The Music of Fantasy Cinema - Janet K. Halfyard
Superman as Mythic Narrative: Music, Romanticism and the ‘Oneiric Climate’
The Music of Fantasy Cinema - Janet K. Halfyard
Ben Winters [+]
The Open University, UK
Ben Winters is Lecturer in Music at The Open University, UK. His research—which focuses on Hollywood film music of the studio era, fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the works of Erich Korngold—has been published widely in journals including Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. He is the author of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2007), and Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (Routledge, 2014).
Description
The chapter explores the origins of Superman’s mythic identity, tracing the religious concerns evident in the film back to Friedrich Schelling’s and Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a new mythology in the years around 1800. Moreover, it draws attention to the ways in which the opening of John Williams’s score appears to allude to Brucknerian symphonic models of absolute music and, in so doing, partakes of the influential ideological currents. Further, by invoking Umberto Eco’s discussion of the comic book’s temporally paradoxical ‘oneiric climate’, the chapter addresses the continuing importance of Williams’s Superman themes for the status of the film franchise as mythic narrative.