Overview
- Features new concept of the 'crystal song'
- First book-length study on music in contemporary French cinema
- Investigates music as a marker of community and interrelationships between music and gender, songs sung in English and French
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Reviews
“Phil Powrie’s book would already be quite valuable for its first half—a revealing analysis of music’s role in the construction of gender, space, and time in French cinema since the 1980s, as well as of the dominance of English-language songs in recent French films. But then, his forcefully original work on the ‘crystal-song’ is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the frisson of meaning and affect we experience with particular songs, songs that change the direction and apprehension of stories on screen.” (Claudia Gorbman, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma, USA. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, 1987)
“Powrie’s study of song in French cinema since the 1980s is full of compelling insights into the relationships between song and narrative, sounds and images, and genre and gender. Moving across the boundaries between “high” and “low” film art, between composed scoresand pre-existing music, and between French and English songs, Powrie generates new historical knowledge and creates a stimulating new theoretical concept, the “crystal-song”.” (Kelley Conway, Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is the author of Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film, 2004) “This book takes on an exciting project, approaching the history of French cinema from the vantage point of its engagement with popular music. Popular song has been essential to French cinema throughout its history, as Phil Powrie argues; but it has drawn relatively little scholarly attention. Cinema—and maybe French cinema especially—is thought of as a visual art, first and foremost. Powrie’s examination of French cinema from the standpoint of its links to popular music rests on an original, counterintuitive move that yields fresh insights.” (Charles O’Brien, Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, Canada. He is the author of Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the United States, 2005)
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Music in Contemporary French Cinema
Book Subtitle: The Crystal-Song
Authors: Phil Powrie
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52362-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-52361-3Published: 14 July 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-84885-3Published: 01 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-52362-0Published: 29 June 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 273
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 23 illustrations in colour
Topics: European Cinema and TV, Music, Screen Performance, Audio-Visual Culture, Culture and Gender