Arved Ashby - Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV

• Julie Hubbert, School of Music, University of South Carolina

• Tim Anderson, Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University

• Gene Willet, Conservatory of Music, Baldwin Wallace University

• Giorgio Biancorosso, Department of Music, University of Hong Kong

• Jeff Smith, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin

• Ken Garner, Glasgow School for Business and Society, Glasgow Caledonian University

• Arved Ashby, School of Music, Ohio State University

Pop songs are no longer the awkward cinematic stepchild to traditional orchestral underscoring, but have become a powerful and often unpredictable element in their own right. This unpredictability is conveyed by two overall conceptual poles: the synergistic or integrative effect vs. the divergent or disintegrative effect in making songs central to the soundtrack and even the story and dialogue or narration of a film. One could refer to the divergent effect as a kind of splitting of cinematic seams, and a number of the following chapters pursue this idea in compelling ways. Ultimately, popular songs force us both to strengthen and reformulate the very institution of authorship in recent stylized filmmaking.

Keywords: auteur, movie directors, popular music, music video,voice

By the late 20th century, authorship was largely defunct as cultural institution and as intellectual constructthe mindful creator of texts killed in Paris, embalmed at Yale, [and] mourned in Cambridge, as James Wood put it some years ago in the Guardian. In their view, films commercial basisits high production costs and financial politics of distributionhave made it the auteurist medium par excellence. Directors and even some producers have become brand names by which American films, those shown in the giant cineplexes and art-house cinemas, are sold. Moviegoers rush to a new film by Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, or Quentin Tarantino expecting thematic or stylistic consistency with their earlier offerings. For such audiences, directors names are measures of quality, uniqueness, and ultimately relevance and consequencean equation that began as early as D. W. Griffith with his insistence that his name be displayed prominently on-screen, even in his early Biograph films.

So the auteur idea, once dmod in cinema studies, is again in the ascendant. The present collection of essays follows this trend by extending the auteurism idea beyond the historical context of the politique des auteurs, and advancing a conception different from that of Corrigan, Perez, et al. Much recent auteurism is musically oriented, and the seven contributors to this book see important recent cinematic stylizations as specifically (p.2) music-inspired, music-based, and musically conditioned: Our book looks at cinematic visionaries who have given pop songs the kind of centrality once reserved for the script. In presenting seven influential cinematic authors in such a way, our book counters those critics of the auteur idea who stressed the scriptwriters paper-and-ink authorship over any loosely defined notion of directorial auteurism, and thereby emphasized narrative in the narrowest sense. Two such critics were Pauline Kael and Gore Vidal, the latter of course a novelist and author in his own right. The filmmakers discussed in our own volumeamong them David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantinoupended a basic duality. What they subverted was the long-term cinematic practice whereby popular music, if it appeared at all, served to articulate the narrative while orchestral, symphonic sounds mediated between narrative and moviegoer. The contributors to this book really follow two projects, then: They make a case for renewed understanding of auteurism, but also discuss popular music as an integral element in mise en scne.