Nessa Johnston – författare

This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland.A major hit in Ireland and around the world, the film depicts the short-lived attempts of an ensemble of young working-class Dubliners to achieve success as a soul covers band, playing the hits of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others, on a mission to ‘bring soul back to Dublin’. Drawing upon interviews with key figures involved in the film and its music, including Roddy Doyle, Angeline Ball, and Bronagh Gallagher, as well as archival research of director Alan Parker’s papers, the book explores questions of authenticity associated with youth, music, class, and culture, and assesses the film’s legacy for the Irish film industry, Irish music scenes, and Irish youth. It also examines the film’s status as a truly transnational production.This concise, yet interdisciplinary case study will be of interest to students and researchers in popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as film and media studies.

Bringing together fifty-one essays, each devoted to a single American film, Screening American Film offers a wide-ranging exploration of the histories, practices, politics, styles, and meanings that have shaped American film since the 1930s. While the volume proceeds decade by decade from the 1930s onward, contributors reach further back and forward to illuminate the breadth and complexity of the American screen.Complemented by the volumes on Screening American Independent Cinema (2023) and Screening Classical Hollywood Cinema (forthcoming), in these fifty-one chapters readers will encounter American cinema not as a singular tradition but as a constellation of overlapping and often competing practices, modes, and priorities: classical and post-classical Hollywood, major blockbusters, independent and indie filmmaking, exploitation and arthouse. The essays draw upon a variety of critical frameworks including the industrial, aesthetic, historical, political, and thematic while remaining attentive to key questions of style, genre, authorship, performance, stardom, and context.The central aim of Screening American Film is to complement the viewing and teaching of American cinema in film and screen studies classrooms, across related disciplines, and to reshape notions of canon. Each essay has been designed to stand on its own while contributing to a larger mosaic of what American film has been, and what it continues to become, from Mae West to Barbie. Written to support film screenings and teaching: every film discussed here is available for viewing, in one format or another, even if it lies outside the conventional structures of platform-era film consumption. Indeed, part of the book’s ambition is to highlight American films whose significance becomes newly visible in the revisitation of established “classics” sitting aside the lesser known, and in some cases, entirely un-mapped cinematic terrain.The fifty-one entries introduce students to different approaches within film studies from historical and contextual framing, film analysis, industrial and institutional analysis, politics and ideology, genre and authorship, film theory, representation, exhibition and reception, and technology. Screening American Film is the essential resource for anyone teaching or studying American film.

Bringing together fifty-one essays, each devoted to a single American film, Screening American Film offers a wide-ranging exploration of the histories, practices, politics, styles, and meanings that have shaped American film since the 1930s. While the volume proceeds decade by decade from the 1930s onward, contributors reach further back and forward to illuminate the breadth and complexity of the American screen.Complemented by the volumes on Screening American Independent Cinema (2023) and Screening Classical Hollywood Cinema (forthcoming), in these fifty-one chapters readers will encounter American cinema not as a singular tradition but as a constellation of overlapping and often competing practices, modes, and priorities: classical and post-classical Hollywood, major blockbusters, independent and indie filmmaking, exploitation and arthouse. The essays draw upon a variety of critical frameworks including the industrial, aesthetic, historical, political, and thematic while remaining attentive to key questions of style, genre, authorship, performance, stardom, and context.The central aim of Screening American Film is to complement the viewing and teaching of American cinema in film and screen studies classrooms, across related disciplines, and to reshape notions of canon. Each essay has been designed to stand on its own while contributing to a larger mosaic of what American film has been, and what it continues to become, from Mae West to Barbie. Written to support film screenings and teaching: every film discussed here is available for viewing, in one format or another, even if it lies outside the conventional structures of platform-era film consumption. Indeed, part of the book’s ambition is to highlight American films whose significance becomes newly visible in the revisitation of established “classics” sitting aside the lesser known, and in some cases, entirely un-mapped cinematic terrain.The fifty-one entries introduce students to different approaches within film studies from historical and contextual framing, film analysis, industrial and institutional analysis, politics and ideology, genre and authorship, film theory, representation, exhibition and reception, and technology. Screening American Film is the essential resource for anyone teaching or studying American film.

This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland.A major hit in Ireland and around the world, the film depicts the short-lived attempts of an ensemble of young working-class Dubliners to achieve success as a soul covers band, playing the hits of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others, on a mission to ‘bring soul back to Dublin’. Drawing upon interviews with key figures involved in the film and its music, including Roddy Doyle, Angeline Ball, and Bronagh Gallagher, as well as archival research of director Alan Parker’s papers, the book explores questions of authenticity associated with youth, music, class, and culture, and assesses the film’s legacy for the Irish film industry, Irish music scenes, and Irish youth. It also examines the film’s status as a truly transnational production.This concise, yet interdisciplinary case study will be of interest to students and researchers in popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as film and media studies.

This cross-disciplinary collection provides the first comprehensive study of library music practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Library music was inexpensive, off-the-shelf music available to license for a small fee. It was widely used in television and film as a cheaper alternative to commissioned soundtracks. The book pays attention to the different individuals, groups, organisations and institutions involved in making library music, as well as to its transnational sites of production (from continental recording studios to regional cutting rooms). It addresses questions of distributed creativity, collective authorship, and agency. Combining empirical and theoretical research, the book unveils the modus operandi of a highly secretive yet enduringly significant cultural industry. By drawing attention to the cultural ubiquity and intersectionality of library music, the collection also shifts emphasis from individual film and TV composers to the invisible community of music publishers, writers, and session musicians. It argues that the latter were collectively responsible for fashioning much of the sonic identity of 1960s and 1970s film and television. As well as providing a nuanced understanding of historical library music cultures, the collection shows how they continue to inform contemporary audiovisual cultures.