Composing for the screen in Germany and the USSR : cultural politics and propaganda / edited by Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Stilwell, Robynn Jeananne.

Powrie, Phil

Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion picture music--Germany--History and criticism.

Motion picture music.

Motion picture music--Soviet Union--History and criticism.

Music and state.

Soviet Union.

Germany.

Physical Description:

187 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2008]

Summary:

Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie begin to redress the dearth of scholarship on the vibrant, productive, politically charged and yet under-researched period of film music in Germany and the Soviet Union before WWII. The book looks at the role of cultural politics, including propaganda, in the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and how composers from Germany and the USSR drew on ideals of a mythic past in order to promote their existing ruling powers. A focus on the theoretical and aesthetic writings of the period necessarily highlights the influence of two key figures: the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the USSR, and the film composer Hanns Eisler in Germany. Essays also address political influences on the scores of Sergei Prokofiev, Edmund Meisel, and Herbert Windt, as well as the impact of cinema on Alban Berg's opera Lulu. While most of the chapters concentrate on pre-1940 topics, two chapters look at the continuation of earlier aesthetics in more recent film and music products.

Contents:

Germany. Film music in the Third Reich / Robert E. Peck ; Herbert Windt's film music to Triumph of the will : ersatz-Wagner or incidental music to the ultimate Nazi-Gesamtkunstwerk? / Reimar Volker ; Alban Berg, Lulu, and the silent film / Marc Weiner ; From revolution to mystic mountains : Edmund Meisel and the politics of modernism / Christopher Morris ; New technologies and old rites : dissonance between picture and music in readings of Joris Ivens's Rain / Ed Hughes ; "Composition with film" : Mauricio Kagel as filmmaker / Björn Heile

The USSR. Eisenstein's theory of film music revisited : silent and early sound antecedents / Julie Hubbert ; Aleksandr Nevskiy : Prokofiev's successful compromise with socialist realism / Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir ; In marginal fashion : sex, drugs, Russian modernism, and new wave music in Liquid sky / Mitchell Morris.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [179]-180) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780253349767

0253349761

9780253219541

025321954X

OCLC:

155125584