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Centre for Film Studies,
University of St Andrews
5:15 pm Board Room, 99 North Street

Tuesday, 12 December, 2006

Dr. Mark Brownrigg, University of Stirling,

The Mojo is in the Music: Music and Textual Unity 
in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Amongst other things, the Austin Powers movies 
seem deeply fragmented viewing experiences 
organised around principles of comic digression 
and haphazard, self-conscious narrative 
progression.  This paper demonstrates how music 
is used on numerous levels from the practical to 
the allusive to unify the text, rendering editing 
smoother, adding a sense of narrative continuity, 
foregrounding the structured repetition of 
thematic material and displaying a coherent 
conceptualisation behind the motivation for 
"needledropped" pop tracks.  While the film 
threatens to career off at any moment in any 
number of directions, the score is demonstrated 
to form a solid musical system providing an 
opposing force pulling back towards textual 
unity.  While many film scores perform a similar 
function on a lesser scale, seldom is their 
intervention for this cause so dramatic.  Music 
will also be seen in turn to have a role to play 
branding and unifying the Austin Powers trilogy as a whole.

Dr Mark Brownrigg is a Lecturer in Film and Media 
Studies at the University of Stirling.  He has 
published on the music accompanying television 
channel indentifiers, the contribution of Muir 
Mathieson to British film music in the 1930s and 
1940s, and the work of Eric Serra, Luc Besson's 
preferred composer (forthcoming).  He is 
currently working on a monograph on John 
Williams' score for Close Encounters of the Third 
Kind and cultivating an interest in food and film.

Centre for Film Studies,
5:15 pm Board Room, 99 North Street



Dr Belén Vidal
Lecturer in Film Studies
University of St Andrews,
Dept. Film Studies
99 North Street - St. Andrews - Fife
KY16 9AD
Scotland, UK
Tel. +44 (0)1334 46 7472

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
EUROPE AND ITS OTHERS. INTERPERCEPTIONS PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
(6-8 July 2007, University of St Andrews, Scotland)
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