Abstract
The study addresses the general theoretical issue of music’s position within
the cinematic experience, searching for a deeper understanding of film
music's meaning-construction potential. A critique of psychoanalytic and
cognitive-based theories of film music is followed by an outline of a new
approach that places distinct emphasis on film as a unified experience. The
commonly held assumption that film music’s function is to ‘hypnotize’
audiences and facilitate absorption, which is presumably threatened by the
fragmentary nature of cinema, is strongly contested. A phenomenological rather than semiotic examination of film texts supports
arguments for the productive potential of being absorbed and the fragmentary basis of all experience, introducing
absorption as a necessary condition for change and growth. It is argued that, in a unified cinematic experience,
and similarly to all experience, meaning arises out of the configuring of visual and aural fragments into a whole
by the spectator/auditor, rather than out of and subsequently to the interaction of independently prefigured
meanings of music and image. Combining this approach with the notion that art’s function is to enlarge reality
helps recognize film music as an indispensable contributor to the making of possible worlds rather than a
hypnotizing wash that lulls spectators into accepting any world.
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