abstract This article reconsiders a visually oriented approach to interpreting female operatic performances in cinema, instead treating them as integrated audiovisual wholes. Focusing on three recent films inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins, it argues that this perspective enables a reimagining of auditory disability and female madness, revealing how disabled characters are individuated and imbued with psychological depth.
In Fly (1970), Yoko Ono stages a multispecies encounter between woman and insect, where improvised voice merges with unsettling close-ups to produce an immersive, disquieting experience. This article offers an experiential analysis, grounded in the historical context of mid-century avant-garde filmmaking, and applies a Deleuzian theoretical frame, extending the Body without Organs (BwO) to develop my own concept of the Voice without Organs, a sonic corollary to the BwO that articulates a deterritorialized vocal ontology, transcending the human and destabilizing patriarchal and anthropocentric frames.
Otto Preminger's noir masterpiece Laura (1944) famously blurs the border between diegetic and nondiegetic music as David Raksin's title theme repeatedly migrates into record players and onscreen combos. Yet Laura further exploits this dichotomy with voice-over and recorded speech, which conspire with the music to create a dualistic sound world across which the film's erotic contests unfold. In precarious control of the nondiegetic space is Waldo Lydecker, one of the numerous queer characters in film noir. Despite much attention to this character in film studies, his sonic portrayal remains largely unexplored. This article argues that the soundtrack of Laura exploits the nondiegetic/ diegetic divide to dramatize a dichotomy in Waldo's sexuality. The disembodied realm of the nondiegetic orchestral theme and voice-over corresponds to the purely aesthetic realm in which he seeks to confine his glamorous alter ego; the embodied realm of the diegetic theme represents the real world in which Laura's physical desire (and perhaps his own) arouses a murderous rage. While Waldo first commands the musical narration in a manner unparalleled by any other queer character, diegetic incursions of the title theme steadily erode his narrative control. As Laura appears in the flesh midway through the film, the orchestra and title theme abandon Waldo's voice-over and begin to function as conventional underscore for the heterosexual couple, confirming his impotence over a sexual order he can neither join nor control. I end by suggesting that Laura performs a remarkable deconstruction of queer representation in classic Hollywood cinema.
