Abstract
In the early post-war decades, Italy witnessed a vigorous development of both the discipline of ethnomusicology and the folk music revival. Their relationship with folk music itself, however, was complicated: folk music was celebrated as the repository of anti-capitalist values, but at the same time it was discussed in terms that resonated with orientalist and classist tropes. This ambivalence emerges nowhere more clearly than in the numerous narrative and documentary films that featured folk music produced between the 1950s and 1970s, which contributed in unique ways to the lively discourse of folk music at this time. This thesis explores the intersections and exchanges between Italian cinema, ethnomusicology and the folk music revival during this period. Through a number of case studies, I investigate the dynamics of the remediation of folk music in fiction and documentary films, and discuss the cultural politics, aesthetics, medialities and techniques of this encounter of directors, film music composers and the folk music world.The first section of the thesis considers folk music in neorealist films. I listen to the construction of the folkloric voice in director Giuseppe De Santis’ work, which complemented and sometimes contrasted similar constructions on the part of ethnomusicologists and revivalists. I also discuss the ethnocentrism lurking behind a rendition of folk music premediated by operatic models in Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema. The second section deals with ethnographic documentaries and ‘journey films’ produced in the 1950s. The understanding of folk music here is often articulated in terms of orientalism and allochronism, but I also consider approaches to the folkloric soundscape that prefigured the philosophy and ethics of acoustic ecology. Subjectivity, opaque remediation and reflexivity are helpful concepts to understand the remediation strategies in some documentaries produced in the 1960s, inspired by the work of influential anthropologist Ernesto De Martino and discussed in the third section. A final chapter focuses on approaches to folk music in early 1970s cinema: schizophonia, commodification, pastiche and anti-naturalist sonic aesthetics help to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s soundtracks. By interpreting cinema as a fundamental vehicle in the process of rediscovery, remediation and popularisation of folk music, I question the ideology that has led ethnomusicologists and folk music revivalists to exclude this medium from their accounts of this very process. My thesis, then, provides a starting point – to my mind long overdue – for building bridges between ethnomusicology, film music studies and media studies. It also draws from sound studies as well as Marxist and post-colonial theories as useful frameworks for audiovisual analysis and the discussion of primary sources collected through archival research.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Martin Stokes (Supervisor) & Andy Fry (Supervisor) |