Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak

Abstract

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak Nick Poulakis Elsie Walker Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory. Oxford University Press, 2015. 448 pages; $37.55 paperback; $99.00 hardcover; $33.20 kindle. Kathryn Kalinak, editor Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects Rutgers University Press, 2015. 224 pages; $26.95 paperback; $80.00 hardcover; $26.95 epub/pdf. Cinema has always been considered a modern spectacle of vision. But, although film substance consists of both sound and images, it is a fact that the aural dimensions of this audiovisual medium have been regularly disregarded in academic and journalistic reviews. On the other side, there have also been certain works that deal with the so-called “film musicology,” which tend to employ extremely specialized music-centred examples, comparisons and terminology that are mainly accessible only to a small number of musicology experts. Today, scholars wonder if there is an alternative: to put it simply, how can we apply cultural theories to film music and sound in order to better appreciate and explain films? Elsie Walker’s brand-new book Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory tries to answer these fundamental questions in a methodical way. It applies to film music and sound analysis five of the most common critical theories used in film studies, in particular genre studies, postcolonialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. This monograph draws attention by means of a rigorous examination of films to the [End Page 30] capacity of both music and sound to reveal diverse filmic meanings, uncovering not only the “unheard melodies” (as earlier scholars of this field would put it) but also the “unseen images” of cinema. Currently serving as an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Salisbury University (Maryland), Elsie Walker has considerable experience in theoretical and educational approaches to film in three different countries: New Zealand, England and the USA. Through her published work, she has also contributed greatly to recent film and sound scholarship. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory is the outcome of five years of research on how to attentively bringing together film and music/sound studies with critical conceptions of literature and culture. Practically, this multifaceted perspective yields a book that is adequately accessible to a great range of students, tutors and other audiences, whether expert or non-expert in this domain. The book has an instantly identifiable structure. It is divided into five general parts, each of which is motivated by one of the main theories mentioned above. These parts consist of three individual chapters apiece: the first contains a transparent theoretical preview of the subject matter, whereas the others focus, respectively, on two case studies of film and music/sound analyses. There is also a comprehensive introduction in which the film Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee, music by Gustavo Santaolalla, operates as an opening case study, and a coda that sums up and, what is more, reassigns the book’s major outlines to a very recent production: Gravity (2013), directed by Alfonso Cuarón with music by Steven Price. The book also includes a glossary of terms, an index, as well as a list of films quoted and analyzed. The bibliography cited in the text is placed at the end of each part, thus framing almost autonomous sections of this engaging book. The first part of Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory starts with Rick Altman’s input concerning joint sound and genre theories of film. After that, Walker continues with the analysis of two westerns, The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, music by Max Steiner and Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch, music by Neil Young, from the perspective of the semantic and the syntactic components of this particular genre. The first one is a mainstream film of an earlier period, the second a present-day independent creation. While these offer two totally different kinds of soundtracks, they make the author’s scholar analyses more productive. The second part of the book is titled “Postcolonialism” and it begins with a brief prelude by Robert Stam and Louise Spence on colonialism, racism and representation. Based on the above mentioned theoretical perspective and...