[Publik.ims] Next week's IMS seminar with Emilio Audissino on Film/Music Analysis

Dear all, Welcome to next week’s IMS seminar, Emilio Audissino (senior lecturer in Media and Audiovisual Production at LNU) will give a presentation on his proposal for an approach to Film/Music analysis. Abstract: Film/Music Analysis: An Approach ‘Film/Music Analysis’ is the name I give to my proposal for an alternative approach to the study of music in films (Audissino 2017). By ‘film music analysis’ the general understanding – influenced by the musicological dominance in the film-music discipline – is that one is performing either a musicological study of the musical text (the score) or a musico-dramaturgic examination of a film’s music track. By this new label I wish to stress the inescapably interrelational nature of music and images in the audiovisual artefact. I foster an approach that be more film studies-oriented than musicological, and this can be achieved by tackling music as a cinematic device within a larger and interconnected formal and stylistic system. My take is to adopt a Gestalt-based perspective, with music seen as one micro-configuration and visuals as another micro-configuration, the two fusing into an audiovisual macro-configuration. This Gestalt approach – being based on the fusion of the aural and visual factors into a whole – is not only useful to provide alternative analytical tools but is also helpful to supersede the long-standing visual bias that to some extent still influences film studies (on this, see Rick Altman 1980; Kathryn Kalinak 1992, for example), which leads to think of music as something that is externally added to either reinforce or contradict what is already there in the visuals. A common issue when discussing music and film is to adopt – whether consciously or not – a ‘separatist’ approach, one in which music and visuals are conceptualised as two distinct entities. A ‘non separatist’ approach should conceptualise the audiovisual product as a whole in which music and visuals have a potentially equal importance and agency. When music meets the visuals, it does not merely add something to a meaning that is already there – as theorised by Noël Carroll in his ‘modifying music’ proposal, for example (Carroll 1996) – but a fusion happens between the two elements whose result is a new meaning that was not present in either of the separate elements, a multiplication in which the single factors change one another, in which ‘the whole is different from the sum of its parts’ (Kurt Koffka 1935). Within this Gestalt-informed conceptualisation, I offer more specific guidelines for practical film/music analysis. Music typically performs three types of functions in film and media: emotive function (micro-emotive and macro-emotive), perceptive function (temporal-perceptive and spatial-perceptive), and cognitive function (denotative-cognitive and connotative-cognitive). These functions are mapped onto the activities in which the audioviewer is engaged during the fruition of a film or media product – emotion, perception, cognition. This set of functions, like a compass, can help the analyst individuate what the music does within the film’s formal system in the three areas of engagement and examine how a micro-configuration contributes to the macro-configuration. Biographical Notes Emilio Audissino is Senior Lecturer in Media and Audiovisual Production at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He holds one PhD in History of Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Pisa (Italy) and one PhD in Film Studies from the University of Southampton (UK). His areas of specialism are Hollywood and Italian cinema and media, and his research interests are: film history; audiovisual style and technique; screenwriting; neoformalism; textual analysis of film and media; comedy; horror; and sound and music in media. He is the author of The Film Music of John Williams. Reviving Hollywood’s Classical Style (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021, second revised and expanded edition of the 2014 book John Williams’s Film Music), the first book-length study in English on the composer, and the editor of the collection of essays John Williams. Music for Films, Television and the Concert Stage (Brepols, 2018). His book Film/Music Analysis. A Film Studies Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) concerns a method for audiovisual analysis that blends Neoformalism and Gestalt Psychology. He co-edited the volume Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack (Brepols, 2019), and he is currently co-editing a handbook about music in comedy cinema, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan – both with Emile Wennekes (Utrecht University). His current research deals with the cinema of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and has already produced the first academic investigations of their film and television works – in the collections New Wave, New Hollywood: Gender, Reassessment, Recovery and Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and Moments in Television. Substance/Style (Manchester University Press, 2022). Emilio Audissino will be in Växjö for the presentation, and it is possible to attend both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/940933326 The seminar is on the 13 Oct. from 10.15-12.00 CEST. Best wishes, Signe – on behalf of IMS IMS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LNU.IMS IMS public email list: https://lists.sunet.se/listinfo/publik.ims IMS website: https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/linnaeus-university-centre-for-in… Signe Kjaer Jensen / PhD Senior Lecturer, Department of Film and Literature Linnæus University Department of Film and Literature 351 95 Växjö Sweden https://lnu.se/personal/signe.kjaerjensen/ signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se<mailto:signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se>