MTV utterly changed the movies. Since music television arrived some 30 years ago, music videos have introduced filmmakers to a new creative vocabulary: speeds of events changed, and performance and mood came to dominate over traditional narrative storytelling. Popular Music and the New Auteur charts the impact of music videos on seven visionary directors: Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. These filmmakers demonstrate a fresh kind of cinematic musicality by writing against pop songs rather than against script, and allowing popular music a determining role in narrative, imagery, and style. Featuring important new theoretical work by some of the most provocative writers in the area today, Popular Music and the New Auteur will be required reading for all who study film music and sound. It will be particularly relevant for readers in popular music studies, and its intervention in the ongoing debate on auteurism will make it necessary reading in film studies.

Table of ContentsIntroduction / Arved AshbyMusic and Cinematic Time1. "Without Music I Would Be Lost": Scorsese, Goodfellas, and a New Soundtrack Practice / Julie Hubbert2. Lost in Translation: Popular Music and The Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola / Tim AndersonMusic and the Image3. A Musical Tour of the Bizarre: Popular Music as Fantasy in David Lynch / Gene Willet4. Songs of Delusion: Popular Music and the Aesthetics of the Self in Wong Kar-wai's Cinema / Giorgio BiancorossoMusic as Instrument of Irony and Authenticity5. O Brother Where Chart Thou?: Pop Music and the Coen Brothers / Jeff Smith6. You've Heard This One Before: Quentin Tarantino's Scoring Practices from Kill Bill to Inglourious Basterds / Ken Garner7. Wes Anderson, Ironist and Auteur / Arved AshbyBibliographyIndex