Dear Filmosophers -
As Hugh Grant once immortally said on TV at absolutely the wrong moment in
his career, "I'm not one to blow my own trumpet" - but: in relation to
developments in the musical, I can mention my own long (around 12 thousand
word) essay called "Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond and Against
Hollywood", which first appeared in Volume 3 of the annual CINESONIC book in
2001 (published by Australian Film, Television and Radio School, can be
bought from them on-line), and then in a different version in MOVIE
MUTATIONS edited by myself and Jonathan Rosenbaum, forthcoming later this
year from the British Film Institute. Basically, the piece is an attempt to
deal with the modern(ist) tradition of the musical that runs through Demy,
Godard, Resnais, Tsai, Potter, Rivette, Von Trier, etc. (The Fosse line that
leads to CHICAGO is important, but maybe not all that important!!) And my
piece contains a cranky critique of how, when so many critics and theorists
talk musicals, they only talk Hollywood, as if that is the absolute norm of
the musical form forever and everywhere. (Rick Altman's work for example,
invaluable in so many ways, is myopically all-American on this point.) But
virtually every country, I think it's clear, has its own unique and local
history of musical-making.
Part of my essay also appears in the catalogue of the current Austrian
Filmmuseum series devoted to this specific history of the modern musical.
(the museum is directed by another MOVIE MUTATIONS contributor, Alex
Horwath) Their website has an entire English section. For instance, one
strand of the Museum's research into a true history of the musical
world-wide, and through independent as well as mainstream cinema, has
uncovered a strand they call the 'situationist musical'! Long live the
society of the (musical) spectacle !!!
Another attempt in this general direction is the anthology edited by Bill
Marshall and Robyn Stilwell, Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond (Exeter:
Intellect Books, 2000).
I eagerly await the book that will one day write or assemble the history of
the musical for the whole world - or else Joe Strummer's ghost will be
singing to us: "I'm so bored with the USA ... "
Adrian
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