Strains of Utopia:
Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music
Caryl Flinn

Paper | 1992 | This edition is out of print | ISBN13: 978-0-691-00619-2
Cloth | 1992 | This edition is out of print | ISBN13: 978-0-691-04801-7
212 pp.

e-Book | 2001 | $18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2065-8

When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	3
1	The New Romanticism: Hollywood Film Composition in the 1930s and 1940s	13
2	The Man behind the Muse: Music and the Lost Maternal Object	51
3	Musical Utopias in Marxism and Cultural Criticism	70
4	Out of the Past: Recontextualizing the Utopias of Film Music	91
5	Musical Utopias of the Classical Film	108
6	Music and Interpretation	151
	Notes	159
	Bibliography	183
	Index	189

Subject Areas:

• Film Studies
• Music

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