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Hitchcock Annual (1993) - Strains of Utopia / Settling the Score

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Reviews of Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music by Caryl Flinn and Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film by Kathryn Kalinak

Article

Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Caryl Flinn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 195 pages. $39.50 cloth. $12.95 paper.

Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Kathryn Kalinak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. xvii, 248 pages. $45.50 cloth. $17.95 paper.

Reviewed by BILL THORNHILL

Two recent studies of music in the Classical Hollywood film add considerably to our knowledge and appreciation of film music from this era. Both works rely heavily on contemporary theoretical ideas and models for analysis, the result of which is to enhance and enrich our ways of thinking about the function of music in the Classical Hollywood film.

Caryl Flinn, in Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music, emphasizes the crucial role that 19th‑century Romanticism plays in the shaping of Hollywood film scores; but more importantly she does so by providing ideological direction in various political, institutional, and critical contexts. Rather than examine music as a transcendent art form, independent of the world of human affairs, she discusses music within its cultural and ideological systems.

Flinn develops the thesis that in films of the 1930s and 1940s music provides the cinema with the notions of plenitude and completion, both of which she describes as values promoted by Romanticism. She introduces the concept of utopia which, theoretically, tries to ameliorate an imperfect world by offering perfection, stability, and a nostalgic, idealized past. To simplify considerably, this emerging sense of utopia and plenitude could be established through the introduction of music. A quote from Bernard Herrmann illustrates this idea:

The real reason for music is that a piece of film, by its nature, lacks a certain ability to convey emotional overtones. Ma...

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Bill Thornhill is a musicologist who owns an antiquarian book shop in Urbana, Illinois.