A study of French film in the inter-war years focusing on women, particularly women singers, and the role they played in shaping a national, populist, Paris-oriented French cinema.

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. Soundtrack Available fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring. With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both “nondiegetic” music in film—the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience—and “diegetic” music—music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and mise-en-scene, this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack. Contributors. Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.

The longest-running showcase on television today celebrates a quarter-century of the best of America's music--from country, blues, and folk, to rock, bluegrass, Tejano, and more--with this exuberant, informative, richly illustrated, and highly entertaining book for Austin City Limits fans (past, present, and future) and music fans everywhere.

The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray's work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray's unusual architecture and design - as well as its history of abuse and neglect - emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray's early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks' earliest nude paintings; Gray's first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray's private house, Tempe ?nbsp; Pailla, with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.

Radio provided a new and powerful medium in 1930s France. Devoted audiences responded avidly to their stations' programming and relied on radio as a source of daily entertainment, news, and other information. Within the comfortable, secure space of the home, audio culture reigned supreme. In Programming National Identity, Joelle Neulander examines the rise of radio as a principal form of mass culture in interwar France, exploring the intricate relationship between radio, gender, and consumer culture. She shows that, while entertaining in nature and narrative in structure, French radio programming was grounded in a politically and socially conservative ideal. In the early years of radio, France was the only Western nation -- apart from Australia -- to have both private and public radio stations. Commercial station owners created audiences and markets from a scattered group of radio enthusiasts, relying on traditional ideas about French identity, family, and community ties. Meanwhile, the government-run stations tried to hew an impossible compromise, balancing the nonpolitical entertainment that listeners desired with educational programs that supported state over private interests. As a public medium operating in a private space, radio could potentially cross normal gender and social boundaries. Programmers responded, Neulander shows, by restricting broadcast content, airing only programs deemed appropriate for a proper French home. Accordingly, radio culture espoused normative gender roles and traditional notions of the family. Neulander analyzes radio program schedules and content, including plays and songs, and explains how programmers, governments, station owners, and average citizens fought over what was aired. On French radio, she shows, the best families had working fathers, homemaking mothers, and money in the bank. Indeed, for radio characters, bourgeois stability proved a prerequisite for happiness, and characters who did not fit the ideal often served as bad examples. Although the left-wing Popular Front controlled the French government during the late 1930s, both public and private radio portrayed the working class negatively -- usually as buffoons or criminal characters. Indeed, Maurice Chevalier, better known today for his film career, first cultivated his working-class playboy image on 1930s radio, and legendary radio artist Edith Piaf rose to fame singing tragic tales of prostitutes. Neulander also examines French radio's ambivalent stance toward the colonial world featured in so many plays and songs. The colonies represented a perceived threat to the traditional French patriarchal family and home, so broadcasters stereotyped them as alien, often perilous spaces. Yet love songs by French-perceived exotic types like Tino Rossi proved wildly popular. The first work in English about interwar French radio, Programming National Identity reveals the persistence of conservative notions of family and nation that challenged the failing liberal democracy of the Popular Front at the end of the Third Republic.