Introduction
Today’s digital environment features a growing circulation of repurposed archival audiovisual material.
In this dissertation I examine how music can be used in juxtaposition with voice-over and news footage to create new meaning in the documentary. I consider how music refers outward to a history of social practices as well as to its own material, aesthetic, and cultural history. The repurposing of music can engender affective reactions, identification, and memory on the part of the viewer.
This dissertation builds on Jaimie Baron’s argument that the repurposing of audiovisual footage forms the contemporary experience of history today. I expand on her framework of reception by examining the role of music in this process. I analyze how popular, repurposed music in the films of Adam Curtis functions as a language of political and cultural critique.
In this dissertation I apply a multimodal analysis to the essay films of Adam Curtis. Curtis’ body of work is especially salient for a project on the repurposing of music. Curtis reappropriates material from a wide array of sources including televisual news footage from the BBC, stock imagery, film clips and commercials. Music plays a significant role in how Curtis re-shapes the news footage into new narratives. His works have been referred to as essay films (Coley, 2018); radical mixology (Doyle, 2017); and counter-histories (Harris, 2016).
Using a method that integrates analytical approaches within documentary studies, affect theory, and sound studies, I present a broad analysis of Curtis’ films, followed by a closer analysis of three works: The Trap, (2007), It Felt like a Kiss (2009), and his most recent work, HyperNormalisation (2016).
I argue that Curtis’ strategies function as a radical critique of dominant news narratives. In effect, Curtis uses music to interrogate the relationship between individual pleasure and political ideology. He structures the audience’s identification with the popular culture as it is depicted alongside historical events. His devices of audiovisual juxtaposition foreground the music and compel the viewer to interrogate their own individual affective responses, memory, and social identification with it.
Such interrogation challenges individuals to recognize how they operate as subjects of a popular culture in which the pleasures of the individual are intrinsically political. Curtis’ work demonstrates the capacity to which sound and music can structure affective interactions with archival footage.
Music plays a central role in Curtis’ radical critique of journalistic conventions. Curtis problematizes dominant narratives by interrogating how popular culture has functioned throughout the 20th and 21st centuries while drawing on the audience’s subjectivity within the same cultural and media environment.
One resonant theme in his works is that music and media culture often function to promise liberation while simultaneously perpetuating hegemonic power structures. Curtis continually depicts examples in which rock music often espoused personal freedom, but its hyper-emphasis on individuality led people to become politically apathetic.
The affective experiences created through different combinations of news footage, music, and voiceover compels the audience to confront their recognition of the material as spectators and participants in the same mass media and culture industry depicted.
Through a more focused inquiry into the role of sound, this study extends Baron’s framework of the archive effect. It raises important considerations regarding the use of music as a narrative device and as a point of historical signification. A study of repurposed music in the essay film can contribute to a wider discussion about how techniques of reappropriation function as key devices of rhetoric and critique.
Remediation
Since 1999, new media technology and a growing digital infrastructure have accelerated the production and distribution of audiovisual content to the extent that repurposing footage has become a common rhetorical device.
The concept of remediation was originally coined by Bolter and Grusin in 1999 as the appropriation or repurposing of forms, techniques, or social significance of other media in order “to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999, p. 57).
Recent scholars in the fields of archive and memory studies (Baron, 2013; Brunow, 2013, 2015; Erll, 2011, 2017; Erll and Rigney, 2009) have used the term “remediation” to focus on how the repurposing of audiovisual footage can be employed in genres like the documentary.
Memory and archive studies scholars have adopted the term to refer to the repurposing of audiovisual footage itself. Techniques of repurposing audiovisual footage, they argue, have the power to shape and revise cultural memory by evoking new audiovisual engagements with the past (Baron, 2013; Brunow, 2013, 2015; Erll, 2011, 2017; Erll and Rigney, 2009; Landsberg, 2015).
Archive Effect
To Jaimie Baron, the ability to make sense of coherent narratives or patterns within the repurposing of archival content is central to our understanding of history and reality. She argues that in this new digital environment, traditional distinctions between what is “official” archival footage and what is “found” footage have eroded. The archival document is not “an indication of official sanction or storage location” but, rather, an “experience of reception” which she calls the archive effect (Baron, 2013, pp. 6-7).
Baron argues that the experience of something as archival, and a corresponding feeling of “pastness,” is affectively sensed. The reception of archival disparities is also based in part on the viewer’s cultural, extra-textual knowledge.
Baron articulates two key components to the archive effect: a sensed disparity of time (then vs. now) and a sensed disparity of intention (original source vs. appropriated context). A sense of temporal disparity may be elicited from the material quality of the archival footage (ie. it is black and white or grainy). An intentional disparity arises when the viewer perceives a difference between the original context of the footage and the new meaning derived from its re-contextualization.
Archival footage, Baron argues, carries with it some excess beyond the filmmaker’s intentions, causing a sense of resistance with its recontextualization; this contributes to “its aura of evidentiary authority” (2013, p. 25).
The Historical Avant-garde
Throughout the tradition of avant-garde art, artists have made use of materials available to them in their new media environment (such as the power of mechanical reproducibility offered through photography and film) to challenge dominant modes of perception and raise theoretical and ethical questions concerning the role of media technology in our society. Critical strategies of reappropriation can be located in various genres such as the remix, video art, and found footage or collage films, which have all been inspired by the historical traditions of avant-garde art.
A broad filmmaking practice encompassing the use of found footage in documentary cinema, stock footage in fictional cinema, home-movie footage in some feminist cinema and the often radical re-contextualization of a vast array of images and sounds in examples of avant-garde cinema — Adrian Danks (2006, p. 241)
Radical forms of juxtaposition and reappropriation can be located throughout the history of filmmaking. Although history’s earliest filmmakers could not draw from a pre-existing archive of moving image footage. They experimented with capturing “found” subjects in the world around them, in a candid and un-staged way. Subjects for the camera were found accidentally, randomly, or deliberately collected or documented (Hicks, 2007).
As film techniques of cutting and splicing developed, state-sponsored newsreels appropriated various kinds of footage to form the first audiovisual accounts of the news. Newsreels were presented in a straightforward, explanatory way, guided by the voiceover. The footage was frequently recycled in different reels and mixed with sound and different narrative arguments often to bolster support for nationalist agendas.
The European avant-garde art world of the 1920s and 1930s became the main domain of the first creative reappropriations of film footage. Russian avant gardists such as Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub and Sergei Eisenstein, credited as the originator of the montage, embraced and refined techniques of editing different cuts of footage together to form a continuous whole.
One evident influence on the avant-garde filmmakers was photographic collage, a method coined by artists George Braque and Pablo Picasso in the early 20th century. The collage technique would be embraced within modernist movements including Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Surrealists often incorporated elements of chance and aleatory methods of re-assemblance as a means to circumvent conscious, rational conventions of thinking, which, according to Surrealist rationale, hampered access to the creative imagination. These Surrealist techniques are comparable to what Paul Arthur describes as the “method of ‘estrangement’ found in films by Rene Clair, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman, and Charles Dekeukeleire.” Arthur writes that their filmic reworkings “emphasiz[e] fantastical, previously ignored, formal or metaphoric qualities in otherwise banal scenes” (Arthur, 2000, p. 59).
In a 1962 essay, Susan Sontag argues that “the Surrealist tradition in all [the] arts is united by the idea of destroying conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition (the ‘collage principle’)"
The Essay film
The genre of the essay film, which originated in the work of the Left Bank “essayist” filmmakers, provides another context from which to approach Curtis’ filmmaking techniques. Techniques of reappropriation have continued throughout film history since the 1920s and 1930s, albeit not as the privileged mode of representation in the non-fiction domain.
Among the Left Bank experimental filmmakers of the 1960s onwards, the reappropriation of different footage would become a means to explore filmic, national, and personal memory.
The Documentary Genre
Scottish filmmaker John Grierson coined the term “documentary” in a 1926 review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana. Later, he expanded on the concept to define it as a “branch of film production which goes to the actual, and photographs it and edits it and shapes it. It attempts to give form and pattern to the complex of direct observation” (2002/1946, p. 91).
While acknowledging the concept of the documentary as a “clumsy” one, Grierson was attempting to distinguish the genre from both newsreels and Hollywood films. He referred to newsreels as “lecture films,” absent of all dramatization. “They describe, and even reveal, but, in any aesthetic sense only rarely reveal” (1976/1932-1934, p. 20). On the other hand, he wrote that “studio films largely ignore [the] possibility of opening up the screen on the real world” (1976/1932-1934, p. 21).
Influenced by British traditions of Empiricism, state-building and the social theories of the Chicago school, Grierson largely eschewed avant-garde aesthetics in favor of a straightforward and pedagogical approach to non-fiction filmmaking known as socialist realism (Nichols, 2001).
Realism and new technology of the 1950s and 1960s
In the 1950s and 1960s, newly accessible, handheld recording devices emerged within the context of a radically new postwar environment, inspiring filmmakers of all kinds to embrace a new aesthetic. “Realism,” famously promoted by André Bazin in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma which he founded in 1951, features long takes, direct sound, limited effects (cuts, added sound) and the absence of authorial voice-over or montage (Corner, 2009).
The techniques of repurposing featured in the more experimental works of the Rive Gauche / Left Bank filmmakers added a scrutiny to self-reflexivity. Figures in this movement included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard, one of the leading voices of the Nouvelle Vague. They were of the first generation of filmmakers to have grown up with cinema. Their use of repurposing drew attention to the constructed nature of film and reflected an awareness of the historical film archive.
Decidedly closer to the avant-garde, their essayistic films revealed how both personal and collective memory can be constructed through film, and how important meaning can be achieved through assemblages that exist between fact and fiction, the actual and the staged.
Theorizing the Essay Film
In recent decades, the Left Bank films have been further analyzed through the concept of the essay film. A sub-genre of the documentary, the essay film has been the subject of a renewed scholarship (Rascaroli, 2008; Alter, 2007; Corrigan, 2011).
Originally coined by Hans Richter in 1940, the essay film is a hybrid film form which exists on a spectrum between the documentary and experimental video art. Scholars have analyzed the essay film according to Aldous Huxley’s definition of the essay as drawing on “the three poles of description: the personal and the auto-biographical . . . the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular . . . and the abstract-universal” (Huxley, 1958, qtd. in Rascaroli, 2008).
Rob Coley’s most recent work (2018) uses the term “infrastructural aesthetics” to evaluate Curtis’ work according to Hito Stereyl’s “second stage of the essay film” (2007):
This encounter occurs in the apparent disjunction between content and form, between political argument and aesthetic operation. Indeed, insofar as these films express the abstract space that conditions their possibility — typically conceptualized in terms of a network — his method supports the claim that the essayistic form is now “a dominant form of narrative in times of post-Fordist globalization . . . symptomatic of post-industrial information economies, characterized by ‘the compulsory manufacturing of difference’ extreme flexibilization, and distracted modes of attention.” (Steyerl, 2017, pp. 276-277)
The Found Footage Film
Curtis’ techniques can also be observed in relation to the found footage films and political remix videos that developed in the 1970s. Found footage discourse was reinvigorated in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by the growth of film studies departments; the introduction of historiographical theory; and the emergence of videotape (Corner, 2009). Video made it easier to access, copy and archive a growing body of film and television footage. Prior to video, television content, if recorded from the live broadcast at all, was recorded and stored on kinescopes. Kinescope recordings were difficult to access and often limited to studios, many of which have since been lost or destroyed in warehouse fires.
For a new generation of film studies scholars, video would dramatically expand access to the film archive. Archival access became a crucial locus of power to be interrogated. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida emphasized that history is shaped according to dominant interpretations of archival documents, and that political power is facilitated by access to such records (Foucault,1972).
With the advent of video, dominant narratives could be newly interrogated and critiqued through the reappropriation of television footage.
According to Derrida, the essential criterion for democracy is “the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (Derrida,1996). This theory reflected and constituted an urgent need to reinterpret American history as it has been represented by dominant institutions (Arthur, 2000, p. 59). Thus, history became historiography: a fluid and constantly negotiated narrative which could be challenged, subverted, and redrawn.
Interrogating Commercial Television Footage
Since its inception in the 1950s, commercial television has come to unite publics, legitimize cultural transformations and connect people through shared generational identities. Television journalism remains a powerful force unto people’s sense of reality and Television journalism remains a powerful force unto people’s sense of reality and history (O'connor, 1988; Edgerton, 2000; Wales, 2008). Television is the “principal means by which people learn about history today” (Edgerton, 2000, p. 7). Its form, formatting and conventions influence the “historical representations produced” and the embodied concerns of the present.
“Television history as collective memory is the site of mediation where professional history meets popular history” (Edgerton, 2000, p. 9).
Out of propaganda, The Atomic Cafe constructs ironic counter-propaganda; out of compiled images from various sources it constructs a straightforward dialectic between the past and the present” (1999/2000, p. 35) Like the works of de Antonio, The Atomic Cafe plays on “the complexity of the relationship between historical referent and interpretation. . . . It enact[s] a fundamental doubt concerning the purity of [its] original source material and its ability to reveal a truth that is valid, lasting and cogent” (Stella Bruzzi, 1999/2000, p. 13).
Remix theory
The most recent discourse in which to contextualize Adam Curtis’ work is the post digital field of “remix studies” (Conti, 2014; Doyle, 2017; Gallagher, 2017a, 2017b; Kuhn, 2012; Manovich, 2007; Navas, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2017; Smith, 2009). Eduardo Navas writes that remix culture refers to today’s period of creative production which dates back to the early 1990s (the beginning of the commercial internet and the period in which Curtis first began producing television series).
Eduardo Navas defines remix as “specific forms of expression using pre-existing sources (sound, image, text) to develop work that may be considered derivative while also gaining autonomy” (2017). To Navas, remix is fundamentally a discourse.
Remix culture has roots in the musical experimentations of producers and DJs (Navas, 2014b, p. 4). Having emerged out of the study of sampling and DJ culture, remix theory provides a multimodal framework that does not privilege image over sound. This equivalent treatment of sampled source material is exemplified in John Doyle’s analysis of Adam Curtis as a “remixologist” (2017). Doyle argues that in a remix, any modality can be foregrounded and recontextualized. “Remixed media may quote sounds over images, or video over text, or text over sounds. The quotes get mixed together” (2017, pp. 48-49).
Owen Gallagher argues that “the presence of sampled source material is the defining aesthetic characteristic of remix” (2017a, p. 2).
Catherine Russell considers that remix theory has the possibility to address that which Wees’ distinctions between found footage forms inadequately account for in our convergence culture (Russell 2018, p. 10). Remix addresses the rapid pace of circulation and recirculation of content. Eli Horwatt argues that while the political (or critical) remix video draws from avant-garde practices, it is distinguished by “a wholly new method of distribution, an open accessible archive of source material, and a much larger audience” (2009, p. 77).
Rachel Falconer interprets that remix is “the dominant pattern of human behavior in mass communication and the Internet” (Falconer, 2013). Remix is a form of “cultural glue” in which “the compulsive, obsessive action of ‘cut/copy & paste’ [is] the new norm of creative behavior” (Falconer, 2013).
Eduardo Navas argues that the remix today is part of a metaloop of cultural production. The metaloop consists of two stages: the production of new material, followed by its recycling and cultural sublation, in which the content is culturally legitimized or capitalized on. Today, he argues, these processes occur almost simultaneously; any resistance “thrives within the loops” (2014a, p. 128). A critical remix, he argues, requires a self-awareness of this process.
Today, wherever there is music, there is money. Looking only at the numbers, in certain countries more money is spent on music than on reading, drinking, or keeping clean. Music, an immaterial pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, of the immaterial up for sale, of the social relation unified in money. It heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come. — Jacques Atalli, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977)
In this study, I approach Curtis’ works as multimodal texts, featuring television and video footage, music, sound, voice-over and captions. To form my method of analysis I integrate concepts from text-image analysis, documentary and archive studies, popular music and film sound studies.
I first examine how image/text analysis can form a foundation to approach the interaction between sound/image/argument in the compilation documentary. I then delineate my approach to the role of reappropriated music, which adds a substantial intertextual dimension to the meaning produced. Reappropriated music refers outward to social practice and can compel identification and memory along with affective reactions. I also consider the role of captions and text as they interact with the visual footage and music. Together, the different modalities produce rhythms which elicit an affective experience while also signifying meaning.
Sound / Image / Text
As Roland Barthes has shown, images can evoke a range of cultural connotations. In his classic text, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes analyzes how an advertising image communicates meaning in combination with an accompanying linguistic message. Barthes writes that text may constrain the possible interpretations of the image through “anchoring.”
Or, text and image may function together to provide a joint meaning in the form of “relaying” (Barthes, 1977, p. 38).
The Photographic Essay
While Barthes focused this famous analysis on an advertisement, WJT Mitchell’s study of photographic essays (1994, pp. 281-322) is even more pertinent to a multimodal approach to the essay film. Mitchell argues that in the photographic essay, the modalities of text and image often work to collaborate or resist each other in a way that neither modality is dominant in meaning-making; they are co-equal. Mitchell suggests that the co-equality and independence of text and image, necessary for a rigorous interrogation of their interactivity, functions well within the essay form. He likens the essay to the medium of photography. The essay form is a subjective attempt at an argument, comparable to the incomplete imposition of the subjective framing of the photograph. Both essays and photographs can reveal how their medium or form is “speaking for something” as an interpretation (1994, p. 289).
In his examination of four photographic essay case studies, Mitchell argues that meaning is located in the resistance between text and image. Image and text can differ in equality and in the ways they collaborate to make meaning. The two modes can work together to reinforce shared meaning, or, there can be “a subversion of the textual strategies that tend to incorporate photographs as illustrative or evidentiary examples” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 290).
Barthes’ and Mitchell’s discussions of the collaboration between image and text provide a framework to apply to the interaction between the visual footage and the voice-over in the documentary.
Recontextualization
Paul Arthur's approach to recontextualization in the documentary directly addresses the role of voice-over.
Paul Arthur describes the “two basic modes of recontextualization” of footage in the documentary as the illustrative/analogical and the metaphorical (Arthur, 2000, p. 64). The visual footage can serve as an illustrative example of the voice-over argument. Or, the voice-over can be paired with generic images that serve as visual metaphors.
Experimental works can feature further incongruity between the image and the voice-over. In her reading of Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes [A Land Without Bread] (1932), Vivian Sobchack argues that the disparate footage dialectically undercuts the authority of the voice-over and contributes to a sense of “Surrealist juxtaposition” (2013/1980, p. 52).
Words, image and sound can also function “asynchronously,” in which the “audiovisual contract,” a synchrony between sound and image that encourages the viewer to approach the work realistically, is broken (Chion, 1994).
The recontextualization of audiovisual footage can also be approached using concepts from literary theory. Maureen Jolie Anderson (2013) has analyzed Curtis’ narrative techniques in It Felt Like a Kiss according to Russian formalist Viktor Shklovksy’s concepts of “familiarity and defamiliarty.” In his 1917 manifesto, “Art as Technique,” Shklovksy writes: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (1988/1917, p. 15)
Parallels can be drawn between Shkolvksy’s literary theory and Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the “alienation effect” in his philosophy of theater (1964/1949). Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism may also be invoked in considering how the juxtaposition of music, text, and image can represent a confluence of voices or perspectives on an issue. “Dialogic speech . . . involves a multiplicity of speakers and a variety of perspectives; truth becomes something negotiated and debated, rather than something pronounced from on high” (Tighe, 2012).
Music and Affect
Affect broadly refers to bodily sensations and reactions that occur before individual states are consciously and linguistically identified as emotions. It is affects that are prominently evoked in Curtis’ fast-paced audiovisual juxtapositions. Music listening, like affect, can be a pre-linguistic experience.
In this dissertation I shall consider music as a series of sounds and silences that employs recognizable musical principles such as tone, rhythm, timbre, dynamics. As an art form, it evokes emotion and affect. Moreover, music is highly social and engages in cultural, generic conventions shared by composers and audiences.
Raymond Williams first coined the term “structure of feeling” in a 1958 essay on the connection between artistic conventions and written text. Later, he expanded on the term to address how feeling and emotion can be culturally and socially situated (Williams, 1961). Today, an attention to affect addresses the limitations of the linguistic turn: “the world [is] shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by nonlinguistic effects—by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings” (Hsu, 2019).
To Lauren Berlant, “identity is less a set of conscious decisions that we make, but rather compulsions—attachments and identifications—that we feel” (Hsu, 2019). Originally a literary analyst, Berlant has come to develop “genres for life,” generic and encultured ways that our bodies respond to the precariousness of existence. Berlant identifies our current age as marked by “cruel optimism,” in which people maintain affective attachments to optimistic promises such as romance or upward mobility, even when those attachments are ultimately destructive.
In Ubiquitous Listening, Anahid Kassabian argues that identity is the discursive “trace of affect” (2013). Genres of music first emerge out of sensations of similarity, before shared qualities of music are identified and theorized through social discourse (Kassabian, 2013).
My aim is to explore how recorded music functions as a site in which personal, affective responses intersect with social practice and collective memory. I focus on both domains of affect and music discourse: music writing that refers to genres, history, techniques, and individual and collective experiences. I consider how the disruption of generic conventions or associations can provoke new affective experiences. Synthesizing concepts from both the psychological and literary approaches to affect, I also examine how the strategic reappropriation of music can elicit (or challenge) what researchers in psychology and neuroscience refer to two fundamental continuums of affect: valiance (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (low activation to high activation) (Linnenbrink, 2007; Russell, 2003; Russell and Barrett, 1999; Schutze et al, 2010).
Film Music
Scholarship on film music reveals that non-diegetic music has long played a role in guiding the audience’s attention and ensuring their psychological engagement. Jean Mitry has argued that, since the earliest functions of music in silent film, the “rhythm of music [has] mediated between real time as experienced by the audience and the diegetic or psychological time adhered to by the film” (1964/1963, qtd. in Gorbman, 1980, p. 186).
Claudia Gorbman delineates three ways that music can make meaning in a film: through cultural musical codes, that “elicit encultured reactions” (Gorbman, 1980); pure musical codes (the form of the music itself) and cinematic musical codes, in which the music refers to film itself (1980, p. 184)
The contemporary scholarship that Gorbman pioneered recognizes that music and the image are interdependent. Both modalities share a power in meaning-making, which Gorbman refers to as “mutual implication.” Music cannot be understood strictly in terms of image. The image is polysemic, and irreducible to a single meaning. Additionally, music responds to that which is not immediately available in the image (subtext).
Gorbman’s approach to film music is reminiscent of Barthes’ examination of the rhetoric of the photograph. Alan Durant summarizes her argument regarding the addition of music to moving images: “[It] always adds an effect of some kind, by interpreting the image in terms of emotion and cultural reference, like a caption to a photograph, narrowing and filtering interpretation and anchoring the image against polysemy” (Durant, 1988, p. 341).
The Film Soundtrack
In addition to musical and cinematic codification, the cultural component of meaning plays a more substantial role in the compilation soundtrack: the reappropriation of previously recorded (archival) music. Today, the soundtrack has become an integral element of narrative film, television, and documentaries, and figures majorly in the streaming content industry. The Performing Rights Society for Music released figures showing that the use of music in the top on-demand streaming platforms has more than tripled from 2014 to 2018, “from 145 billion minutes in 2014 to 490 billion minutes in 2018,” the majority of which is re-purposed music (Siddique, 2019). The role of music supervision is increasingly appreciated as an art form. The 2017 Annual Grammy Award Ceremony was the first time that music supervisors were eligible for the “compilation soundtrack” category (Bakare, 2019)
Echoing ideas of Crary (2001) and Kassabian (2013), Holly Rogers writes that Ubiquitous music in our everyday lives, in shops, on TV and on mobile media has highly attuned our sonic awareness. In addition, the saturation of music in cinema has formed audiences highly accomplished in processing images with the help of musical signification. (2014, p. 3)
Compilation soundtracks embody the contemporary soundscape and today’s culture of music listening with instant access to an ever-expanding archive. In conjunction with the rise of streaming music culture, movie and television soundtracks are made instantly available through official and unofficial playlists on Spotify or YouTube. Music can be made popular after being featured; movies and series can gain authenticity or status through the soundtrack choices.
As Ronald Rodman argues in “Popular Song as Leitmotiv in Pulp Fiction [1994] and Trainspotting [1996],” popular music soundtracks refer outward to social practice. “In the pop music score, leitmotiv denotation shifts from the musical artifact itself to musical styles, and the social discourse about music and beyond” (2006, p. 119).
Audiences’ emotional and affective reactions to musical soundtracks involves their own personal backgrounds; the musical soundtrack can compel identification and memory. Recognizable music can elicit nostalgia, evoking memories of different contexts in which it has been listened to or enjoyed (Abebe, 2011).
“Where the old-time Hollywood film score uses the vocabulary of classical music to evoke a timeless romanticism, pop songs, which are inextricably tied to our sense of nostalgia, automatically convey a specific sense of time and place” (Holden, 2011/1989, p. 439).
The soundtrack can reward the audience for their recognition. It can also instantiate new memories or associations with the music.
Music serves to connect individual experiences to a continually evolving collective memory. José Van Dijck argues that recorded music can function as a site in which memory is “embodied, enabled, and embedded” (2006). One reason for this, he argues, is that music reflects a shared socio-technological context: People become aware of their emotional and affective memories by means of technologies, and surprisingly often, the enabling apparatus becomes part of the recollecting experience. Songs or albums often get interpreted as a ‘sign of their time’ in part also because they emerge from a socio-technological context. (Van Dijck, 2006).
Reappropriated music in films can also inspire a new relationship with the past. “Increasingly, it seems, we think in soundtracks… Songs used in films recall us to our past, or they conjure up a past we never experienced and, through the familiar language of popular music, make it ours” (Wojcik and Knight, 2001, p. 1). Music can also impact the continually changing ways in which people remember the past: Remembrance is always embedded, meaning that the larger social contexts in which individuals live stimulate memories of the past through frames generated in the present. (Van Dijck, 2006) The various ways that appropriated music refers outward to social practice can be emphasized in the documentary, as it too refers outward to society and reality.