Popular Music on Film

Undergraduate / Graduate

The rockumentary, concert, or popular music film remains an enduring object across the 20th and 21st centuries. From Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back to Wattstax to Taylor Swift: The Era's Tour, these films stage an essential encounter between two key forms of mass media: popular music and cinema. Starting with this relationship, this class asks, "What can popular music and cinema teach us about each other?" Across readings borrowed from cultural studies, music, and cinema-in addition to weekly film screenings-this course will help students develop a robust understanding of the common ground the popular music film constructs. We will explore how this genre exposes a network of concepts relating to media technology, race, and music culture through close reading and focused film analysis. While this class expects participants to have a basic awareness of the language of film analysis, this class does not assume its students to have formal musical training. Instead, this course encourages and teaches to develop basic skills in competently writing about music on film from a cultural studies perspective. Beginning with common theoretical and cultural concerns shared between film and music, we will learn to describe on-screen music and sound using focused, meaningful, and accurate language. As an extension of this project, we will also learn approaches to incorporating discussions of media culture that reflect and embrace an enduring legacy of popular writing on music.