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  • The 17th Annual Screen ConferenceJuly 4–6, 2008 Glasgow, Scotland
  • Will Straw (bio)

The last time I attended the Screen conference was in 1995, when it was organized to overlap slightly with the biennial meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. As someone trained in film studies but most active in the popular music studies community, I was excited by this coming together, but the two events still seemed like very distinct family gatherings. In those days, the points of convergence between film and popular music studies were relatively minor. The broadening of film studies within a broader conception of audiovisual media was still in its early stages. Likewise, popular music studies in the mid-1990s pursued core themes, like tradition and authenticity, that have remained peripheral to the study of cinema.

Obviously, a great deal has changed in the intervening years, and the traffic between these two scholarly fields is now very busy and productive. (The CineSonic conferences held in Melbourne, Australia, for several years were key events in stimulating this traffic.) Many of the most compelling papers at this event combined the disciplinary maturity one now expects from film studies with adventurous openings onto other fields. One of these papers, Selmin Kara’s close reading of the 2006 film Iraq in Fragments, deftly discussed that film’s use of sound fragments, in an analysis attentive both to the film’s own “sensuous epistemology” and to the broader question of urban aurality. Kara drew both on well-established protocols for the analysis of documentary form and on other writings, from outside film studies, on the urban soundscape and notions of sonic materiality. Similarly, Carol Vernallis’s meticulous textual analysis of what she calls the “new [End Page 70] cut-up cinema” grew out of her earlier work on music television but offered tools for analysis that apply to a range of audiovisual media. Peter Stanfield’s paper, “Making the Case for Bad Jazz (and Calypso and Bongo Music) in 1950s Juvenile Delinquency Movies,” pursued its author’s longstanding interest in commercial film cycles but used these cycles to challenge longstanding assumptions about the status of specific popular musical forms in the 1950s. These were three among many papers that moved smoothly between cultural forms, tracking the migration of stylistic figures and formal devices between film and television, urban infrastructure, and the moving image. My overall impression of this conference was of a comfortable interdisciplinarity expressed in the richness of individual research agendas, rather than in platitudinous calls for the breaking down of boundaries.

Stan Link’s opening keynote, “Musical Misfits and Dancing Dorks: Nerds and the Musical Visibility of Whiteness,” looked at films like Napoleon Dynamite ( Jared Hess, 2004), in which male nerdishness is expressed most blatantly in the failure to dance convincingly to African American musical forms. At the end of the conference, Claudia Gorbman spoke of music’s place in suggesting subjective states, most notably in the films of Agnès Varda (the focus of Gorbman’s current work). These two keynote addresses represented the major poles around which research on film music has tended to cluster. Link’s presentation set itself within histories of popular musical performance, an interest pursued elsewhere in the conference in papers by Steve Neale (on Broadway Melody), Boel Ulfsdotter (on rock-and-roll performance scenes in Japanese films of the 1950s) and others. Gorbman’s address took up the question of music’s place within the formal systems of film, its complex relationship to diegesis and textual voice. The debate which erupted following her presentation, on the diegetic or non-diegetic status of soundtrack music, revealed how many of these questions remain unresolved.

The spatial turn observed in cultural analysis over the last decade inflected several of the most original papers at the conference. In a panel on “Sonic Spatialities,” Sean Cubitt analyzed the strange variety of sounds typically used to accompany images of sunlight in film, while Mats Bjorkin traced the shifting presence of electronic music in 1950s industrial films striving to convey the character of a modern world in which technology was supreme. Peter Doyle’s paper on images of the recording studio, in...

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