European Film Music [antikvár]

IntroductionMiguel Mera and David BumandFocusing this anthology on the study of European film music is an approach that is, in equal measure, both necessary and problematic. It is necessary, because writing that examines the common themes, practices, methodologies and ideologies of music within European film tradition is scarce. Individual case studies of European film scores do exist, but the vast majority of extant research has concentrated on a canon of Hollywood film music, composers and systems. This overwhelming critical bias towards mainstream American filmmaking indicates that many of the assumptions and functional models on which film music studies have been based over the last twenty-five years are at best narrow and at worst misleading. Recent scholarship, of course, acknowledges that other film-scoring traditions can contribute to a broader debate on the nature of the relationship between music and moving images, and has thus begun to redress the balance somewhat. In particular Tatiana Egorova's examination of Soviet Film Music} Rebecca Coyle's edited volume Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music^ and Anna Morcom's doctoral thesis 'Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema'^ suggest the increasing importance of localized studies in advancing our understanding of the nature of music in film. European Film Music aims to contribute to this important and widening debate.However, this discussion is complicated by the fact that the idea of a pan-European film industry has never existed in any sustained sense. In many ways European culture is defined by its diversity: diversity of language, belief systems, climate, landscape, aesthetic values and so on. When we speak about European cinema we refer, more often than not, to the cinema of individual nation states, or rather national cinemas within Europe. Individual nations within Europe may have popular cinematic forms of their own - Swedish melodramas, French musicals, Italian horror movies - but these are rarely popular across the whole European market."^ European audiences represent diverse class, gender and ethnic identities that complicate the question of European cinema.This conflict between national and European identities is also highlighted by the very institution of a supposedly integrated Europe, the European Union. Initially, the EU consisted of just six countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973, Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986, Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. In 2004 the biggest ever enlargement took place with ten new countries joining.^ The EU is only now beginning to approach the notion of a pan-