Roger Hillman - Böcker

"Hillman's groundbreaking study enables both serious and casual film students to approach these works with sharpened vision and improved hearing." —Klaus Phillips, Hollins UniversityUnsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology examines the use of classical music in film, particularly in the New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 80s. By integrating the music of Beethoven, Mahler, and others into their films, directors such as Fassbinder, Kluge, and Syberberg consciously called attention to its cultural significance. Through this music their films could reference and, in some cases, explore an embedded cultural tradition that included German nationalism and the rise of Nazism, especially during a period when German films were gaining international attention for the first time since the 1920s. Classical music conditioned the responses of German audiences and was, in turn, reinterpreted in new cinematic contexts. In this pioneering volume, Hillman enriches our understanding of the powerful effects of music in cinema and the aesthetic and dramatic concerns of postwar German filmmakers.

Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, "Fields of Vision" is a path-breaking collection that inquires into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures. From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of ethnographic film and the gorgeous bodies of romantic cinema, "Fields of Vision" moves through eras, genres, and societies. Always asking how images work to produce meaning, the essays address the way the 'real' on film creates fantasy, news, as well as 'science', and considers this problematic process as cultural boundaries are crossed. One essay discusses the effects of Hollywood's high-capital, world-wide commercial hegemony on local and non-Western cinemas, while another explores the response of indigenous people in central Australia to the forces of mass media and video.Other essays uncover the work of the unconscious in cinema, the shaping of 'female spectatorship' by the 'women's film' genre of the 1920s, and the effects of the personal and subjective in documentary films and the photographs of war reportage. In illuminating dark, elided, or wilfully neglected areas of representation, these essays uncover new fields of vision.