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Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s. By Annette Davison. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) [x, 221 p. ISBN: 0-75460-5825. $69.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

"[I]n their attempts to show how movies purportedly mystify spectators," argues Noel Carroll in Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, 2), "contemporary film theorists, in fact, mystify our understanding of cinema." Carroll's comments adequately describe the end result of Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s, a new title in Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music Series. The stated mission of the series is to present music "in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology." Davison's book is not primarily about film music but rather about how it can be construed in the context of film theory. The analysis of film scores as a musical form is not found here. Because of this, it rightly should be cataloged in PN 1995.7 (Motion pictures--Sound effects) instead of ML 2075 (Motion picture music--Analysis, appreciation, or Motion picture music--History and criticism).

A working knowledge of film theory is really needed to adequately understand this difficult text, something that most musicians are not likely to possess. Although Robynn Stilwell, quoted on the dust jacket of the book, states that "[the book] will be an excellent foundation for any student in the field" only those with a strong background in film theory will be served or, more precisely, a background mostly in yesteryear's film theory, rather than more recent alternative theories advanced in the past decade and a half, as found in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds. [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996]).

Davison makes a distinction between classical Hollywood scoring practices, defined as "a set of structural conventions originally institutionalized as a set of filmmaking practices in the 1930s and 1940s" (p. 2) and non-Hollywood practices, described as "film soundtrack composition"...

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