Review: Mark Slobin, ed. (2008) Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Transcription

1 Review: Mark Slobin, ed. (2008) Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Aparna Sharma UCLA Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music is an anthology of essays providing an in-depth overview of film music practices, production systems and cultural influences in a span of geographical contexts ranging from the Indian subcontinent to the West Indies. While entitled Global Soundtracks, the text provides a critical take that destabilises the term global as monolithic, homogenous and other to the North American and European mainstream. Editor Mark Slobin s three chapters that form the introductory part of the book, entitled American Worlds, commence by defining Hollywood practices of image and sound construction in terms of the Institutional Mode of Representation that was first proposed by Noël Burch. Slobin presents a historical analysis of music codes within Hollywood using not a musicologist s approach, but instead deploying an ethnographic unpacking of Hollywood s motivations and mechanisms. From this position, Hollywood realism s much debated motivation for verisimilitude is contextualised in terms of supplying, through music, an ethnography of indigenous society. The first chapter focuses on Max Steiner s work specifically investigating aspects such as his use of symphony orchestra that is posited as a small version of the social order (11); and the use of drumbeats as a source for evoking foreign exoticism within the Hollywood supercultural context (13). The next chapter examines Hollywood superculture beyond Max Steiner, contextualising the institutional practices of the film score that Film-Philosophy ISSN:

2 emerged after the Second World War when target audiences shifted to young couples and teenagers and film music developed contact with advertising. Here Slobin usefully points out how Hollywood s supercultural influences impact societies and their filmmaking practices across the world citing examples from Bollywood and Chennai. Through a range of case studies Slobin posits that the dominant approach to filmmaking relies on music to homogenize and stereotype ethnographically, adding however, that the superculture is not monolithic or omnipotent (60). There are within the supercultural system variations and even subversions that according to Slobin are as vital as uniformity for the supercultural system to persist (60). In the last chapter of this section, categorisations that fall outside the superculture are introduced. According to Slobin, Subcultural cinemas are the work of insiders who take the camera into their own hands with the firm intention of telling stories about small groups embedded within larger societies (63). The subcultural modality as posited by Slobin approximates a postcolonial interstice as its mechanisms include borrowing and moving out to a wide choice of sources thereby countering audience expectation of a direct match between film and ethnic identity (77). Together these three essays serve to define the dominant approach to film music from Hollywood that influences film industries across the globe, and further, they provide the necessary backdrop for the close readings of specific film music practices distinct from the supercultural modality that follow in the remainder of the book. This structure of the book facilitates the reader in developing comparative insight into the materials and practices examined in the book. Not only in this section, but throughout the book, authors use an ethnographic approach to the study and critically analyse the music practices they investigate. This method lends a coherence to the text and more specifically, it facilitates translation of varied film music practices for readers who may not be conversant with cultural and historical disparities between the different geographical regions the book spans. The second part of the book, Cinema Systems, opens with Greg Booth s comprehensive and in-depth study of the sound system and practices Film-Philosophy ISSN:

3 of Bollywood. Booth carefully excavates how practices of background music and orchestral sound that were first mobilised in Hindi movies before going on to became normative and institutionalised modes of film sound construction. In his discussion, Booth clearly points out how since the 1930s up until the 1990s the Hindi film industry integrated foreign influences into film music and how that trend has been reappropriated and furthered with the onset of digital technologies in the 1990s and beyond in the context of a global economic system. Two discussions from this chapter are particularly insightful. The first surrounds the institutionalised practices for developing Hindi film songs and music. Booth elaborates on the economic modes underpinning the production of film music in Bollywood. This leads into the second incisive discussion of this chapter surrounding the development of a star-system applied to music directors and playback singers as much as to Bollywood actors. In recent years studies of Bollywood films and associated practices of exhibition and distribution have gained currency within western academic circles. While useful, given that Bollywood churns out more films than most mainstream film industries in the world, studies of Bollywood often lack the rigour and insight of how that industry is organised, its underpinning economic and cultural mechanisms and its reception among audiences in India and outside. Booth s essay is commanding on all these accounts as applied to the study of Hindi film music. He points to how Bollywood bears a dual identity as the production center for film soundtracks and for a nation s popular music (95). More importantly, his analysis of film music production practices - both economically and culturally - is a rare account that documents institutionalised procedures and production modes from within the industry rather than an analysis of finished film texts - a modality that tends to dominate Indian cinema studies. Despite the very prominent odds that most film scholars working in India confront often in the form of lack of documentation, this chapter provides a necessary in-road into understanding the Bollywood film industry historically and in the process bringing forth financial and class mechanisms - aspects Film-Philosophy ISSN:

4 that underpin the Bollywood operative, but which have not been fully exposited in production and exhibition studies. In an obvious and necessary move away from Bollywood the next chapter examines music in the south Indian, Tamil Film industry. This chapter, like Booth s discussion of Hindi film industry, provides cultural and historical contextualisation and also discussion of the processes for developing music in the Tamil film industry. The scope of this chapter is vast, spanning from the early mythologicals to the postmodern and transnational music of Oscar winner AR Rahman. Joseph Getter and B. Balasubrahmaniyan, the authors of the chapter, reference links between Tamil folk music and the bhava and rasa principles from India s ancient text, Bharata s Natyashastra. On the whole, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of Tamil film music. There is a euphoric sentiment in this chapter particularly while celebrating prominent stars and musicians. The whole corpus of Tamil film music in terms of its pervasiveness in and connections with everyday Tamil life is introduced and could have been delved further to question and analyse the institutionalisation of film form and practices in the Tamil film industry whose output exceeds Bollywood s. Extending out of the Indian subcontinent, the next chapter is an ethnography surrounding the influence and amalgamation of Hindi film music in Hausa (Nigerian) Videofilm soundtracks. Abdalla Uba Adamu situates Nigeria s exposure to Hindi cinema in terms of the wider exposure to foreign media cultures ranging from the packaged media products (153) coming in from Lebanon to more historical factors such as British colonialism, which encouraged cinema among the locals but neither supported any local film industry or exposure to Arab cinema that was deemed revolutionary. Adamu distinguishes between the Hausa videofilm industry that started in Kano, North Nigeria, and eventually got termed Kanywood as opposed to the Nigerian videofilm industry, aka Nollywood. Adamu identifies characteristics of the Hausa videofilm including the love triangle and song-and-dance routines. This chapter argues that Hindi film is eagerly viewed by the Hausa as audiences and appropriated stylistically. Film-Philosophy ISSN:

5 Adamu proposes that the similarities between the two cultures contributes in sustaining Hausa viewers interests in Hindi film that is deemed as near to their everyday life experience. Not only music and film style generally, Adamu points out that even Hausa videofilm poster design is influenced by Hindi movies. According to Adamu, the Hausa videofilm has increasingly metamorphosed into a musical film, with songs as the selling points rather than storylines (165). Adamu then elaborates on the process of music composition in a Hausa videofilm before concluding that foreign media influences, particularly Hindi film, have redefined the musician in the youth culture of Hausa and created spaces for male and female interaction as distinct from the traditional music practices that evolved as single-sex and single voice (172). The following essay by Sue M. C. Tuohy extends the critical discourse of Global Soundtracks by tracing the scope of reflexivity in Chinese film and music. While post-coloniality necessarily gestures the oscillation between tradition and modernity, Tuohy s essay emphasises how early Chinese film, being located in urban centres represents urban environments. Reflexivity in these films takes the form of depicting the composition of film music diegetically or by deploying intertextual practices and metacommunicative forms. The essay then focuses on specific film forms that embody reflexivity such as the Chinese opera world as a filmic trope, or films focussing on the actress-songstress character. Through this essay, our understanding of reflexivity is extended to include cultural and historical imperatives - a move that is necessary to counter the opacity of embodiment underpinning dominant Western understandings of reflexivity in cinema, which is often linked to making visible the cinematic apparatus within film. In the third section of the book, Cinema Moments, essays examine specific experiences of filmmaking, reception and cultural context. Discussion spans the use of music in historical Indonesian films, representation of cultural difference within the Mexican Silver Screen, Donald Duck s trip to Latin America as depicted in The Three Caballeros (1945), cinema of Martinique and Guadalope, and music in Egyptian film. Film-Philosophy ISSN:

6 While geographically and culturally diverse landscapes are addressed through these essays, issues of post-coloniality surface in most of them. These steer the discussion into issues of stereotypes pertaining to race and colour, the implications of film music within colonial and postcolonial moments, and the disparity between rural and urban landscapes in the postcolonial context. These essays persist with the ethnographic approach of the text and emphasise in their analyses the historical and cultural implications of film music. For example, Brenda Berrian in Diversity and Orality in Euzhan Palcy s La Rue cases-negres raises the use of bele lisid drums by filmmaker Euzhan Palcy. Berrain points at how the drum in Palcy s work surfaces as a subversive instrument voicing people s suffering and resistance to the colonial regime. Besides cultural tradition, musical instruments now come to embody lived and collective cultural memory. The last section of the book, Comparative Vistas, adequately rounds up the text pointing out how film music in varied contexts across the globe is underpinned by specific cultural and historical imperatives. This coincides with the opening move in the book to approach the term global as not monolithic or homogenous. In the last essay, editor Mark Slobin revisits varied modes of approaching and studying music. For example, he unpacks the use of an American folksong in Hitchcock s The Birds as inserting a sense of community within the given scene and through that comes a connection with the audience. This last essay calls for a multiplicity of approaches to the study of music in film - emphasizing its creative and cultural diversity. Providing a broad survey of film music practices around the world, by emphasising the cultural, historical and creative specificities of musical practices in varied cinema contexts, Global Soundtracks makes for a much required intervention into the broader rubric of studying world cinemas. It provides refreshing methodological approaches to the study of musical practices thereby flagging the inadequacies of conventional close text and discourse analysis in Film Studies applied to the study of world cinemas. Film-Philosophy ISSN: