Giorgio Biancorosso - Böcker

Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence. In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices.

Scoring Italian Cinema: Patterns of Collaboration redefines what it means to write music for the cinema. In eight richly illustrated chapters and a deft introduction, nine leading music and film scholars revisit the great theme of artistic collaboration from a heretofore unexplored angle: the relationship between film directors and composers in the "Long Italian Post-War" (ca. 1945–1975).Spurred by the surfacing of printed and manuscript scores, sketches, drafts, tapes, letters and miscellaneous notes, the authors of Scoring Italian Cinema examine afresh the partnerships between such figures as Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, Michelangelo Antonioni and Giovanni Fusco, Elio Petri and Ennio Morricone, and Dario Argento and Goblin. The volume also brings to light the role of conductors and performers as well as producers and screenwriters in creating the soundtracks of some of the most important films in the history of Italian cinema, including Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro, 1949), La strada (1954) and Salvatore Giuliano (1962). The intrinsically polyvocal nature of the process of completing a score, such as it emerges in the case studies gathered in Scoring Italian Cinema, invites us to rethink of composing for the films as a new kind of expanded, distributed musical practice.Meticulously researched and written in an accessible style, Scoring Italian Cinema will appeal to scholars and practitioners in the fields of music, film and media studies.

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.