Rogers - Music and Sound in Documentary Film

Series Editor: Holly Rogers

The Routledge Music and Screen Media Series offers edited collections of original essays on music in particular genres of cinema, television, video games and new media. These edited essay collections are written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music and film and media studies.

Music and Sound in Documentary Film
Edited by Holly Rogers

Music in Video Games: Studying Play
Edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner

The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop
Edited by Robert Edgar, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, and Benjamin Halligan

Music in Science Fiction Television: Tuned to the Future
Edited by K.J. Donnelly and Philip Hayward

Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema
Edited by James Wierzbicki

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier
Edited by Kathryn Kalinak

Music in Television: Channels of Listening
Edited by James Deaville

Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear
Edited by Neil Lerner

First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of Holly Rogers to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music and sound in documentary film / [edited by] Holly Rogers.

pages cm (Routledge music and screen media series)

1. Motion picture musicHistory and criticism. 2. Film soundtracks. 3. Documentary filmsHistory and criticism. I. Rogers, Holly (Professor of music), editor. II. Series: Routledge music and screen media series.

ML2075.M8755 2015

781.5'42dc23

2014019564

ISBN: 978-0-415-72861-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-72866-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-85155-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy and Gill Sans 10/12
by codeMantra

Senior Editor: Constance Ditzel
Senior Editorial Assistant: Elysse Preposi
Production Manager: Mhairi Bennett
Marketing Manager: Emilie Littlehales
Project Manager: Francesca Monaco, codeMantra US
Cover Design: Salamander Hill Design

BILL NICHOLS

HOLLY ROGERS

CAROLYN BIRDSALL

JAMES DEAViLLE

JULIE HUBBERT

THOMAS F. COHEN

ORLENE DENICE MCMAHON

MERVYN COOKE

JOHN CORNER

K.J. DONNELLY

JAMIE SEXTON

MARION LEONARD AND ROBERT STRACHAN

SELMIN KARA AND ALANNA THAIN

ANAHID KASSABIAN

This project would not have come about without the dedication and hard work of the contributors, who all embraced the topic of music and sound in documentary film with such great enthusiasm. Their ability to produce excellent and original research was matched by their endless patience and good humour, which made the task of editing this book an immensely enjoyable one. I extend my thanks to the series editor Neil Lerner for his help and encouragement and to Constance Ditzel and Elysse Preposi at Routledge for their support and professionalism.

The idea for this project arose during an afternoon pastry-eating session with Bill Nichols in a San Francisco coffee shop and Id like to thank him for his support. My interest in documentary film was nurtured during a US/UK Fulbright Commission scholarship to the DocFilm Institute at San Francisco State University, where I had the pleasure of teaching, learning from and befriending an inspiring class of documentary filmmakers. Im sure I learned way more than they did. My education continued during several sessions on documentary music with my students at the University of Liverpool, who continue to surprise me with their original thought and insightful comments. Id like to thank the Fulbright Commission for their financial help and the students on both sides of the pond for their inspiration.

As usual, this book is dedicated to my parents John and Polly; to Jigs; to the rest of my family; to my creatures old and new; and to the one who will shortly be with us.

While the scholarly conversations about music in film and visual media have been expanding prodigiously since the last quarter of the twentieth century, a need remains for focused, specialised studies of particular films as they relate more broadly to genres. This series includes scholars from across the disciplines of music and film and media studies, of specialists in both the audible as well as the visual, who share the goal of broadening and deepening these scholarly dialogues about music in particular genres of cinema, television, videogames and new media. Claiming a chronological arc from the birth of cinema in the 1890s to the most recent releases, the Routledge Music and Screen Media series offers collections of original essays written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music, film and media studies in general and interdisciplinary humanists who give strong attention to music. Driving the study of music here are the underlying assumptions that music together with screen media (understood broadly to accommodate rapidly developing new technologies) participates in important ways in the creation of meaning and that including music in an analysis opens up the possibility for interpretations that remain invisible when only using the eye.

The series was designed with the goal of providing a thematically unified group of supplemental essays in a single volume that can be assigned in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses (including courses in film studies, in film music and other interdisciplinary topics). We look forward to adding future volumes addressing emerging technologies and reflecting the growth of the academic study of screen media. Rather than attempting an exhaustive history or unified theory, these studiespersuasive explications supported by textual and contextual evidencewill pose questions of musical style, strategies of rhetoric and critical cultural analysis as they help us to see, to hear and ultimately to understand these texts in new ways.

Neil Lerner
Series Editor

Bill Nichols

Bill Nichols is the pioneering theorist of documentary film. It therefore makes perfect sense for him to introduce this book, which is the first collected volume of essays on the sound and music of the genre. As you will see, not only has he been responsible for some of the most influential texts in documentary studies, he also has many thoughtful ideas about the ways in which music works on a documentary audience. Here he introduces some of the main new directions signalled in this book.

Holly Rogers