From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. "Disintegrating the Musical" tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film's classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals--a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars--Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge--emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites--even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

"Disintegrating the Musical" covers territory both familiar--"Show Boat," "Stormy Weather," "Porgy and Bess"--and obscure--musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne's first film "The Duke Is Tops," specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short "Jammin' the Blues." It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, "Disintegrating the Musical" shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Bamboozled."

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. "Soundtrack Available "fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.
With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both "nondiegetic" music in film--the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience--and "diegetic" music--music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and "mise-en-scene," this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack.
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Contributors. "Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

From cold war hysteria and rampant anticommunist witch hunts to the lure of suburbia, television, and the new consumerism, the 1950s was a decade of sensational commercial possibility coupled with dark nuclear fears and conformist politics. Amid this amalgamation of social, political, and cultural conditions, Hollywood was under siege: from the Justice Department, which pressed for big film companies to divest themselves of their theater holdings; from the middleclass, whose retreat to family entertainment inside the home drastically decreased the filmgoing audience; and from the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was attempting to purge the country of dissenting political views. In this difficult context, however, some of the most talented filmmakers of all time, including John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, and Billy Wilder produced some of their most remarkable work.

Bringing together original essays by ten respected scholars in the field, American Cinema of the 1950s explores the impact of the cultural environment of this decade on film, and the impact of film on the American cultural milieu. Contributors examine the signature films of the decade, including "From Here to Eternity," "Sunset Blvd.", "Singin' in the Rain," "Shane," " Rear Window," and" Rebel Without a Cause," as well as lesser-known but equally compelling films, such as "Dial 1119," "Mystery Street," "Suddenly," Summer Stock, "The Last Hunt," and many others.

Provocative, engaging, and accessible to general readers as well as scholars, this volume provides a unique lens through which to view the links between film and the prevailing social and historical events of the decade.

From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. "Disintegrating the Musical" tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film's classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals--a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars--Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge--emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites--even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

"Disintegrating the Musical" covers territory both familiar--"Show Boat," "Stormy Weather," "Porgy and Bess"--and obscure--musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne's first film "The Duke Is Tops," specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short "Jammin' the Blues." It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, "Disintegrating the Musical" shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Bamboozled."