Popular music and film are separate media, framed by specific discourses, histories of
distribution and reception, semiotic relationships and literacies. Through these divergent
manifestations and ideologies nodes of convergence exist. At moments of connection,
new and innovative textual and contextual possibilities emerge, transforming the ways in
which audiences both engage and read these media. Whilst often driven by capitalist
goals, both popular music and film capture and tether personal expression and collective
memory. Through these processes of signification, popular cultural texts belonging to
both media forms are able to resist their commodified origins to inform and construct
both collective and individual identities.
This thesis charts the movement of popular music across cinema. RocknRoll is utilized
not only as an amalgam of texts made up of sounds and images, but also as a critical and
interpretative apparatus through which specific cultural identities are configured. This
work is concerned with various manifestations of political resistance in popular culture,
and the ways in which this resistance is moderated through cultural commodification.
Using an interdisciplinary approach converging film analysis, popular music studies
and music journalism this thesis constructs an ideological framework through which
film and popular music can be aligned, and through which this alignment can be
researched.
Through an engagement with myriad cinematic and popular cultural texts, executed through interdisciplinary methods, this thesis establishes a theoretical framework for
understanding and analyzing the convergence of popular music and cinema. Its original
contribution to knowledge is an evaluation of the ways in which these media are changed
through their alignment and how they inform each other both structurally, as tangible
manifestations of specific media codes and structures, and politically, in the ideological
embodiment of particular identities and representational realities. This goal is achieved
through the selection of specific research materials, especially those which have not been
subject to detailed investigation in other scholarly studies. Specific filmic and musical
texts are discussed because they embody the aesthetic and political synergy of these two
media forms as well as demonstrating the cultural processes through which this synergy
is enacted.
This thesis offers interdisciplinary dialogue as a valid strategy to understand the
processes involved in the creation and reception of texts which are cinematic in nature
but utilize the language and discourse of popular music. The textual and contextual
manifestations of this process are a primary concern. Emphasis is placed on the
implications for film form in terms of the structure of texts and their existence within
specific genres, the shifting position of the auteur and the renegotiation of the term and its
meaning to film and popular music, and the conjunction and interaction between
creativity and commerce. In addressing the political and aesthetic possibilities of the film
and popular music hybrid, as well as the cultural implications of their convergence, this
thesis provides new perspectives for the analysis of both forms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/221767 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | a.trainer@curtin.edu.my, Adam Trainer |
| Publisher | Murdoch University |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.murdoch.edu.au/goto/CopyrightNotice, Copyright Adam Trainer |
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