Elsie Walker (Salisbury University)I first met Danijela Kulezic-Wilson through her article titled “A Musical Approach to Filmmaking: Hip-hop and Techno Composing Techniques and Models of Structuring in Darren Aronofsky's π.” This article appeared in the very first issue of Music and the Moving Image and it was a transformative experience for me—not only because it made me hear the sonic logic of the film better, but because it made me understand how meaningful a musical approach to cinema could be. I met Danijela a few months later, at my first Music and the Moving Image conference in 2009 at New York University. Little did I know that she would become one of the most important presences in my personal as well as scholarly life.Danijela's writing about the π soundtrack is a fine balance between discipline and freedom of expression, tautness and energy, meticulous form and creative willfulness. To my surprise, she embodied these rarely combined qualities. It is common to be inspired by another scholar's work, but it is unusual to be just as inspired by who they are. Danijela was a completely unified person: her approach to cinema and music was representative of her approach to all forms of life. She met films, people, and unforeseeable challenges with open-mindedness and worked hard to understand them without ever imposing her own will on them too much. She was an extraordinary survivor of many adversities and a revolutionary scholar of film soundtracks. She turned her struggles into beautiful writings, redirecting what she knew of tragedies into hearing music everywhere. The impact of her presence in the world, and especially the conversations she created through her writing, will not end.Danijela died on April 15, 2021. Her death was a deep shock to the entire international community of soundtrack scholars. This article is a transcript of the tributes paid to Danijela at a keynote for the Music and the Moving Image conference on May 27, 2022. Those readers who knew Danijela will recognize that the references and the reflections of these speeches paint a suitably multidimensional portrait of a beloved colleague and friend. We hope that those in mourning for her will feel heartened and uplifted by this loving act of remembrance. Those readers who did not have the pleasure of knowing Danijela will get a good sense of her through this transcript, and we hope will feel inspired to learn more about her work. As co-creators of this journal and its associated conferences, Ron Sadoff and Gillian Anderson give us a wide view of Danijela's place in the community of soundtrack studies. Thereafter, several of Danijela's closest colleagues and friends share their memories of her work and life.Dear Reader, whether you knew Danijela or not, please read what follows as a representative range of perspectives on a person whose presence and scholarly significance we could never fully encapsulate. Please also look out for a special issue of the journal Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media in the summer of 2023 that will be devoted to honoring Danijela's lasting legacy. Some content from this article will be included and elaborated upon in that issue of Alphaville, signifying the ongoing reverberations of Danijela's words that will matter forever.Gillian B. Anderson and Ronald H. Sadoff (New York University)Our image of Danijela arises from the 2007 MaMI Conference—she was sitting in the Frederick Lowe Theatre, and we recall just how engrossed and attentive she was—full of fresh, probing ideas—all emanating from this wonderful spirit. Like a few other “lifers” (like Elsie Walker), Danijela attended nearly every MaMI Conference until her passing. And every year, when we would first spot Danijela, whether in the Lowe Theatre, a coffee room, wherever—we smiled—she smiled—and we sensed that another circle had been completed. We knew Danijela would spend yet another intense three or four days in contributing, challenging, and helping us all grow this wonderful field (while also taking time out from the conferences to make field trips to some cutting edge New York attraction). Danijela thought so frequently outside the box—and this encouraged a freedom of expression and experimentation that affected everyone at the conference and their work during and afterward as well.Danijela was one of the MaMI Conference's anchors, one of its most enthusiastic supporters, a contributor to its fresh, out-reaching, outside-the-box curiosity. Her students attended and became enthusiastic supporters themselves, part of the MaMI cheering section. When she gave a paper, if you hadn't seen the movie, you acquired it. It didn't mean that you were in agreement after you watched it, but you understood why she was interested. She was always taken seriously and with good reason. Her character had been tempered by the obstacles she had had to overcome. Refreshingly, she talked about the music, but you knew that she understood the context in which it was being employed—the filmmaking process—the industrial and societal pressures. She was particularly empathetic to the filmmaker's motivations, even though they may not have been realized successfully. On a personal level, she was engaging, fun, supportive but also reserved and extremely modest. She made deep and long-lasting friendships with MaMI participants, and these became part of the fabric of everyone's conference experience, even though many may not have realized it.Soon after that first 2007 MaMI conference, we began the process of shepherding Danijela's article into our first volume of the journal Music and the Moving Image. We still used real mail in those days—in our process of sending Danijela, via overseas mail—the University of Illinois “Permission to Publish” form. (UIP required her actual inked signature, embedded on real paper, and delivered in a real envelope.) We attempted to send this to Danijela, but our efforts to secure an accurate location of Danijela's physical address in Ireland—nestled in a rather obscure locale—was hampered by her address that lacked any numbers whatsoever. So, Ron turned to the fledgling new Google Map search function—and with uncanny accuracy, it managed to bring up a photo revealing a sparsely inhabited area—and what turned out to be her next-door neighbor's house! He sent her the Google-Earth photo and Danijela was delighted—truly impressed and amused by his findings. Of course, we were equally bemused by the power of Google to “invade” and “reveal” pretty much anything and anyone.We published Danijela's article, which was the first article of MaMI volume 1, number 1, in spring 2008: “A Musical Approach to Filmmaking: Hip-hop and Techno Composing Techniques and Models of Structuring in Darren Aronofsky's π.” Ron had always been so viscerally struck by Aronofsky's rhythmic film-virtuosity—but Danijela contextualized this, in an article emblematic of the confluence of filmic, music, sound, and narrative elements—all of which would increasingly reflect the scope of research in the field.Danijela's final book, Sound Design is the New Score, inscribed by the author, now sits in our offices. We turn its pages, reflect, and remain enlivened by Danijela's spirit, comforted by knowing her myriad of MaMI presentations (all archived) and her publications continue in her voice. She was unique and her absence will leave a big hole in the MaMI fabric, but we trust her leadership will continue through the influence she has had and will continue to have on all of us.K. J. Donnelly (University of Southampton)Danijela Kulezic-Wilson is a big loss both personally and to the study of film music and audiovisual culture.In December 2005, I made a long journey from small town on the Welsh coast to an English city from where I flew to Belfast and then had a long (three-hour) taxi journey to a small town on the coast of Northern Ireland. It was to examine Daniela Kulezic-Wilson's PhD. The journey was a very strange experience and so was the PhD viva. Once I had read Danijela's thesis, I knew we would be in for an interesting viva. It was a very audacious and original PhD. But it had very rough edges and was very opinionated and I pointed this out to her. I remember her saying at one point that she was “disgusted” by the use of music in a particular film. I could see what she meant, and agreed with her in a way, but told her she needed to couch things in slightly different terms. She needed to tone down some of the emotional responses she had included in the thesis. As scholars, we are often forced to do this, and I realize on one level that this is a shame to curb passion, but I always thought that Danijela retained immediate emotional reaction as a component of analysis.In her viva, as people who knew her might imagine, she was very combative and passionate. She argued every single point with me. Indeed, it was among some of the toughest arguments I've had as a scholar. Of course, she passed her viva, and I was mentally and emotionally drained after a really intense discussion—whereupon I was immediately ushered into a taxi to repeat my long journey the other way. The whole experience had an air of unreality about it, and I was happy to meet Danijela later at conferences under more “normal” circumstances.I was aware that I had come across a very talented and committed scholar at that moment. Most of the things that she dealt with in her PhD were long-term concerns that she persistently addressed across her written output. One thing that immediately impressed me was that she appeared to be coming at film from a different angle. Not following the traditional “musicological angle,” which remains quite common for scholars who have studied music, but a more culturally informed position allied with an approach from the viewpoint of avant-garde aesthetics. This approach seemed new, and certainly the way she approached analysis was always novel and original.I was always keen to hear her conference papers, which always offered up new insights and striking analysis. Ron Sadoff was right when he said, you always rushed out and bought the film on DVD afterward and every time you came upon a sequence in the film that she had addressed you literally relived exactly what she had set out in her conference paper.The concerns evident in her PhD thesis developed over a few years, and I encouraged her to pull together her first book, The Musicality of Narrative Film (2015). The title sums up Danijela's general assumption about the relationship of music to the moving image—and about the moving image's relation to music. I think it's a great title. She had actually published a number of the articles already and it almost seems like a compilation album of “hit record” conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles. Indeed, some were published in the esteemed journal Music and the Moving Image.I really like the whole book, but I particularly like the section on rhythm. Now, rhythm has a strange position in the study of film music and the study of film more generally. It's been at the heart of film theory, even since Sergei Eisenstein's writings nearly a century ago, but never really dealt with in a satisfactory manner, in a way that has had an impact on the study of film and film music. There were plenty of thought-provoking and original points about rhythm here, but a statement stayed with me. The end of the “The Musicality Film Rhythm” chapter reads: . . . examined points of similarity between the distinctive characteristics of the aesthetics of the shot and the cut on one hand, and certain features of musical structuring on the other, point to analogies between music and particular aesthetic approaches to film that might be useful in terms of encouraging new ways of thinking about film as well as opening a new field of metaphorical categories in connection with it. (2015, 50–51)This is an important point and something easily overlooked when we make in-depth analysis of films, or isolated sequences of film and music. I stress the speculatory part of the end of the quotation, the part that reads, “So, where do we go from here in terms of analysis?” I've read many fine close studies of music and of film narrative, but they often finish there, and don't go any further. Danijela was really good at going further. She was always looking for the larger possibilities alongside rigorous analysis. She always speculated a little and I think that she saw film music as potentially revelatory. We all tell each other something about the film and the music, but I think she took it further, and she was happy to see that film and film music could be revelatory about wider culture and about humanity in general. I didn't always agree with her conclusions, but I was always engaged by them, and knew a conference was going to be a chance for an energetic discussion of them. Danijela's passing is a such a terrible loss both personally and to scholarship.Liz Greene (University of Reading)I first met Danijela in 2004. I was about to start a PhD at the University of Ulster and my supervisor, Professor Martin McLoone, invited me to go along to the annual Irish postgraduate research seminar series in Portrush, Northern Ireland. I heard some really interesting research presented, mainly on topics related to Irish cinema. And then came Danijela with her paper on music and rhythm.1I was transfixed both by Danijela's command of her scholarship and the ease with which she conversed in academic language. As someone just starting their doctoral research, I was most impressed by her scholarship. The paper was sharp, original, and brilliantly crafted. It was subsequently published as “The Musicality of Film Rhythm” in National Cinema and Beyond, edited by John Hill and Kevin Rockett in 2004, and would later be revised and included in her first monograph, The Musicality of Narrative Film in 2015. We spoke at that conference and quickly realized that we had shared research interests in sound design and music. We exchanged email addresses and remained in contact from that conference onward, building a friendship through research as we completed our postgraduate studies and beyond.In 2016, we coedited a volume titled The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. I had been asked by Kevin Donnelly to propose a book on sound design for his series with Palgrave. I spoke to Kevin about this idea and suggested instead that I work on a book with Danijela as I was more interested in the relationship between sound design and music than sound design alone. Thankfully, both Kevin and Danijela were on board with this idea, and thus what started out as an anticipated small volume with the short title The Integrated Soundtrack in 2013 became a more expansive handbook with the retained Integrated Soundtracks as a subtitle.From the outset of editing the book together, we landed on the idea to both read every chapter submitted, provide feedback, and discuss the material, before allocating a specific editor to work with an author. There was a real strength in this approach as it meant we were able to both contribute to the breadth of the editorial process. For example, if I did not understand a term in musicology, or Danijela was unfamiliar with a term in sound design, we were able to clarify that for each other and with each author to make sure that the language used across the volume was accessible to all readers. We continued that approach throughout the re-drafting process. We didn't always agree, and some of these discussions were difficult for us both. However, I am very proud of the book we produced and what we managed to achieve within it. It would not have been possible without Danijela's keen and insightful editorial work throughout.Central to Danijela's research journey was the MaMI conference and journal, as Ron has outlined. Danijela introduced me to the conference and the broader community of MaMI scholars when I attended for the first time in 2009. Besides the papers that I heard, what I cherished most about attending MaMI over the years was getting to hang out and eat food, go to the cinema, listen to concerts, and most importantly go for long walks in New York with her. Danijela walked a lot in New York. It provided a space to talk about the stuff that mattered. Walking was something that also featured in Danijela's scholarship.In The Musicality of Narrative Film, in a section titled “Musical Movement within a Shot,” Danijela offers examples of rhythm and walking in film, focusing particularly on Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy films: Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. With the long take approach of Van Sant and his director of photography, Harris Savides, Danijela detailed how the bobbing of the heads of the two Gerrys (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) bounce in and out of phase. The close-up shot of their heads accompanied by the crunching sound of their feet walking inspired her to write, “The consistently rhythmicized visual movement is an integral part of the scene's musical effect” (2015, 79), Danijela proposes here that this be considered a form of audiovisual musique concrète.While attending Danijela's memorial in May last year, I was struck by Aimee Mollaghan's words. Aimee spoke of spending time with Danijela at MaMI and it completely echoed my experience of attending this conference. It was only then that I realized that I had slotted into the rhythm of Danijela's conference going experience—heads bobbing in and out of phase as they move in close-up. I am grateful for the opportunity of getting to know Danijela and her work, and I am still drawing from her writing and ideas. I was invited by Laura Rascaroli, the general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, an open access journal housed at University College Cork, Ireland, where Danijela worked, to edit a special issue of the journal dedicated to the legacy of Danijela's scholarship. This issue will include research articles and audiovisual essays that respond to, build on, and engage with the many pioneering ideas Danijela put forward in film sound and music. The issue is due to be published in June 2023. I am grateful to Elsie and the conference organizers, Ron and Kat, for giving me this opportunity to reflect on Danijela's legacy. Thank you.Randolph Jordan (Champlain College in Montreal)In her last book, Sound Design is the New Score, Danijela set out to push theories of the integrated soundtrack into new territories. One chapter is dedicated to what she calls the “aesthetics of reticence,” which offers a particularly provocative pathway into thinking past the idea of the “integrated soundtrack” as a blurring of boundary lines between speech, music, and sound effects, and toward a multilevel set of integrations that requires understanding of the relationships between the history of film sound theory, the position of the auteur and the audience in relation to the finished film, and the deployment of sound strategies in the film itself. If you're waiting for a definition of the aesthetics of reticence right about now, I'll start by saying that this is, perhaps, a term that is better left with some mystery around it, for the value of mystery is one of the very things that Danijela is trying to point to with this term.On the surface, the aesthetics of reticence has to do with trends in recent art cinema that deliberately limit or exclude nondiegetic scoring, in opposition to the maximalist scoring tendencies of mainstream Hollywood film. Danijela is interested in how this musical restraint is connected to ideologies that seek to promote more active spectatorship through the use of deliberate ambiguity: not spoon-feeding audiences their emotional responses, as so much film scoring aims to do, but instead drawing on the capacity for sound design to be used expressively in ways that defy audience expectations and therefore prompt active interrogation.When I first read this chapter, it was part of Danijela's prospectus for Oxford University Press, for which I acted as reviewer. In my report, in which I broke anonymity so as to speak to Danijela more directly, I made it known that I was skeptical about the value of a new term that seemed to be describing long-standing traditions in various waves of cinematic expression over the years, particularly the Soviet montage school of the 1920s in which very clear arguments were made for the role that sound should play in maximizing viewer engagement, hinging on the idea of counterpoint as a tool for generating ambiguity. At that time, Danijela had not reached very far back into the annals of film sound history to contextualize what she thought was new about the way the current art cinema played with sonic ambiguity to command audience attention, and I said as much. So it was amazing to see that the finished chapter now contains what I consider to be an essential literature review that traces a line through film sound theory around the specific question of the relationship between sonic ambiguity and audience engagement.More importantly, the chapter's theoretical sections serve her goal of trying to pinpoint what it is that new voices in film sound expression, like her main example in Peter Strickland, are bringing to the table. In her analysis of Strickland's first two films, she focuses on how the director's own reticence is laid bare in the film's contradictions, as in the way that Berberian Sound Studio at once revels in recreating the atmosphere of Italian giallo films while critiquing their misogyny. The flexibility of Danijela's use of the term “reticence” is revealed here because the abstinence in this film is not on the soundtrack, as in most examples, but rather within the image track: we never see images from the violent film that the characters in the story are producing; we see only the production of the sound, which is decidedly maximal in its presentation. There is a kind of counterpoint in play here that exposes the reticence of the filmmaker himself in committing to either side, opening up an ethical ambiguity that reflects the ambiguity of the musique concrete sensibility that defines Strickland's status as a mélomane and governs the film's attention to sound within the narrative as well as on the level of aesthetics.In a way, the reticence of which Danijela speaks is a recognition of the difficulty of her very own analytical task, a hesitancy to make any pretense toward full understanding of what filmmakers who practice the aesthetics of reticence are doing. And in the end, that becomes one of the most useful qualities of her terminology in helping examine the audience's own position in relation to any given film's sonic ambiguities.James Denis Mc Glynn (University College Cork, Ireland)Thank you so much Elsie, and to Ron, Kevin, Liz, and Randolph for your beautiful contributions.Kevin has already provided a window into Danijela's conception of the “musicality of narrative film,” a notion that she explored at length in her monograph of the same name and continued to investigate in many eclectic ways throughout her career, right up to her final published works. Danijela's theorization of what she saw as the inherent musicality of film as a medium—along with the musical qualities that characterize our engagement with film as audience members—transcended any sort of overly simplistic comparison of film and musical forms and became a much more all-embracing approach that ambitiously strove to unravel our experiences of rhythm, movement, flow, and texture in the soundtrack. As Kevin and others have rightly suggested, this approach resonates with so much contemporary scholarship on screen music and sound that the influence of this way of thinking will undoubtedly be palpable in our discipline for many years to come.To return to this idea for a moment, I believe it is also valuable to note just how much of Danijela's innovative approach to film musicality permeated all her work. It is arguably the one unifying thread that connects her many (outwardly quite disparate) writings and ideas. And, as I'm sure is already clear from today's panel, it is a hugely diverse body of work: even the most cursory exploration of Danijela's scholarly output reveals just how readily she turned her hand to the most eclectic aspects of our experience of film and music. This was, of course, a very conscious decision for her: she once memorably described how scholarship that grounds itself in a specific theory or ideological framework tends to foreground just one particular aspect of our experience while neglecting many others (2020, 22–23). This was a trapping that Danijela identified and admirably strove to avoid through her analyses’ intuitive distillation of theories and ideas arising from many distinct fields of study. Yet her approach to film musicality is ever present: whether in her pioneering explorations of the interconnectedness of soundtrack elements—the so-called integrated soundtrack—or her vivid conception of what she saw as audiences’ sensual engagement with certain types of films (2020, 9).This pervasive emphasis on musicality was undoubtedly indebted to many of the recent trends in sonic and musical experimentation that so inspired her and which, by her reckoning, reflected a vibrant and exciting shift in recent screen music and sound practices. Yet, if I were to single out one facet of her approach to film musicality which has borne an enduring influence on my own research and teaching, it would be her deft navigation of this musicalized approach to filmmaking's relationship with reflexivity in narrative cinema: a phenomenon explored at length in her case study of Joe Wright's Anna Karenina (2015, 158–78). Her striking framing of this connection has had a clear influence on my own choice of case studies over the years and, in my teaching, often serves as a vibrant means of introducing my students to both Danijela's scholarship and complex aspects of reflexivity in cinema. For me, this work also reflects the complete lack of pretension that characterized Danijela's scholarly output. While she would garner a strong reputation at NYU's annual Music and the Moving Image conference and beyond for courageously confronting some tremendously challenging cinematic works, Danijela was entirely nondiscriminatory in her choice of texts and her resolve to tackle more mainstream film and series, should their use of sound and music inspire her. I believe it is a testament to the value—if not the universality—of many of her ideas that they might enable us to glean the same abundance of insights from even the most seemingly innocuous works as they do from more experimental or arthouse films.On a final, more personal note, whenever I revisit these particular writings of Danijela's on film musicality and reflexivity, I am forcibly reminded that academic writing need not be incompatible with exceptionally readable prose, nor need it exist in a vacuum from one's personality. Danijela had the most remarkable capacity to imbue her writing with a precise and empirical tone, without ever forfeiting the color and clarity of her prose or occluding the presence of her personality and firmly held points of view: no small achievement in academic writing.To this day, these attributes of Danijela's eclectic body of work remain the standards against which I measure the effectivity, thoroughness, and enjoyability of all the scholarly writing that I encounter. Moreover, they are the qualities to which I always aspire in my own writing: a gift for which I remain forever indebted to her.Miguel Mera (City, University of London)In the final chapter of her last monograph, Sound Design is the New Score (2020), Danijela discussed the musicalization of speech. This was not an entirely new topic for her, of course, but I believe she had reached an important point in her thinking that aligned with broader cultural trajectories. In a way, filmmaking had caught up with her way of seeing and hearing the world. She was able to point to recent examples of the use of speech, supported by technological and aesthetic developments, as a broader indicator of the breakdown of film soundtrack hierarchy. This is the powerful idea that she leaves us with.In that final chapter, she pointed to examples of rhythmic and affective uses of speech, including percussive, punctuating qualities, that help to create rhythmic form on a macro scale. She wrote about repetition and asynchronous sound, most notably in Shane Carruth's Upstream Colour (2013), where she understood the organization of speech and the push toward and pull away from visual synchronicity as a musical construction. She also discussed several examples of what Chion called “verbal chiaroscuro” (1994, 178), that is, being able to understand more or less of what is said analogous to the strong contrast between dark and shade in some visual art. Danijela's analysis included Chris Nolan's Interstellar (2014) and Drake Doermus's Breathe In (2013), where what is said is arguably less important than its sensory or timbral character. Speech that is deliberately hidden or rebalanced in the mix, Danijela argued, points to an emphasis on materiality, sensuality, on the interchangeability between speech and music, and ultimately the importance of this all in shaping a different mode of perception. She wrote, “The musical approach to speech is yet another form of new practice that brings to the fore film's musical and sensuous qualities, encouraging an aesthetic engagement with film that is based on the combination of narrative and multisensory stimuli” (2020, 129). This challenge to the idea of vococentric narrative cinema and the lean toward an holistic experiential musical encounter is, I think, an important legacy and, for us as screen music and sound scholars, it is also a call to arms.S