声音与图像:实验音乐与流行恐怖电影外文翻译资料

Sound and Image: Experimental Music and the Popular Horror Film

Psycho needs to be seen as a historical marker of a moment when popular American movies, facing the threat of television [... I began to invent new scopic regimes of visual and visceral `attraction. In this moment visual culture can be seen getting a tighter grip on the visual pleasures of film spectators through the reinstitution of a post-modern cinema of attractions.

Film music and psychoanalysis have a rather convoluted history, and navigating the

numerous currents of contemporary psychoanalytical theory can be particularly difficult, as the application of psychoanalytical concepts to music and to film have not always shared similar theoretical aims and/or intentions. In the context of this study, there exists the need for a trade-off between purely formalist approaches (for example, the musicological approach), and a meaning-driven, semantic interpretation of film music. This is fundamental to debates concerning the application of psychoanalytic concepts to film music and particularly important in the case of horror film music, with its experimental musical characteristics and its promotion of semiotic excess.

This is particularly noticeable with regards to Psychos pioneering formal strategies, especially the directors general promotion of form over content within the overall

hierarchy of popular cinematic imperatives. 4 Yet scholars have still to remark upon

Hitchcocks, and film composer, Bernard Herrmanns, pioneering appropriation of

experimental musical styles, or consider how this aspect of the directors overall

cinematic strategy may have reconfigured the primary functional relationship between sound and image. Hitchcock scholars have typically displayed a deep fascination for the

scopophilic regimes of visual pleasure the director constructs, but have shown scant

regard for how the soundtrack, particularly non-diegetic music, may function in this

context.

As early as 1932, Hitchcock was attesting to the fundamental role of music in the

cinematic experience. 5 Moreover, the use of experimental musical styles seems

especially relevant to the directors `pure cinema films, which occur across this

classical/post-classical divide. Viewed as a landmark event in popular cinema, then,

Hitchcocks Psycho retains a deep significance for this study, which investigates the

functional relationship posited between sound and image in post-1960 horror cinema,

stressing the particular efficacy of experimental musical styles and techniques in this

context.

Until recently, film music studies laboured under the domineering influence of two

interrelated biases - the promotion of the visual and the narrational dimensions of

cinema. Previous to its spirited growth in the 1990s, film music studies remained a

relatively minor discipline, limited to a small number of works that spanned a near

century of film history. A significant number of these studies compounded this biased

interpretation of non-diegetic film music, a process that arguably peaked with the publication, in 1987, of Claudia Gorbmans Unheard Alelodies. : Narrative Film Alusic.

In focusing on two hitherto neglected areas of film music scholarship - the post-1960

horror film and its appropriation of experimental musical styles and techniques - this

study responds to the wider concerns created by such theoretical parochialism. In

particular, this relates to Gorbmans narrative-led conceptual paradigm and its

subordination of sound to the image and spectacle to the narrative. This study

investigates the manner in which post- 19601post-Psycho horror cinema has appropriated the formal attributes of experimental music(s) in ways that challenge the many preconceptions of the dominant, narrative-based theoretical understanding.

In doing so, this study explains how the major characteristics of experimental music forms – most notably, atonality, dissonance, instrumental timbre, and arrhythmic time-signatures - serve alternative functional purposes than those we see prioritised in the dominant narrative model. Psycho proves to be a telling case in this respect: a traumatic, but compelling, rupturing of many of the things audiences had come to expect from mainstream cinema at that particular moment. More pointedly, it is also a landmark moment in popular cinemas appropriation of experimental musical styles and techniques.

The cinematic soundtrack, and the musical score in particular, continue to play an

important role in the overall success or failure of a great deal of horror cinema, a fact

especially apparent in the post-classical period of the genre attended to by this study.

Despite this, the horror genre has experienced a surprising amount of neglect from

scholars of film music. The fact that horror films continue to command a great deal of attention from other scholarly disciplines - most notably, psychoanalytic theory, genre criticism, and aesthetic (but largely visual) appreciations - makes this a disconcerting omission, especially as an engagement with these disciplines can enrich our understanding of musics function in the horror film. As a result, this type of interdisciplinary strategy shapes the overall methodological approach and theoretical framework(s) applied in this study of experimental music(s) and the post-classical horror soundtrack.

This opening chapter describes and justifies such an approach, built, as it is, upon the reassessment and synthesis of numerous theoretical frameworks and methods of analysis and research. This affords me the opportunity to situate the work within the current academic field, and acknowledge any scholarly debts in the

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