The Aesthetic Cost of Marketing : The Economical Motivation of Pop Songs in Films

• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson – in Narration in the Fiction Film and Breaking the Glass Armor – list four types of motivation to explain the presence of a given device – e.g., camera movement, lightning pattern, chromatic contrast, etc... – in the film form: compositional motivation, artistic motivation, realistic motivation and transtextual motivation. This set of heuristic tools explains how the film works and how it has been constructed from an aesthetic, ars-gratia-artis point of view, that is, how an artwork is formally and narratively understood by the active spectator. However, cinema – and Hollywood cinema in particular – is indeed an Art, but also an Industry. Bordwell and Thompson's set of motivations is good to understand the film as an Art object. Though, in order to understand it as an industrial commodity, a fifth type seems to be required: economic motivation. Most technical and formal changes in film history can be properly explained by means of an economical approach – see Douglas Gomery's use of the economic “Theory of Technological change” for his account on the coming of sound – rather than by means of a purely aesthetic one. Such a case is the relationship between cinema and songs, particularly in the Sixties and Seventies, when pop scores and compilations  replaced the classical symphonic scoring. The paper focusses on the economic motivation of this pop music craze in the American cinema of that decade, trying to point out how the use of songs was mostly a marketing strategy: to advertise the song via the film, to advertise the film via the song – by its presence on the radio or in the music stores –, to maximise the profit by having the film industry owing also the music industry and thus – by a synergistic cross-promotion – getting money from both markets. In most cases, this market-oriented approach had quite big an aesthetic cost: that of stopping the narration in order to let the song play, which – in the worst instances – has nothing to do with the narrative. A brief history of the relationship between songs and films are traced – mostly with references to Rick Altman's Silent Film Sound, Jeff Smith's The Sound of Commerce, and James Wierzbicki's Film Music. A History –, with the aim of showing that the explicitly visible instances of the Sixties and Seventies are only the “tip of the iceberg”, the peak moment of a longer story: the massive aesthetic change of the period can be explained by the economic and industrial revolution that Hollywood had to face after the dismantlement of the Studio System in the Fifties. The main difference between the use of songs in classical cinema and their use in the Sixties is that, while in the former system songs were diegetically placed and carefully and coherently integrated in the narrative, in the latter case songs were also used non-diegetically, without much concern about their consistency, which resulted in the baring of the sole economic motivation.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Musikvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Musicology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Medievetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Media Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

film music; record industries; film marketing; film history; film theory

Film Studies

Filmvetenskap

Medievetenskap och journalistik

Media Studies and Journalism

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)