Product Description
by Michael Baumgartner (Author)
Hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and ground-breaking cinematography, Jean-Luc Godard is a prominent pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image, but his achievements in sound have been largely overlooked. Such a lacuna in the extensive research on Godard's work is unfortunate, as Godard's lifelong preoccupation of exploring self-reflexively all aspects of filmmaking particularly affects film music. With the novel approach of metafilm music, extrapolated from Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre, this book not only closes up a crucial gap in Godard research, but also offers detailed analyses of the music as metafilm music in Contempt, Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, First Name: Carmen, Histoire(s) du cinéma, among other films and video productions. The innovative scholarly concept of metafilm music, enriching the burgeoning field of music in audio-visual media, describes how
Godard thinks about film music with film music. This book thus provides a thorough examination of Godard's self-reflexive approach to film music which has resulted in a lifelong creation of multi-layered soundtracks pushing the envelope of film music and sound to the limit.
Author Biography
Michael Baumgartner teaches at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on music in relation to cinema, theater, and visual arts, music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the exploration of the narrative capacity of music. He is the author of the monograph Exilierte Göttinnen:
Frauenstatuen im Bühnenwerk von Kurt Weill, Thea Musgrave und Othmar Schoeck (2012) and the co-editor of the three anthologies Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War; Music, Ideology, Commerce, and Popular Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s; and
Music, Process, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s (2020-22).
