How and why is pre-existing music used in films? What effects can its use have on films and their audiences? And what lasting impact can appropriation have on the music? Reeled In is a comprehensive exploration of these questions, considering the cinematic quotation of Beethoven symphonies, Beatles songs, and Herrmann scores alike in films ranging from the early sound era to the present day, and in every role from ‘main title theme’ to ‘music playing in bar’. Incorporating a discussion of such factors as copyright and commerce alongside examination of texts and their effects, this broad study is a significant contribution to the scholarship on music in screen media, demonstrating that pre-existing music possesses unique attributes that can affect both how filmmakers construct their works and how audiences receive them, to an extent regardless of the music’s style, genre, and so on. This book also situates the reception of music by film, and by audiences experiencing that music through film, as significant processes within present-day culture, while more generally providing an illuminating case study of the kinds of borrowings, adaptations, and reinventions that characterize much of today’s art and entertainment.

For more than three decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have produced some of the most memorable and influential American roots music soundtracks in film history. From Raising Arizona (1987) to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) to Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the Coens, along with musical archivist and producer T-Bone Burnett, have curated half-forgotten yet unforgettable genres, artists and songs from America's cultural past for new audiences. This book is the first devoted to giving a full account of this rich cinematic legacy.

The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores the place of cinema in the history of listening. It looks at the ways in which listening to film is situated in textual, spatial, and social practices, and also studies how cinematic modes of listening have extended into other media and everyday experiences. Chapters are structured around six themes. Part I ("Genealogies and Beginnings") considers film sound in light of pre-existing practices such as opera and shadow theatre, and also explores changes in listening taking place at critical junctures in the early history of cinema. Part II ("Locations and Relocations") focuses on specific venues and presentational practices from roadshow movies to contemporary live-score screenings. Part III ("Representations and Re-Presentations") zooms into the formal properties of specific films, analyzing representations of listening on screen as well as the role of sound as a representational surplus. Part IV ("The Listening Body") focuses on the power of cinematic sound to engage the full body sensorium. Part V ("Listening Again") discusses a range of ways in which film sound is encountered and reinterpreted outside the cinema, whether through ancillary materials such as songs and soundtrack albums, or in experimental conditions and pedagogical contexts. Part VI ("Across Media") compares cinema with the listening protocols of TV series and music video, promenade theatre and personal stereos, video games and Virtual Reality.

Exploring how music is used to portray the past in a variety of media, this book probes the relationship between history and fantasy in the imagination of the musical past. The volume brings together essays from multidisciplinary perspectives, addressing the use of music to convey a sense of the past in a wide range of multimedia contexts, including television, documentaries, opera, musical theatre, contemporary and historical film, videogames, and virtual reality. With a focus on early music and medievalism, the contributors theorise the role of music and sound in constructing ideas of the past. In three interrelated sections, the chapters problematise notions of historical authenticity on the stage and screen; theorise the future of musical histories in immersive and virtual media; and explore sound’s role in more fantastical appropriations of history in television and videogames. Together, they pose provocative questions regarding our perceptions of ‘early’ music and the sensory experience of distant history. Offering new ways to understand the past at the crossroads of musical and visual culture, this collection is relevant to researchers across music, media, and historical and cultural studies.

In a major expansion of the conversation on music and film history, The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era draws together a wide-ranging collection of scholarship on music in global cinema during the transition from silent to sound films (the late 1920s to the 1940s). Moving beyond the traditional focus on Hollywood, this Companion considers the vast range of cinema and music created in often-overlooked regions throughout the rest of the world, providing crucial global context to film music history. An extensive editorial Introduction and 50 chapters from an array of international experts connect the music and sound of these films to regional and transnational issues—culturally, historically, and aesthetically—across five parts: Western Europe and Scandinavia Central and Eastern Europe North Africa, The Middle East, Asia, and Australasia Latin America Soviet Russia Filling a major gap in the literature, The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era offers an essential reference for scholars of music, film studies, and cultural history.

The thirteen chapters in this collection analyze David Fincher’s development as a filmmaker, from television commercials and music videos to serving as front runner on the series Mindhunter. The contributors explore a variety of characteristics, including Fincher’s attitudes toward his audiences, his attention to detail, his Gothic sense of evil, his modernization of film noir, and his reinvention of the serial killer. The diversity of approaches highlights the paradoxes of Fincher’s films and style, accentuating the tensions between his innovative methods and storytelling and unpacking the perennial questions of love, life, and death that his films raise. Scholars of film, television, and media will find this book especially salient.

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.

Musical Sincerity and Transcendence in Film focuses on the ways filmmakers treat music reflexively—that is, draw attention to what it is and what it can do. Examining a wide range of movies from the last thirty-five years including examples from Indiewood, teen film, and blockbuster cinema. The book explores two recurring ideas about music implied by foregrounded musical activity on screen: that music can be a potent means of sincere expression and genuine human connection and that music can enable transcendence of disenchantment and the mundane. The book covers eclectic critical terrain to highlight various layers of musical sincerity and transcendence in film, including the nineteenth-century aesthetics of E.T.A. Hoffmann, David Foster Wallace’s literary resistance to irony (sometimes called the New Sincerity), strategies of self-revelation in singer-songwriter repertoires, Lionel Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity, theories of play, David Nye’s notion of the American technological sublime, and Svetlana Boym’s writings on nostalgia. These lenses reveal that film is a way of perpetuating, revising, and critiquing ideas about music and that music in film is a potent means of exploring broader social, emotional, and spiritual desires.