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Music in Films about the Shoah
Commemoration, Comfort, Provocation
by Elias Berner
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Book Presentation:
This book focuses on the aural and musical sphere of fictional audio-visual reconstructions of the Holocaust, a defining event in the history of the 20th century. Musicology has seen an increasing number of works on the function of film music and the construction of identity in media contexts in recent years. This project analyses the use of music in feature films about the Shoah. The analysis of 'the sound of Nazi violence', as well as the escape from and resistance against it, not only reveals a lot about the construction of the filmic characters' emotive states, but also tells us more about our own relationship to the past. The author understands the soundtrack of these films as an affective mediator of time, which connects filmic representations of the past with the present. Analysis focuses on the soundtracks of four films: Schindler's List, The Pianist, Taking Sides and Inglourious Basterds.
About the Author:
Elias Berner is a Post-doc Researcher at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria. In 2020 he obtained his PhD at the Department of Musicology at the University of Vienna. From 2015–2017, he was a Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK).
Press Reviews:
"The Shoah has moved into popular cinema, and film musicology needs to engage with this trend. Elias Berner does that in subtle and careful analyses of the music of key films from the 1990s and 2000s, analyses that do justice to what the music does in and for these films." (Guido Heldt, Senior Lecturer, Programme Director, Department of Music, University of Bristol, UK)
"For a long time, research on cinematic memory of the Shoah has concentrated on narrative and visual aspects. It focused on historical images, not on the mood created through historical films. Elias Berner's study closes this gap by focusing on the music in films about the Holocaust. He demonstrates how musical forms support the visual narrative and contribute to the formation of images of memory." (Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Communications and Journalism Department)
"Elias Berner has written an inspiring and moving book, a study of close listening that re-shapes theories of film music, and entangles them with the ongoing discourse on the memory of the Shoah. What this book thus
beautifully brings to the fore is the relational power of music to regulate feelings of distance and closeness with a projected past." (Thomas Macho, Professor for Cultural Hitory at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Head/Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies University of Art and Design Linz, Austria)
See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan
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