A while back, I wrote a brief post outlining PJ Harvey’s work with director Maria Mochnacz. Today, I thought I’d put together all the videos Ms. Knowles has done with longtime collaborator Melina Matsoukas. Divas are such singular entities in our minds sometimes that the labor many provide to their constructions is often obscured, so I thought it might be useful to highlight this professional relationship. They worked together on “Why Don’t You Love Me?,” which I recently discussed. Here are a few more.
“Green Light” B’Day
The next two clips were co-directed by Beyoncé.
“Kitty Kat” B’Day
“Upgrade U” feat. Jay-Z B’Day
“Diva” (you can read my thoughts on the video here) I Am… Sasha Fierce
Cover of Changing Tunes; image courtesy of musicweb-international.com
Since a lot of folks (including many friends) are back in school, I thought I’d do another book report. Tonight, I’ll jot down my notes on Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film. Just as my friend Kit pointed me in the direction of this useful, diverse anthology, I thought I’d do the same, especially for any other burgeoning feminist soundtrack/score enthusiasts there may be. Term paper deadlines will come closer than you think.
As Robynn Stilwell was one of the co-editors of the collection who penned the particular essay Kit recommended to me, what better place to start? After all, her piece is called ”Vinyl Communion: The Record as Ritual Object in Girls’ Rites-of-Passage Films.” Here, Stilwell looks at four movies featuring girl protagonists and preoccupied with such themes, two of which I’ve yet to see (Little Voice and Heavenly Creatures) and two of which are all-time favorites (Ghost World and The Virgin Suicides). As Stilwell’s reading of Little Voice aligns with Pamela Robertson’s, I will refer you to a previous entry where Robertson’s essay is discussed. And while I would’ve liked more development of each text (hell, I could read a whole book on each of these movies) and would have appreciated some movies that consider the mediated representations of vinyl practices from girls of color, I still found Stilwell’s insights valueable. And obviously, I’m going to need to watch all these movies.
To Stilwell, Ghost World‘sEnid believes that vinyl, and its technological apparatus, has no instrinsic value as an object. In one scene, she pretends to break her record collector friend Seymour’s vintage LP. She also has no interest in creating an authentic listening experience, playing old vinyl releases on a 33 1/3 record player that were meant to be played on a 78. Instead, Enid turns to record-playing for its transportive and transformative qualities. She wants a form of escape from her suburban SoCal surroundings, trying on punk, retro, and gothic fashions and turning to Bollywood, Indian rock music, and blues singer Skip James’s hauntingly androgynous tenor in “Devil Got My Woman.”
With Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, itself based on the Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme murder, the schoolgirls’ fandom for tenor Mario Lanza serves as a buffer for true homosexual feelings, a development that Stilwell explains by using late theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s notion of the homosocial triangle.
Thus, in order to own those feelings, Pauline and Juliet must disavow themselves from Lanza, burning their records to aver these feelings in the process.
Record burning is considered in a much different context in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, instead constructed as authoritative punishment rather than a declaration of one’s identity. The Lisbon girls, a mysterious and cloistered quintet, consider records to be a form of communication between one another and to the neighbor boys with whom they’ve been forbidden to interact with by their parents. Songs like Heart’s “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You” speak on their behalf, conveying the lust and sexual agency that girls feel and Lux Lisbon acts upon for high school heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Thus, mother Lisbon’s command that Lux burn her rock records after Trip Fontaine sleeps with and abandons her on the football field after the Homecoming game suggests a tragic loss of voice, demanding that she align with soft rock male singer-songwriters like Gilbert O’Sullivan and Todd Rundgren instead of continuing to listen to libidinous cock rock bands like Aerosmith.
With Vanessa Knights ‘ “Queer Pleasures: The Bolero, Camp, and Almodóvar,” we have a consideration of how Pedro Almodóvar asserted a queer identity in his earlier films, utilizing the campy potential of bolero, as well as acknowledging the contributions bolero singers like La Lupe have given to queer fan culture, particularly among gay men.
While Almodóvar may have more often utilized Cuban musicians’ contributions to movies made within a strictly Spanish context, Phil Powrie’s “The Fabulous Destiny of the Accordion in French Cinema” considers the accordian, originally an Italian musical instrument, as a French national symbol. He considers the accordian’s heroic period between 1930 and 1960 and how the instrument was used as an audiovisual marker of utopian community in movies like René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris. While Powrie does not make it clear, I hazard to guess that there may be some connection, however tenuous, between this period and the chanteuse réaliste movies Kelley Conway has discussed elsewhere.
By 1949, Powrie notes that movies like Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête were commenting on the decline of the accordian’s ubiquity in French culture as the country shifted from a working-class country with a strong sense of history to a modern society with tremendous interest in other cultures and a particular interest in American life. This is a point Powrie argues that Tati makes aurally, as Jo Lefevre’s accordian opens and closes a film about a character who tries to emulate American customs, cued through the film’s use of swing music.
The move away from the accordian’s aural connotation of national identity is evident in 80s French cinema. The accordian instead becomes a visual, unheard marker of community demise in movies like Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva. From the 1990s on, the accordian has become a post-modern instrument for French cinema to Powrie, suggesting both a utopian ideal and evident of self-aware nostalgia, most evident in Yann Tiersen’s score for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie.
And finally, we have Ronald Rodman’s “The Popular Song as Leitmotif in 1990s Film,” which considers how the use of theme music written for specific characters in classical music and film can be translated into contemporary film’s use of popular music and how leitmotif is used as a connotative signifier. This seems like a tremendously useful exercise that I’ll make sure to remember when I get to be a boss professor lady.
Rodman considers Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, two successful movies made noteworthy, in part, because of their exclusive use of popular music. With Pulp Fiction, protagonist hit man Vince Vega becomes associated with surf rock and Elvis as a means of connoting his class and white ethnic cultural positioning as an Italian American with a working-class background. In Trainspotting, Scottish heroin addict Mark Renton is associated with art-damaged, anti-establishment classic rockers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, before getting clean and making his classed ascent into the bourgeoisie, which is highlighted by his musical association with Brit pop and popular techno.
While I appreciate Rodman’s argument for Trainspotting, I do wonder what he’d make of the wave of regional pictures in the UK during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just as Trainspotting focuses on Edinburgh, so to did 24-Hour Party People depicted Manchester’s singularity. That said, I do value Rodman’s effort to reconsider how popular music functions similarly to classical music in movies, and look forward to reading more on the interplay from similarly-invested scholars. Please feed me titles if you’re so inclined.
So, lots of ladies in music have played with alter egos. Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, and Neko Case have made careers for themselves writing and recording songs as multiple characters, playing with gender roles in the process. Tori Amos released American Doll Posse in 2007, wherein she recorded and subsequently toured as a five-member girl group, each member having their own distinct look and personality modelled after Greek goddesses.
I keep thinking about female musicians’ use of alter egos alongside Elana Levine’s reading of the Showtime series The United States of Tara, which is written by Diablo Cody and stars Toni Collette as a working wife and mom with multiple personality disorder. Levine reads the show as a response to third-wave feminism’s interest in the multiplicity of identity.
I find this concept useful for my preoccupations with gender performance in music culture, particularly in thinking about Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce and Bat for Lashes’ Pearl. Click on the artist’s name to watch each music video.
Bat for Lashes
“Pearl’s Dream” Two Suns
Directed by Nima
Beyoncé
“Diva” I Am Sasha Fierce
Directed by Melina Matsoukas
Thinking about the multiplicity of identity in conjuction with women of color opens up and complicates issues of identity even more (Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan is British and of mixed ethnic and racial hertiage — Pakastani on her father’s side, Caucasian on her mother’s side; Beyoncé is African American who is of French descent on her mother’s side). Khan’s Pearl wears a blonde wig and reads as white. Beyoncé’s Sasha has a metallic glove associated with robots and cyborgs, who are often racially coded as white. That these personae are shown alongside the artists’ “true” identities is also important, suggesting that they are both performances and extensions of themselves.
So, loyal readers, I’ve had some wrenches thrown in my schedule this past week, making it more difficult for me to blog lately. Suffice it to say, getting my car back will help. I’ve got some drafts I’m working on and hope to get a brand new entry with in-depth analysis up tomorrow.
In the meantime, who doesn’t love music videos? So, from time to time when I get a little too busy, I thought I’d share a self-curated retrospective of music videos from a female director. If she were a dude, like Michel Gondry, we may call her an “auteur”. But since there’s no female equivalent in French for “author,” I thought I’d just make up a word (I’m a quarter French, so I’m sure the Académie française is cool with it). I really wished I could do this for my thesis. With a self-authored blog, fuck it. Make up some words, says the bloggess.
Oh, and in the spirit of gynocriticism, I’ll only focus on the music videos these directors have done with female artists or female-led mixed gender musical acts. Tonight, we focus on Sophie Muller, who I kept hoping would get her own Directors Label DVD. Since she’s famous and the people she works with are often also famous, embedding is tricky business. For the sake of consistency, just click on the artist’s name.
