| Several films of the New Hollywood Cinema produced between 1965 and 1978 were aesthetically invested in the idea of the historical past. This dissertation examines the implications of this investment for the expressive use of sound and music. Chapter One locates the past as a subject of discourse within the context of New Hollywood film culture. Chapter Two focuses on "Bonnie and Clyde," examining the film's visceral sound design and the propulsive, but alienating effect of its bluegrass score. Chapter Three compares two revisionist Westerns, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," examining distinct ways in which Burt Bacharach's score and Robert Altman's unique approach to music and sound project a mythic temporality, blurring together contemporaneity and historicity, as well as the real and the fantastic. Chapter Four examines four films---"Inside Daisy Clover," "Inserts," "The Day of the Locust," and "The Last Tycoon"---projecting distinct permutations of a cultural imaginary in which the "Old Hollywood" of the studio era formed a locus of occult Gothicism and troubled sexuality. In this imagined space, aurality is an uncanny, spectral presence and technological mediation stages a threat to reality itself. Chapter Five discusses compiled pop scoring in relationship to the spatio-temporalized figure of radio transmission in two nostalgia films, "The Last Picture Show" and "American Graffiti." Chapter Six engages Terrence Malick's film-philosophical preoccupations within a reading of "Days of Heaven," examining issues of musical heterogeneity and the aural spectacle of its Dolby Stereo sound design. Across the body of film represented by this study as a whole, aural sensibilities of "pastness" are manifested in diverse ways, but nevertheless share a central dialectical concern, on the one hand, with the immediacy and experiential actuality of the past itself, and on the other, with the distance that inevitably separates us from this experience. |
