Film Musings [antikvár]

Introduction The book that you have in your hands is a very selective compilation, representing less than half the original material, of the column "Film Musings" that I wrote every other month for Fanfare magazine, starting with the November/December 1983 issue (Volume 7, no. 2) and ending with the July/August 2001 issue (Volume 24, no. 6). The raison d'etre of "Film Musings" was to cover recordings, starting on LP and moving to CD, devoted to film music. "Original soundtrack recordings" constitute the bulk of what I covered in "Film Musings," and they constitute an even greater bulk of this book, since I probably applied the editor's scissors most heavily to paragraphs devoted to compilation recordings, whether of film-score excerpts or of pop songs loosely thrown together to represent a particular film that in many instances barely uses most of them. But one of the little changes I have introduced throughout into the writing here, in a move some may find pointless and even self-righteous, is the substitution of the expression "music-track" to replace "soundtrack," since the latter, if presented separately from the film, would offer nothing but a collection of the sounds—gunshots, sirens, breaking glass, whatever—recorded for a particular film and laid in on the . . . sound track. I have also eliminated catalogue numbers and other information, such as names of producers, when indicating the labels for the various recordings. Since this is an anthology of previously published work, I have generally not fudged with the copy, even in instances where, in going back to material written sometimes ages ago, I was less than pleased with the style and/or the content of what I wrote. In instances where I have applied substantial changes I have indicated the new material in square brackets. In several cases I have brought over a film-music review that did not appear in "Film Musings" but was published, for one reason or the other, elsewhere in that particular issue of Fanfare. And in one instance of major fudging I actually brought over most of a DVD review I wrote for The Perfect Vision to replace my initial comments on Swann in Love, since a second viewing of that film on DVD considerably changed my outlook. This anthology may also have a