Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film
English · University of Minnesota Press · 2010
ISBN 9780816660889Verify editionNo verifiable published translation record was located.
Core question
When song and dance erupt within linear narrative, does the musical moment merely repeat familiar formulas, or can it reorganize time, space, body, and history? How does difference emerge from within repetition of cliché?
Argument
Herzog uses difference, repetition, and refrain to analyse the musical's contradictory force. Musical spectacle relies on formulas, gendered/racial/class conventions, and cultural memory, yet its excess, abstraction, and bodily movement can interrupt narrative order. Jukebox shorts, adaptations of Carmen, Jacques Demy, Esther Williams, and Tsai Ming-liang form a cross-media route showing that the musical moment's liberating force must be tested within concrete repetitions.
Argument structure
The musical moment connects impossible jukebox bodies, Carmen's dissonant refrains, musical memory in Demy, and fluid bodies in aquatic spectacle. Songs can suspend narrative time and recompose space, but can also sustain existing conventions. Difference depends on the new relations an interruption actually produces.