Wagner and Cinema

Wagner and Cinema 
Edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman
Foreword by Tony Palmer
Interview with Bill Viola

Publication date: 2/2/2010
Format: paper 504 pages, 28 b&w illus., 35 musical exx.
6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22163-6
PAPERBACK $29.95

The work of Richard Wagner is a continuing source of artistic inspiration and ideological controversy in literature, philosophy, and music, as well as cinema. In Wagner and Cinema, a diverse group of established and emerging scholars examines Wagner's influence on cinema from the silent era to the present. The essays in this collection engage in a critical dialogue with existing studies—extending and renovating current theories related to the topic—and propose unexplored topics and new methodological perspectives. The contributors discuss films ranging from the 1913 biopic of Wagner to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, with essays on silent cinema, film scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, German cinema, and Wagner beyond the soundtrack.


Foreword by Tony Palmer

Introduction: Why Wagner and Cinema? Tolkien Was Wrong \ Jeongwon Joe

Part 1. Wagner and the Silent Film
1. Wagnerian Motives: Narrative Integration and the Development of Silent Film Accompaniment, 1908—1913 \ James Buhler
2. Underscoring Drama—Picturing Music \ Peter Franklin
3. The Life and Works of Richard Wagner (1913): Becce, Froelich, and Messter \ Paul Fryer
4. Listening for Wagner in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen \ Adeline Mueller

Part 2. Wagnerian Resonance in Film Scoring
5. The Resonances of Wagnerian Opera and Nineteenth-Century Melodrama in the Film Scores of Max Steiner \ David Neumeyer
6. Wagner's Influence on Gender Roles in Early Hollywood Film \ Eva Rieger
7. The Penumbra of Wagner's Ombra in Two Science Fiction Films from 1951: The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still \ William H. Rosar

Part 3. Wagner in Hollywood
8. "Soll ich lauschen?": Love-Death in Humoresque \ Marcia J. Citron
9. Hollywood's German Fantasy: Ridley Scott's Gladiator \ Marc A. Weiner
10. Reading Wagner in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944) \ Neil Lerner
11. Piercing Wagner: The Ring in Golden Earrings \ Scott D. Paulin

Part 4. Wagner in German Cinema
12. Wagner as Leitmotif: The New German Cinema and Beyond \ Roger Hillman
13. The Power of Emotion: Wagner and Film \ Jeremy Tambling
14. Wagner in East Germany: Joachim Herz's Der fliegende Holländer (1964) \ Joy H. Calico

Part 5. Wagner beyond the Soundtrack
15. Nocturnal Wagner: The Cultural Survival of Tristan und Isolde in Hollywood \ Elisabeth Bronfen
16. Ludwig's Wagner and Visconti's Ludwig \ Giorgio Biancorosso
17. The Tristan Project: Time in Wagner and Viola \ Jeongwon Joe
18. "The Threshold of the Visible World": Wagner, Bill Viola, and Tristan \ Lawrence Kramer

Postlude: Looking for Richard: An Archival Search for Wagner \ Warren M. Sherk
Epilogue: Some Thoughts about Wagner and Cinema; Opera and Politics; Style and Reception \ Sander L. Gilman
Interview with Bill Viola \ Jeongwon Joe

Filmography \ Jeongwon Joe, Warren M. Sherk, and Scott D. Paulin
List of Contributors
Index



Jeongwon Joe is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati. She is editor of Between Opera and Cinema (with Rose Theresa) and has published articles on Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Gérard Corbiau’s Farinelli, and other works related to opera and film music.

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University. He is author of Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity; Multiculturalism and the Jews; Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery; Freud, Race, and Gender; and Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews.