Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

Abstract

It is fitting that genre studies and sound studies should join forces, since both have at times been cast in the role of understudy in the larger field of film and television studies. That is, the study of genre is typically understood to have emerged as an alternative to the prevailing tendency towards auteurist scholarship, while work on sound has often presented itself as an antidote to a ‘visual bias’ in the field. Both approaches also share an investment in broadening the scope of media analysis: genre studies by engaging with a nexus of media production and reception, and the intertextual dimension of film and television cultures; and sound studies by exploring the intermedial dimension of media cultures, as well as the ways in which sound articulates texts, bodies and spaces. A number of recent monographs and edited collections have demonstrated how these two areas of inquiry can form a productive partnership. Robert Miklitsch's Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir joins a growing body of scholarly work that combines the study of film sound and film genre: monographs include Robert Spadoni's Uncanny Bodies, William Whittington's Sound Design and Science Fiction, Peter Stanfield's Horse Opera, and Sarah Kozloff's discussion of dialogue in Westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films and melodramas.1 Also of note are two collections on sound and genre edited by Philip Hayward.2 Miklitsch's book contributes to this scholarly discussion through a wide-ranging analysis of sound and music in the films noirs of the 1940s. Miklitsh has a knack for locating and explicating film sequences that demonstrate the importance of sound, although at times I found myself wishing for a more substantial historical and theoretical framework in order to provide ballast to his argument and unite the book's many intriguing case studies.