Mémoire complété dans le cadre de la maîtrise internationale "International Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies" suivie à l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) et l'Université Paris-Nanterre (Paris-X). / Selon le musicologue Richard Leppert, la contradiction sémiotique existant entre la musique en tant qu’expérience vécue corporelle et la musique en tant que phénomène sonore et acoustique trouve une résolution par le biais de la vision humaine. Partant de cette thèse, notre recherche se propose d’étudier trois documentaires qui, portant sur la musique rock et s’attachant à mettre en images le corps de la rock star, cherchent à combler notre besoin de voir et d’écouter le corps du musicien dans sa pratique de création musicale ou durant sa performance spectaculaire. Les trois documentaires examinés – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars : The Motion Picture, One + One et 20,000 Days on Earth – mettent à l’épreuve la fabrication musicale-sonore et subjective de l’identité de la rock star ; et, par cela, ils déconstruisent la tradition générique du rockumentary. Concentrés sur le foyer catalyseur qu’est le corps sonore de la star, ces films se constituent comme des oeuvres audiovisuelles hybrides où le son et l’image participent dans l’acte de création filmique et de la création et performance musicale. / According to the musicologist Richard Leppert, the semiotic contradiction between music as a bodily experience and music as an acoustic phenomenon finds resolution through human vision. Based on this claim, our research aims to study three documentaries that focus on rock music and the representation of the body of the rock star, which seek to fill our need to see and to listen to the body of the musician during the practice of musical creation or performance. The three documentaries examined – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture, One + One and 20,000 Days on Earth – problematize the musical, sonorous and subjective fabrication of the rock star’s identity ; and in doing so, they deconstruct the generic tradition of the rockumentary. Concentrating on the catalytic force of the rock star’s sounding body, these films thus constitute hybrid audiovisual works in which sound and image partake in both the act of filmmaking and musical performance.

This study investigated the terms used by drummers and audio engineers to describe the recorded drum kit and the processing applied to it. The main method consisted of semi-structured interviews with six professionals in the fields of drumming and audio engineering. The participants were asked to describe five musical samples of different drum kit mixes containing kick, snare and hi-hat sounds. Their descriptions along with explanations of their communication tactics were compared, resulting in explanations of fourteen semantic descriptors. The comparison of their use of the terms in the context of the samples revealed some differences depending on their professional backgrounds. The results suggested that, while audio engineers have a larger semantic lexicon in regards to the recorded drum kit, the differences in the definitions of terms had a larger degree of variation between individuals than between the respective professions.

This thesis focuses on a transformational but disregarded period in New Zealand’s twentieth century history, the era from the arrival of the Marines in 1942 to the arrival of Rock Around the Clock in 1956. It examines one of the chief agents in this metamorphosis: the impact of American culture. During this era the crucial conduits of that culture were movies, music and comics. The aims of my thesis are threefold: to explore how New Zealanders responded to this cultural trinity, determine the key features of their reactions and assess their significance. The perceived modernity and alterity of Hollywood movies, musical genres such as swing, and the content and presentation of American comics and ‘pulps’, became the sources of heated debate during the midcentury. Many New Zealanders admired what they perceived as the exuberance, variety and style of such American media. They also applauded the willingness of the cultural triptych to appropriate visual, textual and musical forms and styles without respect for the traditional classifications of cultural merit. Such perceived standards were based on the privileged judgements of cultural arbiters drawn from members of New Zealand’s educational and civic elites. Key figures within these elites insisted that American culture was ‘low’, inferior and commodified, threatening the dominance of a sacrosanct, traditional ‘high’culture. Many of them also maintained that these American cultural imports endangered both the traditionally British nature of our cultural heritage, and New Zealand’s distinctively ‘British’ identity. Many of these complaints enfolded deeper objections to American movies, music and literary forms exemplified by comics and pulps. Significant intellectual and civic figures portrayed these cultural modes as pernicious and malignant, because they were allegedly the product of malignant African-American, Jewish and capitalist sources, which threatened to poison the cultural and social values of New Zealanders, especially the young. In order to justify such attitudes, these influential cultural guardians portrayed the general public as an essentially immature, susceptible, unthinking and puritanical mass. Accordingly, this public, supposedly ignorant of the dangers posed by American culture, required the intervention and protection of members of this elite. Responses to these potent expressions of American culture provide focal points which both illuminate and reflect wider social, political and ideological controversies within midcentury New Zealand. Not only were these reactions part of a process of comprehension and negotiation of new aesthetic styles and media modes. They also represent an arena of public and intellectual contention whose significance has been neglected or under-valued. New Zealanders’ attitudes towards the new cinematic, literary and musical elements of American culture occurred within a rich and revealing socio-political and ideological context. When we comment on that culture we reveal significant features of our own national and cultural selves.