Music videos widened the creative vocabulary of filmmaking, starting with the launch of MTV in 1981, and continuing through the expansion of cable TV and the proliferation of the PC and of digital video. Writers have pointed to the music video's influence in increasing speed of event, as well as deflection away from Aristotelian understandings of narrative, characterization, and storytelling toward a concentration on situation, feeling, mood, and new approaches to time and the passage of time. Just as important is the music video's introduction of different performative sensibilities. Popular ... More

Music videos widened the creative vocabulary of filmmaking, starting with the launch of MTV in 1981, and continuing through the expansion of cable TV and the proliferation of the PC and of digital video. Writers have pointed to the music video's influence in increasing speed of event, as well as deflection away from Aristotelian understandings of narrative, characterization, and storytelling toward a concentration on situation, feeling, mood, and new approaches to time and the passage of time. Just as important is the music video's introduction of different performative sensibilities. Popular Music and the Post-MTV Auteur looks at seven visionary directors, most of them American, who have allowed these music-video-induced changes to infiltrate their feature films: our book defines these filmmakers' relation to the soundtrack as their key authorial gesture. The question is not of the music video influence making films more “musical,” or helping pop songs gain new influence within film conceptions. What these filmmakers have done, demonstrating a fresh kind of cinematic musicality, is write against music rather than against script, and allow pop songs a determining role in narrative and imagery. These directors have allowed preexisting pop songs to open a new cinematic space, between the narrative situation and the music itself. At the most basic level, the music steps away from nondiegetic function and withholds commentary — empathetic commentary, at least — on the narrative. The pop song doesn't mediate in the manner of the nondiegetic orchestral score, but “sides with” the character, or sometimes with the viewer, more impartially than nondiegetic music can. While the classic symphonic film score promised insight directly into a character’s mind, the expanded role of popular music has made more ambiguous the question of when, if ever, we are allowed to see or share a character’s emotions. As a result, the potential for irony and ambiguity has multiplied exponentially, and characterization and narrative capacities have fragmented. At the most basic level, the new cinematic-musical aesthetic has required filmgoers to renegotiate some of their most basic instinctual connections with the human voice and with any sense of a filmmaking self.