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The Presence of the Past
Temporal Experience and the New Hollywood Soundtrack
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Book Presentation:
The Presence of the Past offers a new perspective on Hollywood's "New Wave" as engaged with the vitality of sensory experience and the affective imagination. As author Daniel Bishop shows, the soundtracks of several key films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960s and 70s cultivated an array of sensibilities regarding the American past. This importance of the past exceeded the New Hollywood's acknowledged use of genre revisionism as a vehicle for timely ideological commentary. There was also a vital tendency in this era to locate the past as an object of imagined phenomenal presence.
Although this concept of the past never solidified into a self-conscious discourse, it was nevertheless woven into film culture, readable between the lines of criticism, cultural reception, New Wave aesthetics, and in the aesthetic and industrial transformations of sound design and film music. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Last Picture Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Badlands (1973) are not only key texts of an exciting era in American popular cinema. They are also mediations upon the presence of the past, an image central to the polarities of visceral energy and ambiguous ephemerality, of utopian dreams and melancholy resignation that characterized this cinema. These sensibilities of pastness engage in diverse ways with myth, nostalgia, paranoia, and existential alienation. They are, however, also united by a concern both with the experiential actuality of the past and with the distances that inevitably separate us from this actuality.
About the Author:
Daniel Bishop is an adjunct assistant professor at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he teaches in the Music in General Studies program and the Musicology department. His teaching and research focus on film music and sound.
Press Reviews:
"Daniel Bishop largely achieves the objectives set forth in the introduction, which makes The Presence of the Past a valuable read for scholars who specialize in film music and film philosophy. Scholars with a more general interest in film or who focus on the historical film may find Bishop's more musicological passages difficult. These scholars, however, can still benefit from The Presence of the Past, especially the first and fourth chapters. These chapters highlight ways to think more deeply, subtly, and profitably about the role of music and sound design in cinema, especially in terms of historical films." - Chris Stone, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
"The Presence of the Past offers a fresh take on many iconic films from the New Hollywood era by exploring underlying tensions between past and present, and myth and history in their soundtracks. Through an erudite and incisive analysis, Bishop reveals how overlapping 'temporal resonances' in these films constitute an essential part of their experiential allure." - Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, author of Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack (OUP, 2015)
"In this engaging and imaginative study, Daniel Bishop approaches films and their mythic aura through seeing their music as a crucial frame for deeper interpretation. Bishop is to be congratulated on this bold and highly illuminating study, which engages and probes the complexities of historical representation in a number of key American films of the 1970s. The discussions are rich, revealing and lively, arguing most convincingly for music's primacy in the films' paradoxical and ambiguous sense of the past." - Kevin Donnelly, Professor of Film and Film Music, University of Southampton
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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