Roger Hillman

Cultural memory on film soundtracks

This article addresses issues of cultural memory arising from the use of classical music on film soundtracks. The phenomenon is considered in three forms: (1) historical layering, as in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady and Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue; (2) memory and nostalgia, especially in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, and in the possibilities available to classical music in European compared with US films; (3) musical memory in a given culture, from It Happened Here (Brownlow/ Mollo) through to various directors of the New German Cinema. The reception histories of the ‘Deutschlandlied’ and of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are enriched by consideration of their frequent use in West German films of the 1970s, as part of a quest for national identity. Alongside the established critical tool of scopic regimes, the article pleads for attention to acoustic regimes as a neglected aspect of cultural studies.

Trueba's La nina de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams) (1998): the German connection

Abstract Fernando Truebas 1998 film superficially stages a playful remake of a multi-language version film shot in Berlin during the Spanish Civil War. However, the double time frame is used to subversive effect, not just to create parallels between then and now within Spanish history but also through its links to German history and film history. Trueba provides much more than a gloss on Spain emerging from the post-Franco transition era, and his film dramaticizes the application of memory studies to Spanish (and German, and European) identity issues.

Book Review: David Roberts: The total work of art in European Modernism

as we will witness over the next generations the breakdown of the fusion of the political, the ethical and the aesthetic that has been so important for the last 40 to 50 years. I also think the meaning of the non-Jewish relationship to revelation and redemption will be severely tested in ways that our ethical and political and aesthetic calls and achievements have little answer to. I would like to think my adumbrations of terrible forces is my own private nightmare – but the geo-political and financial tensions of our time do not seem to me to line up in the neat ethical and political boxes which have been constructed to deal with the most urgent of matters by the post-Holocaust generation. Rosenzweig’s thinking has the great virtue of really understanding what faith means and what is at stake as the energies, resentments and hatreds accumulated over multiple generations in their failure to create peace threaten to explode. Expressed theologically, though intended existentially, God’s judgement is a far more terrifying and threatening sign than can be comprehended under the ethical and aesthetic domains. The task of universalizing and thus fulfilling that law of revelation had, for Rosenzweig, fallen to the Christian(ized) people. The unredeemed world remains, thus, a sundered world, and it is only the scale of the redemptive power of love’s acts – and those acts may not find themselves best undertaken within the zones of politics, art or ethics – that redeems the world.

Beethoven, Mahler, and the new German cinema

Abstract Art music has been used on the soundtrack since the silent film era. Often functioning as highbrow mood music, it can also convey ideological associations which lend the narrative a further historical layer. The New German Cinema features works by Wagner, Beethoven, Mahler, and others whose reception has been partially influenced by Nazi propaganda. The overtones of these cultural icons parallel discourses about a fluctuating national identity. While the discipline of film studies is belatedly acknowledging the key role of the soundtrack and the ‘new musicology’ has accentuated music as text, the area on which this article embarks has been largely ignored to date.

Filmmusik im DRitteN R: Die dokumentation

Abstract The professed aim of this volume is to serve as an archival resource for television stations, cinemas and relevant university departments. After an introduction, the bulk of the work consists of an alphabetic list of films in German for each of the years 1933–1945. There follow similar lists of the composers of film music, and of those who provided the texts, brief biographies of the major film music composers and finally — the most interesting section —documentation relating to two central film scores.