TY - BOOK ID - 145235316 TI - The presence of the past : temporal experience and the new Hollywood soundtrack PY - 2021 SN - 9780190932695 9780190932688 PB - New York : Oxford University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Motion picture music KW - Film soundtracks KW - Nostalgia in motion pictures. KW - History in motion pictures. KW - Cinéma et histoire. KW - Nostalgie KW - Musique de film. KW - History and criticism. KW - Au cinéma UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:145235316 AB - The Presence of the Past offers a new perspective on Hollywood's "New Wave" as engaged with the vitality of sensory experience and the affective imagination. As author Daniel Bishop shows, the soundtracks of several key films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960s and 70s cultivated an array of sensibilities regarding the American past. This importance of the past exceeded the New Hollywood's acknowledged use of genre revisionism as a vehicle for timely ideological commentary. There was also a vital tendency in this era to locate the past as an object of imagined phenomenal presence.Although this concept of the past never solidified into a self-conscious discourse, it was nevertheless woven into film culture, readable between the lines of criticism, cultural reception, New Wave aesthetics, and in the aesthetic and industrial transformations of sound design and film music. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Last Picture Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Badlands (1973) are not only key texts of an exciting era in American popular cinema. They are also mediations upon the presence of the past, an image central to the polarities of visceral energy and ambiguous ephemerality, of utopian dreams and melancholy resignation that characterized this cinema. These sensibilities of pastness engage in diverse ways with myth, nostalgia, paranoia, and existential alienation. They are, however, also united by a concern both with the experiential actuality of the past and with the distances that inevitably separate us from this actuality. "In the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 70s, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that elevated and explored the immediacy of lived experience, whether as an aesthetic or political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms associated with temporal alienation or distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown) and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, however, "the past" is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, bridging conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, the representation of media technology, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past"-- ER -