This volume focuses on the singing voice in contemporary cinema and considers different contextual formations of singing and how they contribute to narrative, emotional affect and cultural sensitivities.The singing voice is arguably the most expressive of all musical instruments. This volume celebrates the ways in which singing features in film. This includes the singing voice as healer, as motivator, as entertainer, and as comedic interlude. Whether the singing voice in film is personally expressive, reflexive and distant, or synchronized for entertainment, there is typically interplay between the voice and visual elements. Extending beyond the body of literature on 'the musical', the volume is not about musicals per se. Rather, The Singing Voice in Contemporary Cinema discusses the singing voice as a distinct agent that focuses on identity and identification. This book explores the relationship between screen, singing, singer and song; it celebrates the intersection of the singing voice and popular culture. In doing so, the volume will cross multiple disciplines including vocal studies, film studies, film sound studies, and music production (vocal processing).

Theorists of the soundtrack have helped us understand how the voice and music in the cinema impact a spectator's experience. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis edit in-depth essays from many of film music's most influential scholars in order to explore fascinating issues around vococentrism, the voice in cinema, and music’s role in the integrated soundtrack. The collection is divided into four sections. The first explores historical approaches to technology in the silent film, French cinema during the transition era, the films of the so-called New Hollywood, and the post-production sound business. The second investigates the practice of the singing voice in diverse repertories such as Bergman's films, Eighties teen films, and girls' voices in Brave and Frozen. The third considers the auteuristic voice of the soundtrack in works by Kurosawa, Weir, and others. A last section on narrative and vococentrism moves from The Martian and horror film to the importance of background music and the state of the soundtrack at the end of vococentrism. Contributors: Julie Brown, James Buhler, Marcia Citron, Eric Dienstfrey, Erik Heine, Julie Hubbert, Hannah Lewis, Brooke McCorkle, Cari McDonnell, David Neumeyer, Nathan Platte, Katie Quanz, Jeff Smith, Janet Staiger, and Robynn Stilwell

Chion analyzes imaginative uses of the human voice by directors like Lang, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Duras, and de Palma.

Multivocality frames vocality as a way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept encompassing all the implications with which voice is inscribed-the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment. Like identity, vocality is fluid and constructed continually; even the most iconic of singers do not simply exercise a static voice throughout a lifetime. As 21st century singers habitually perform across styles, genres, cultural contexts, histories, and identities, the author suggests that they are not only performing in multiple vocalities, but more critically, they are performing multivocality-creating and recreating identity through the process of singing with many voices. Multivocality constitutes an effort toward a fuller understanding of how the singing voice figures in the negotiation of identity. Author Katherine Meizel recovers the idea of multivocality from its previously abstract treatment, and re-embodies it in the lived experiences of singers who work on and across the fluid borders of identity. Highlighting singers in vocal motion, Multivocality focuses on their transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, between religious contexts, between found voices and lost ones.

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre.

The purpose of this book, through its very creation, is to strengthen the dialogue between practitioner and theorist. To that end, a film academic and musicologist have collaborated as editors on this book, which is in turn comprised of interviews with composers alongside complementary chapters that focus on a particular feature of the composer’s approach or style. These chapters are written by a fellow composer, musicologist, or film academic who specializes in that element of the composer’s output. In the interview portions of this book, six major film composers discuss their work from the early 1980s to the present day: Carter Burwell, Mychael Danna, Dario Marianelli, Rachel Portman, Zbigniew Preisner, and A.R. Rahman. The focus is on the practical considerations of film composition, the relationship each composer has with the moving image, narrative, technical considerations, personal motivations in composing, the relationships composers have with their directors, and their own creative processes. Contemporary Film Music also explores the contemporary influence of electronic music, issues surrounding the mixing of soundtracks, music theory, and the evolution of each composer’s musical voice.