Film is often compared to music, explained by the use of musical terms and even conceived and structured using music as a model. The Musicality of Narrative Film is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of the film/music analogy through comparative analysis of both arts' common denominators: time, rhythm and movement. Drawing on a number of examples from contemporary art-house and mainstream cinema, Kulezic-Wilson argues that film's musical potential can be realized through various cinematic devices, with or without music. The book's final section contains detailed case studies of Darren Aronofsky's π , Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina , which demonstrate how various factors contribute to achieving the effect of musicality in a large-scale form and how contrasting approaches to film time, rhythm and movement can create very different examples of film musicality

upload/motw_shc_2025_10/shc/The Musicality of Narrative Fil - Danijela Kulezic-Wilson.pdf

motw/The Musicality of Narrative Fil - Danijela Kulezic-Wilson.pdf

Macmillan Education UK

Red Globe Press

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

20150424

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 10.1.15 (Windows)

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Cover 1
Contents 8
List of Figures 10
Acknowledgements 11
Part I: The Topography of Film Musicality 12
1 Introduction 13
What is musical(ity)? 15
The musicality of film as metaphor 20
Musical poetics of film 22
2 Music as Model and Metaphor 28
Tracing the origins of contemporary film/music analogies 28
Film’s musical potential and contemporary film music practice 34
The influence of MTV 39
Part II: Comparative Analysis of Music and Film 44
3 The Musicality of Film Rhythm 45
Music rhythm and its reflection in aspects of film rhythm 46
Rhythm, metre and Gestalt laws of perception 48
Rhythm of the shot and the cut 52
4 The Rhythm of Rhythms 60
Macro-rhythm and issues of perception 60
The immersive power of form 63
Repetition as a structural and a musical device 65
The power of patterns 73
The musicality of narrative and editing patterns 77
5 Musical and Film Kinesis 81
The illusion of movement 82
Musical movement within a shot 85
Musical movement of editing 88
Audio-visual motion and emotion 90
The kinesis of audio-visual interaction 94
The musicality of cinema action 96
6 The Symbolic Nature of Musical and Film Time 101
Time in music and film 102
Philosophical and spiritual dimensions of linear and nonlinear time in music and film 105
Multiple temporalities in music and film 110
Time as a symbol 113
Music as a portal into the multiple temporalities of the Lynchian universe 115
Part III: Case Studies 122
7 Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and the Rhythm of Musical Form 123
From cool to political, spiritual and musical 124
Structural rhythm 127
Rhythm of silence and sound 130
Micro-rhythm 132
Rhythm of time, space and motion 134
Affective rhythm 137
8 Hip Hop and Techno Composing Techniques and Models of Structuring in Darren Aronofsky’s π 143
Paranoid filmmaking as an inspiration for paranoid analysis 143
The patterns 146
Hip hop editing 148
Audio-visual kinesis and musical patterning 154
Techno flow 161
9 Audio-Visual Musicality and Reflexivity in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina 164
Love and lust 166
Opposites, gaps and the porous borders between them 168
Flowing movement, morphing desires 171
Nuts, bolts and invisible joints 177
The powers of fate 180
Conclusion 185
Notes 192
Bibliography 203
Filmography 215
Index 218

2025-10-27