Rock”N”Roll Cinema
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Rock’n’Roll Cinema Adam Trainer Bachelor of Arts With First Class Honours in Media Studies This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Media, Communication and Culture Murdoch University 2005 I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains, as its main content, work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary educational institution. Adam Trainer Refereed Publications Adam Trainer. ‘“Well I Wouldn’t Buy the Merchandise”: David Bowie as Post -Auteur’ in Senses of Cinema 28. September/October, 2003. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/bowie_postmodern_auteur.html This journal article was derived from Chapter Five Adam Trainer. ‘The Business of Living: Secrets & Lies’ in Australian Screen Education 36. September, 2004. pp. 127-129. This journal article was written in association with research on cinematic realism, as featured in Chapter Four. Adam Trainer. ‘“They Made Me Do It”: The Mad World of Donnie Darko’ in Australian Screen Education 37. January, 2005. pp. 138-142. This journal article was derived from Chapter Three. Adam Trainer. ‘“It’s Not My Fault You Hate My Band”: Perth Art Rock’ in Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and Its Popular Music. Tara Brabazon ed. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2005. pp. 127-135. This chapter was written in association with research on experimental music, as presented in Chapter Six. Adam Trainer. ‘A Crooked Crooked Reign’ in Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and Its Popular Music. Tara Brabazon ed. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2005. pp. 155-162. This chapter was written in association with research on indie rock, as featured in Chapter Six Conference Papers ‘The Cinema of the Everyday’. Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Century Quotidian. Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference. Murdoch University: Murdoch, Australia. 9th – 11th December, 2004. This conference presentation was written an association with research on cinematic realism, as presented in Chapter Four. ‘Transforming the Gaze in the Popstar Vehicle’. Culture Incorporated: Bodies, Technologies, Habitats. Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference. Christchurch Arts Centre: Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. 6th – 8th December, 2003. This conference presentation was derived from Chapter Five. ‘You Are a Target Market’. Sonic Synergies/ Creative Cultures. International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference. University of South Australia: Adelaide, Australia. 3rd – 6th July, 2003. This conference presentation was derived from Chapter Six. Abstract Popular music and film are separate media, framed by specific discourses, histories of distribution and reception, semiotic relationships and literacies. Through these divergent manifestations and ideologies nodes of convergence exist. At moments of connection, new and innovative textual and contextual possibilities emerge, transforming the ways in which audiences both engage and read these media. Whilst often driven by capitalist goals, both popular music and film capture and tether personal expression and collective memory. Through these processes of signification, popular cultural texts belonging to both media forms are able to resist their commodified origins to inform and construct both collective and individual identities. This thesis charts the movement of popular music across cinema. Rock’n’Roll is utilized not only as an amalgam of texts made up of sounds and images, but also as a critical and interpretative apparatus through which specific cultural identities are configured. This work is concerned with various manifestations of political resistance in popular culture, and the ways in which this resistance is moderated through cultural commodification. Using an interdisciplinary approach – converging film analysis, popular music studies and music journalism – this thesis constructs an ideological framework through which film and popular music can be aligned, and through which this alignment can be researched. Through an engagement with myriad cinematic and popular cultural texts, executed through interdisciplinary methods, this thesis establishes a theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing the convergence of popular music and cinema. Its original contribution to knowledge is an evaluation of the ways in which these media are changed through their alignment and how they inform each other both structurally, as tangible manifestations of specific media codes and structures, and politically, in the ideological embodiment of particular identities and representational realities. This goal is achieved through the selection of specific research materials, especially those which have not been subject to detailed investigation in other scholarly studies. Specific filmic and musical texts are discussed because they embody the aesthetic and political synergy of these two media forms as well as demonstrating the cultural processes through which this synergy is enacted. This thesis offers interdisciplinary dialogue as a valid strategy to understand the processes involved in the creation and reception of texts which are cinematic in nature but utilize the language and discourse of popular music. The textual and contextual manifestations of this process are a primary concern. Emphasis is placed on the implications for film form in terms of the structure of texts and their existence within specific genres, the shifting position of the auteur and the renegotiation of the term and its meaning to film and popular music, and the conjunction and interaction between creativity and commerce. In addressing the political and aesthetic possibilities of the film and popular music hybrid, as well as the cultural implications of their convergence, this thesis provides new perspectives for the analysis of both forms. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the immeasurable support of my supervisor Associate Professor Tara Brabazon in allowing me to undertake this thesis in the manner in which I had always aspired to, whilst simultaneously guiding me through the realities of the doctoral process. I would also like to acknowledge the friendship and mentorship of Dr. Garry Gillard whose support has also been of incredible value to me throughout my tenure. I would like to offer my warmest love and thanks to my family, my partner Michelle and my friends for their insufferable patience and support throughout this process. I would also like to extend my thanks to my postgraduate colleagues and wish them the best with their respective tenures and academic careers. Finally I would like to offer my thanks to all the artists, musicians, directors and performers mentioned within this thesis for their inspiration and their brilliance. Table of Contents Declaration i Refereed Publications/Conference Presentations ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 Section One: Re-Constructing Anti-Histories Chapter One: Rock’s Increasing Cinematic Visibility 27 Chapter Two: All Singing, All Dancing, All Knowing: The Post-Musical 46 Section Two: “You Don’t Remember, I Remember!” Chapter Three: Cashing In On Nostalgia 90 Chapter Four: The Rockumentary vs. the Biopic 139 Section Three: “Way To Jump on the Bandwagon, Sell Out!” Chapter Five: Transforming the Gaze in the Pop Star Film Vehicle 174 Chapter Six: The Rock Musician as Film Scorer 213 Section Four: “Filth is my politics, filth is my life!” Chapter Seven: Trash Culture and the Cinema of Transgression 263 Chapter Eight: The Rock Aesthetic and Notions of Cinematic Structure: Rock’n’Roll Filmmaking 302 Conclusion 334 Bibliography 348 Introduction Desire becomes its own purpose, and the sole uncontested and unquestionable purpose.1 Zygmunt Bauman We again arrive at the frontier between philosophy and history, between system and existence; and we feel it would not be difficult, yet no small thing, to put some order into all these words or, better still, to show that there was always a deeper order and logic there in the first place.2 Frederic Jameson Culture is alive. It is composed of different combinations of matter and that matter takes many forms. It is hard bone with flesh, muscle and fat stretched over and around it. It is blood, water and other fluids and gasses which regulate and are regulated. It also, like any living thing, includes materials existing between solid, liquid and gas. They either take this form through necessity, or they are in transition. They may exist in a permanent state of transition; they may exist as the transition between solid and liquid or liquid and gas. As a metaphor, such movements in materiality actualize Bauman’s characterization of the current political and cultural economy as a form of ‘liquid’ modernity. In this environment, ideas are free to move around and through each other whilst maintaining referents to that which is or was once solid. Bauman uses the tenants of modernity in his analysis, such as emancipation, individuality and formalized notions of time, space, work 1 Zygmunt Bauman. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. p. 73 2 Frederic Jameson. A Singular Modernity. London: Verso 2002. p. 99 1 and community, to comment upon the political economy of change and the ways in which it relates to systemic structure. Bauman asserts that in what he terms the “affluent West”, consumerism is ingrained in configurations of the individual. ‘[O]ur form of life’ has once and for all proven both its