Reviews
… Johnson’s contributors deliver on the promise to show how music can be used to contextualize a film by placing a text historically, or de-familiarizing, or subverting, among other things. Journal of Film Music, 4.2
Earogenous Zones
Sound, Sexuality and Cinema
Edited by
Bruce Johnson [+–]
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
With its capacity to defamiliarize and subvert visual representation, sound is not simply a source of information supplementary to the visual in the cinematic representation of sexuality, but a site of ambiguous ideologies and power relations.
This collection exemplifies a variety of approaches to the sonic representation of sexuality in cinema. It draws on a range of sexual scenarios from pornography to sci-fi to art-house and includes cinema from various cultures and countries. Among the topics addressed are how the deployment of sound is implicated in gender politics in the representation of sexuality and how sounds are able to radically colour and even override the visual and lexical content of a film.
Through sonicity the film-maker can challenge the ideologies at play underneath surface stereotypes, and introduce emotional overtones which meliorate the alienation generally associated with porn. Sound and music can establish a historical period as well as spatially localize sexuality within a framework that problematizes the distinctions between porn and erotica. They can introduce into the ahistorical sextopia of porn the cultural specificity of the notion of ‘pornography’ and indeed can shift a film in and out of that category, even desexualizing the naked human body.
Series: Genre, Music and Sound
Table of Contents
Prelims
Acknowledgments vii – vii
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
About the Authors ix – x
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
Introduction
Introduction [+–] 1 – 11
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
Introduction
1
Sound Decisions: Interviews with Ole Ege [+–] 12- 37
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
Ole Ege was arguably the most important pioneer of pornographic and erotic film during a period of profound change in public and legal attitudes towards the representation of sexuality, and in a country which is still internationally recognized as being at the forefront of those changes. His films won major awards at the first erotic/pornographic film festival in Amsterdam in 1970, but have also enjoyed a very high level of mainstream commercial success in their region.
2
Mark Evans,Matt Burgess £17.50
Macquarie University
Mark Evans is Head of the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University and is co-editor of Perfect Beat – The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture. He has published articles on a range of topics, including: the use of sound in the ‘Matrix’ films; copyright; CD-Rom; Christian music; rock journalism; and country music in Australia. He is also a pianist and has recorded and performed in various contemporary styles.He is the author of Open up the Doors: Music in the Modern Church (2006) and editor of the Encyclopedia of Film Music and Sound (Equinox, forthcoming).
The discussion that follows will detail how the overall soundscape created in Meyer’s films is used in similar style to visuals, and in many cases it is sound that achieves Meyer’s more mischievous aims.
3
Independent film writer
About the Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky
4
New York University
Sadomasochism, Sexuality and Sound in mid-1970s Cinema
5
The Peculiar ‘Love’ Music in Oshima’s Ai no korida [+–] 89 – 101
University of Michigan
James Wierzbicki is a musicologist who teaches at the University of Michigan and serves as executive editor of the MUSA (Music of the United States of America)
series of scholarly editions.
series of scholarly editions.
Music in Nagisa Oshima’s Ai no korida
6
Southern Cross Univeristy
Philip Hayward has taught film and popular music studies in Australia and the United Kingdom and is Professor and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) at Southern Cross University, Australia. His previous books include Off The Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema (2004) and he is a performer in an avant garde chainsaw quartet performing work written by composer Michael Hannan.
Science Fiction Themes and Sex Cinema
7
Southern Cross Univeristy
Philip Hayward has taught film and popular music studies in Australia and the United Kingdom and is Professor and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) at Southern Cross University, Australia. His previous books include Off The Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema (2004) and he is a performer in an avant garde chainsaw quartet performing work written by composer Michael Hannan.
Actor
Science Fiction Themed Porn Cinema and Its Soundtracks
8
McMaster University
Laura Wiebe Taylor is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, where she is examining
boundary issues in speculative fictions and theory. Her publications include articles on the relationships between science fiction, dystopia and metal music.
boundary issues in speculative fictions and theory. Her publications include articles on the relationships between science fiction, dystopia and metal music.
Music in New Wave Hookers Carries the Joke
9
Making “a Mall Movie about a Man with a 13-inch Penis”: Popular Music Representations of Pornographic Intention [+–] 158 – 173
University of New South Wales
Popular Music Representations of Pornographic Intention
10
Musical Loops: Eyes Wide Shut… Ears Wide Open [+–] 174 – 189
Sam Houston State University
Musical loops
11
Multiple Positions: Sound,Sex and Aural Dominance in 9 Songs [+–] 190 – 202
University of Toronto
Sound,Sex and Aural Dominance in 9 Songs
12
Music,Image,Orgasm:Getting off on the Short bus [+–] 203 – 216
University of Texas
John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006)
13
In Extremis: The Roots, Soundscapes and Significations of Twenty-first-century Zombie Porn [+–] 217 – 233
Ralph Marsh £17.50
The Roots, Soundscapes and Significations of Twenty-first-century Zombie Porn
Index
Index [+–] 234 – 246
Macquarie University
Bruce Johnson is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His many publications in popular music and literary studies include The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz.
Index
