Introduction

Abstract

This essay collection completes an expansive three-volume study on music in European films between 1945 and 1989. The genesis of the collaboration in developing this investigation was rooted in a shared desire of the two editors to illuminate an often-overlooked area within film music scholarship—namely, the complex, evolving roles that music has played in shaping cinematic meaning, cultural memory, and audience reception across Europe’s vastly diverse film traditions. The first volume—Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War—examines how filmmakers across various genres and national contexts used music to navigate the cultural aftershocks of war, occupation, and displacement. It explored music’s capacity to mediate memory, mitigate trauma, and express longing in films grappling with personal and collective losses. The second volume—Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s—takes a critical look at auteur theory, challenging assumptions of directorial singularity by highlighting the collaborative nature of filmmaking. It offers close readings of how music functions narratively in art cinema, explores director–composer partnerships, and investigates the ideological and aesthetic tensions that music introduces into the construction of cinematic authorship. The present volume turns toward the popular, offering what might be considered the flip side of European art cinema. It focuses on the ways music has intersected with genre filmmaking, popular culture, industrial imperatives, and mass audiences. While each volume in this trilogy—in fact, all twenty-eight chapters—can be read independently, together they offer an integrated and multidimensional account of music’s centrality to European film history. By addressing the intersections of memory, authorship, and popular culture, the series invites a rethinking of how we understand the cultural impact of music in cinema more generally. As a whole, it touches on influential film composers and performing stars while also shedding light on many professional partnerships that steered lesser-known national film productions. It brings attention to individual films and genres where music assumes unexpected narrative, ideological, or cultural importance. It also dislodges common binary oppositions often imposed on European cinema to emphasize the interdependence of its constitutive parts. Like a kaleidoscope that creates new and ever-shifting patterns of reflective fragments, the series reconfigures the ways in which we can see, hear, and understand European cinema in all its diversity and interconnectedness.

Publication Title

Music Ideology and Commerce in European Popular Cinema 1940s to 1980s

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