bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening
Authors: Cenciarelli Carlo 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This introduction maps out the methodological and intellectual issues at stake in the study of “cinematic listening.” The first half argues that the vagueness of the “cinematic” and the elusiveness of “listening” can be productive if, instead of attempting to define what cinematic listening is, we focus on analyzing how changing notions of the “cinematic” and of “listening” have shaped each other through time, exploring cinema’s changing relationship with listening cultures past, present, and imagined. The second half offers an overview of the structure and content of this volume. It sums up how, by means of engaging with the archaeologies, aesthetics, and extensions of cinema’s aural protocols, each volume section contributes to our understanding of how listening to film is mediated by particular texts, places, and practices, and how listening cinematically extends beyond the texts, places, and practices typically associated with film.
Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History
Authors: Ward Meredith C. 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
In evaluating the success of twenty-first-century applications of surround sound technology, the popular press often fails to take into consideration the powerful role that history plays in their design. Dolby Atmos for Cinema (2012 –) has been marketed as groundbreaking and become a gold standard in cinema sound. Conceived of as a means to create a “platform” that would reach across the movie theatre, home theatre, music, and virtual reality for maximal profit, however, Atmos was always designed to move beyond it. Discussing both Atmos for Cinema and Atmos for Music (2016–), and drawing on first-hand interviews with industry insiders, this chapter situates Dolby’s platform into a longer history of multimedia surround technologies, and argues that its contribution to that history is first, in its reflection of the underrecognized hybridity of surround sound’s past, and second, to think of surround sound as a space to physically move through.
Summon the Cinematic?
Authors: Mon Ya-Feng 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter focuses on Remote Taipei (2017–18) by Berlin-based theatre group Rimini Protokoll. In keeping with Rimini Protokoll’s broader approach to theatrical productions, and with the global formula of Remote X, Remote Taipei uses the urban landscape as its stage. It sends audience members into the city wearing headphones, and guides them via a soundtrack that mixes voice, music, and sound effects. Combining theoretical, ethnographic, and autoethnographic approaches, this chapter tests the artist’s hypothesis that headphone listening would engender a sense of “filmic immersion.” It argues that the headphone mediation of Remote Taipei, while potentially triggering a quasi-cinematic experience that involved aural, haptic, and visual sensations, was also vulnerable to technological “disintegration,” and remained indeterminate at the level of local reception.
Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive
Authors: Dyer Richard 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
Ambient sound and silence largely function in film to hold narrative space and time in place. They are rarely allowed just to be—they must be made to speak. La Captive (Belgium/France 2000, dir. Chantal Akerman) is an interrogation of this impulse to interrogate aural opacity and absence, in the context of a male need to probe the female. Here, a woman’s silence becomes a refusal to be known by a man and the clacking of high heels becomes maddeningly erotic and elusive, while verbal interrogation leads nowhere and florid music functions as an excess of misleading expressivity. La Captive is structured both thematically and formally by listening, and it suggests the way that the latter, like looking, organizes the gendered epistemological drive of narrative and perception in film.
Hi-Yo, Rossini
Authors: Godsall Jonathan 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter discusses the use of the finale of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture (1829) as the theme of the multimedia Lone Ranger franchise, from the original radio show (1933–54) to the recent Disney film (2013). Rossini’s pre-existing piece is shown to be integral to the Lone Ranger brand, but also adaptable to suit the narratives and production circumstances of individual franchise iterations, while The Lone Ranger’s influence on listeners’ understandings of the finale—now heard as post-existing music—is argued to be significant in both semantic and structural regards. Exploration of the whole franchise reveals how Lone Ranger films appropriate pre-existing music in specifically cinematic ways. It shows that the 2013 film in particular reworks the finale to align with the modern-blockbuster style of its surrounding Hans Zimmer score, and thereby encourages audiences to adopt a blockbuster-cinematic mode of listening, not least in relation to Rossini’s original.
Hearing Hearing? Reflections on the Kubrickian Soundtrack
Authors: Code David J. 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter approaches the phenomenon of “cinematic listening” through a combined critical consideration of “poetic” cinema and aural reflexivity. In the first instance, I draw on a longstanding, oft-neglected lineage of challenges to “narrative” assumptions about the filmic medium, exemplified (for example) in P. Adams Sitney, George Mekas, and Maya Deren. I then select examples from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to suggest how a more “poetic” consideration of particular instances of “the hearing of represented acts of hearing” can refine critical understanding of particular, exceptional “narrative” moments in film. Opening out to adumbrate the relevance of this reframing to a wide variety of contemporary productions, I offer a further challenge, after Michel Chion and Kubrick himself, to the literary (and more broadly “vocal/verbal”) models that often go unchallenged in film theory and film music studies alike.
Listening–Feeling–Becoming
Authors: Mera Miguel 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter explores the sensory evolution of cinematic representations of surveillance, with a particular focus on the role of sound in shaping what I call the corpo-“real.” Cinematic representations of surveillance initially used sound to make “real” their affective and embodied impact but then evolve into bodies that are, literally, embedded within the surveillant apparatus. At the same time, the intensifying modes of embodied surveillance representation diminish the importance of discrete listening, which becomes subsumed within the audiovisual/body amalgam. I trace some of the ways in which surveillance has shifted its attention from the audible, and the sensory, to the embodied. As surveillance in society has expanded and intensified, film has attempted to grapple with challenging questions of interiority and exteriority through a journey from listening through feeling to becoming.
Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks as a Mother and a Daughter
Authors: Walker Elsie 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter analyzes embodied listening from a pedagogical and unusually personal, feminist point-of-view. It explores how two parts of the author’s identity (being a mother, and being a daughter whose mother died) teach her to hear cinema anew along with her students. By extension, it builds upon other sound scholarship (especially the work of Michel Chion), by stressing that every person’s experiences leads them to rehear all cinema with meaningful results. In this chapter, the author first draws from her experiences of motherhood while teaching the sound track of Babies (2010). Second, she reflects on witnessing her mother’s death in relation to teaching the sound track of a death scene from Ten Canoes (2006). Third, the author connects being in the presence of her mother’s silent body with teaching a conversation from An Examined Life (2008), featuring queer theorist Judith Butler and disabled artist-activist Sunara Taylor.
Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure
Authors: Smith Jeff 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
Over the past fifteen years, processing fluency has become an increasingly important research topic in mapping the contours of aesthetic experience. It refers to the ease with which our minds assimilate new information, and it plays an important priming function in the pleasure or enjoyment experienced during film viewing. Fluency occurs as the result of both stimulus features and contextual factors, which include, among other things, the exposure effect, repetition, dishabituation, and spontaneous recovery. It can also play a vital role in cinematic listening, predisposing auditors toward positive judgments of films based on the ways in which they trigger efficient recall of music’s formal patterns. Processing fluency, thus, figures as an important dimension of film and music cross-promotion, either by leveraging consumer interest in music ancillaries or by enabling spectators to re-experience films through their soundtrack albums.
Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)
Authors: Hubbert Julie 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.
The “Trickality” of Listening in Early Musical Trick Films
Authors: Brown Julie 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter considers a small but distinct body of music-themed “trick films” that involve imaginative visualizations of music, sometimes also of the marvels and problems associated with new audio technologies. Exponents of the early “trick film” genre Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón saw the potential for film to facilitate both visual and audio-visual tricks, despite the medium’s material silence. The chapter suggests that the ubiquity of musical and vocal themes in early films, with sound visually materialized in imaginative ways, may reflect the fact that film-makers were struck by the inherent joke of the audio-visual incongruity created by a silent medium that displayed scenes taking place in a hearing world. These films often focused on new audio technologies, for which the opposite audio-visual relationship was true: sounds (re)produced by audio technologies lacked their visual source. For films involving sound reproduction subjects, there was a double incongruity—and perhaps, double the pleasure.
Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture
Authors: Winters Ben 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter examines historical presentational practices of sound film and, specifically, the extra music added to roadshow versions of films between the 1930s and 1960s—including Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It argues that such added music—which included overtures, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music—when combined with controlled theatrical lighting and use of the curtain, might have prompted a number of different cinematic listening experiences among audiences. It suggests that an understanding of these historical presentational practices might call into question comfortable assumptions about the nature of sound-film ontology and the relationship between cinema as “Text” and cinema as “Event”—issues that resonate with the discourse surrounding historically informed performance (HIP) practice in musicology.
Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music
Authors: Öhman Nina C. 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.
Political Leadership
Authors: Uhr John 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter draws on the fields of politics and performance to analyze the nature of leadership performance in contemporary political societies. It recovers neglected themes about leadership performance originally articulated by two political thinkers deeply interested in the role of public performance by political leaders, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Walter Bagehot, both of whom can help strengthen contemporary appraisals of leadership performance. The two thinkers evaluate leadership performance quite differently, using different performance standards. The eighteenth-century philosopher Rousseau devised a moral critique of modern liberalism, including a detailed evaluation of underdeveloped modes of leadership performance typical of modern liberal political regimes. Rousseau’s alternative leadership morality sketched in The Social Contract remains a powerful source for contemporary analysis of the limits of liberalism and of the options for more egalitarian, republican alternatives.
Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites
Authors: Dutt Bishnupriya 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
Performative manifestation of protests in recent times in India and elsewhere in the world are identified by gestures, which often emerge from protest sites, circulate in the public domain, and are seen as democratic articulations and dissent, particularly when right-wing state powers are trying to curb freedom of expression and subvert democratic practices. This chapter argues that the power of the gestural idiom surpasses the marginality of its location and has resulted in a large corpus of scholarly works focusing on theatrical gestures as protest dramaturgies and transgressive and agentive bodily idioms. In contrast to the growing right-wing rhetoric and cultural mobilization in spaces of mass congregations, which adopts stereotypical gestural rhetoric, these gestures of dissent can be read as self-critical, coming from theatrical practices, particularly those elaborated by Bertolt Brecht, influential in Europe and the postcolonial world. In addition, the chapter attempts to initiate a dialogue between theater and performance studies and studies in politics as common sites of performing dissent. The chapter further argues that, despite the difference in methodological approaches, there are potentials of critical dialogues across the disciplines. Case studies from contemporary India, relevant to the academic debates, describe and analyze religious festival and pilgrimage, instrumentalized for political electoral gains and a protest performance in civil society on the eve of the 2019 elections.
Care
Authors: Warren Narelle 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
Care is a concept characterized by its multiplicity of meanings, uses, and practices. It is deeply shaped by the affective contexts in which care take place. Political and social processes determine who can and does care—the work of care—and the recognition of this work. While grounded in individual relationships, care is performative insofar as it is made and remade through its provision and practice, which tells much about the power structures that surround its practice. This chapter examines these affective and performative dimensions of care through vignettes with Australian informal (unpaid) spousal caregivers. Care, as described by the participants, operates in two distinct ways. First, as they explicitly describe, their acts of care reflect what matters to them, their affective ties to another—their spouse who lives with Parkinson’s disease. All discussed care as a mutual endeavor characterized by reciprocity and meaning, resonating with Puig de la Bellacasa’s constitutive elements of care as commitment, doing, and obligation. Second, participants described their care practices as reflecting a deeply unequal gendered order in which the allocation of limited economic, social, and political resources were laid bare: who does and does not get paid in the delivery of care reinforces social and household inequalities. Attending to performativity allows a consideration of how such competing priorities are negotiated in everyday encounters of care.
Colonial Theatricality
Authors: Skwirblies Lisa 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter argues that references to the theater are never merely innocent metaphors but instead are historically and culturally determined modes of perception that allow us to see certain problems in the political realm such as authenticity, representation, and spectatorship as essentially theatrical problems. This is particularly the case in nineteenth century colonial discourse with its technique of theatricalizing the colonized people and places. As a “travelling concept,” theatricality is not bound exclusively to the realm of the theater nor to the discourses of theater and performance studies; it holds meaning and potential as an instrument for analysis in the field of political science as well. The cross-disciplinary possibilities of the term theatricality lie in the term’s applicability for a better understanding of both the theater-like character of the political and social domain as well as of the grammar of performance as an aesthetic medium.
Media Sites
Authors: Segall Kimberly Wedeven 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter looks at mass media as political performance in the sense that select ed bodies, images, and voices are part of a production with an intended audience. Alternative media offer different political performances in the sense that small-scale productions of marginalized communities use personal/ or communal voices to interrupt dominant structures. This chapter offers specific extended examples of the latter in particular, such as music videos and filmed performances. Distinguishing between mainstream press and its vernacular forms, this chapter suggests how alternative media performs a distinct psychological and political functions: enacting resiliencies, redefining citizenship, reviving racial solidarities. Contextualizing how mass media needs to be interpreted not for its neutrality but as a site of performance and politics offers a new lens on women’s protests.
Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line
Authors: Nield Sophie 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter proposes a theatrical history of the picket line, reading this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lenses of space and spectatorship in order to explore the boundaries of performance and theatricality. Tracking its evolution from the nineteenth century to the Thatcher era, the chapter interrogates the picket line in British industrial and labor history as a site of the interplay of legality and performativity, and argues for the value of reading the political picket through a theatrical lens. A picket line functions as both a practical enactment of rights in space (understood as an occupation of or claim on public space intended to make visible a form of collective identity) and the symbolic expression of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively. Its theatricality resides in this space between symbolic and practical action, in the relationship between presence (a literal placing of bodies in space) and representation as a process of claim-making. The encounter produces affects and behaviors carrying implications beyond the immediate point of conflict: Who owns labor? Who has the right to act collectively? Who holds responsibility for these issues? These issues remain central to debates around labor, conditions, contracts, and rights today, involving the right to unionize, the effective return of zero-hours contracts, and the destruction of communities historically rooted in shared industrial labor.
What’s in a Name?
Authors: Hadley Bree 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
In the past three decades disabled scholars, artists, and their allies have highlighted the politics of representing the disabled body in theater, film, literature, museums, and the media. They have begun to address a problematic legacy of visibility-without-agency by advocating for positive self-representations of disabled people across a range of arts practices. Terms like disabled, handicapped, and crippled have been critiqued and in some cases reclaimed to articulate the distinctiveness of crip culture and performance. Terms like disability arts, arts and disability, artists with disability, and disability-led arts practice have been applied to politicized performance by disabled artists. This chapter argues that such terms have in effect become politicized performative gestures in their own right, which enact and guide the enactment of a disability rights agenda. It examines how artists’, archivists’, and historians’ efforts to relabel past work—to redact offensive labeling of disabled people as other from the historical record—is impacting our understanding of the evolution of this field of politicized practice. It also examines the impact changing ways of labeling art about, with, and by disabled people today is having. Labels certainly can be critical political gestures, designed to achieve critical maneuvers at critical moments in time, along the trajectory toward rights for disabled people. However, the idea that labels will serve in perpetuity, both in prospect and in retrospect, in wholly unproblematic ways, is less certain. In this sense, labels designed to support specific political shifts may always be “right for now” rather than “right forever.”
Immersion
Authors: Sauter Willmar 
Published: March 2021

Abstract
This chapter presents various kinds of immersion, in which terms such as presence, participation, curiosity, and reflection are relevant aspects of public communication. It reconsiders some traditional schemes of communication and their applications in theater and performance studies as well as aesthetic theories that underline the position of the beholder. To make ideas of the spectator’s immersive involvement as concrete as possible, it refers to a contemporary trilogy of plays performed as Women in Science, in which various communicative strategies and techniques were employed. The attention is directed toward the watching B(eholder) as constitutive of theatrical communication, while the performing A(gent) can assume a wide variety of shapes. The beholder’s immersion has a close affinity to political activities.