| While music traditionally serves as a subordinate element in narrative film, this dissertation examines films in which music is the dominant force. Musical films are rife with contradiction, marked by structural and cultural repetition as well as a tendency toward transformation, differentiation, and excess. These contradictions provide the foundation for my inquiry.;Film and music, as media composed of time and movement, demand a mode of analysis focused on those qualities. The peculiarity of the musical film further complicates the theoretical frameworks typically drawn upon when studying cinema. Emerging from the traditions of vaudeville and the stage, these films are driven by a logic that is primarily music-based. Unfettered by the demands of causality, irrational spectacles in the musical often subsume the narrative framework, creating configurations of time and space completely unlike those found in other filmic works. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, my study focuses on the cycles of repetition and transformation that drive musicals, positioning film and music not as static texts, but as dynamic events. What one gains through this understanding is a means of conceptualizing the expressive and experiential qualities of music and cinema without resorting to modes of analysis that immobilize their dynamism and fluidity. In such a formulation, the musical film becomes a site of encounter, an exchange between film, audience, and place that cannot be understood outside of the historical situations in which it is created and experienced.;Rather than approaching the musical as a fixed genre, this project is comprised of a series of case studies. Chapters address 16mm "film jukeboxes" from the 1940s and 1960s (Soundies and Scopitones); the shifting refrains of various cinematic versions of Bizet's Carmen; the role of history and memory in the musicals of Jacques Demy, and configurations of corporeality and gender presented by two vastly different sets of water-based musicals---the synchronized swimming spectacles of Esther Williams and The Hole by Tsai Ming-liang. While the topics of these studies are eclectic, their divergences offer an opportunity to explore multiple facets of the theoretical framework that underpins the project as a whole. |
