Music in Canadian visual narrative -- musical collaborations in five films of Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 401
Description: The goal of this project is to promote an awareness of some important recent contributors to Canadian film music, and draw attention to the collaborative process between composers and filmmakers in Canada. My investigation of film music through a multi-contextual framework engages the larger question of how music adds layers of meaning to film. Music is an agent of narrativity in film, and the case studies benefit our understanding of Canadian film music's potential to inform the multiple narratives through which it passes.This project examines the work of two Canadian independent feature filmmakers, Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema, and the film composers---Mychael Danna, and Lesley Barber and Mark Korven, respectively---with whom they have collaborated since their emergence in the 1980s. Their works serve as case studies for an understanding of the ways film music can engage visual narrative and how the convergence of music and story can inform broader and Canadian considerations. In the first chapter, I discuss film as social text and as personal and cultural expression within a context of national cultural policies. I consider how music, in its ability to mediate and interpret film, and as the product of creative interactivity, becomes a site through which individual and national identities can be negotiated. In a national and social sense, I investigate some of the ways music can be "heard" differently when we acknowledge its particular social, cultural and ideological contexts---within and outside the film.In the spirit of the multidisciplinary approach necessitated by the subject matter, this project brings together interpretive strategies informed by cultural and anthropological studies, film music theory, postmodernism and gender theory, among others. Using cultural studies and ethnographic methods as the backbone for examination of the music's "extrafilmic" contexts, while applying detailed musical analyses in consideration of music's "extrafilmic" roles, the second and third chapters provide layered and multi-variable discussions of the music and music makers of five Canadian films. Egoyan's films,  Family Viewing (1987) and Exotica (1994), and Rozema's films, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), White Room (1991), and When Night is Falling (1995) fuel the discussion.
Notes: Adviser:  James Kippen.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1583.