Visual Text and Musical Subtext: The Cossacks (George Hill, 1928): A 21st-Century Composer’s Journey in Silent Film Scoring

The expanded field of printmaking: its intersections and counterpoints with writing and the image in the context of contemporary art

PORTO ARTE Revista de Artes Visuais ◽

10.22456/2179-8001.43769 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 19 (32) ◽

Author(s):

Maria do Carmo De Freitas Veneroso

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Contemporary Art ◽

21St Century ◽

Visual Text

In this article I present how the changes on the statute of printmaking during the 20th century and continuing in the 21st century has enabled an approach of printing practices from the perspective of an “extended” or “expanded field”, in which printmaking dialogues with other languages such as writing. Writing is approached through the fabric of the visual text, its “graphic texture”, in the Barthesian meaning. By referring to graphic texture, Barthes draws a relation with the origin of writing in a time when drawing, engraving and writing were very close activities.

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Adaptation, Authenticity, and Ethics in Carl Davis’s Score to the Thief of Bagdad

10.14325/mississippi/9781496832603.003.0008 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 126-148

Author(s):

Geoffrey Wilson

Keyword(s):

Silent Film ◽

Musical Style ◽

Film Scoring ◽

Historical Film ◽

Revival Movement ◽

Readiness To Adopt ◽

Musical Cues ◽

Do So

Contributor Geoffrey Wilson notes Davis’s self-proclaimed practice of reviving the score the films might have had in their original release but he faults the leading composer in the silent film revival movement for failing to realize his aim. Wilson cautions that a number of contemporary practices mark Davis’s scores, including his use of leitmotivs to denote characters, a willingness to allow those leitmotivs to shape the overall narrative, and his readiness to adopt a unified musical style for the film. Each practice belongs to a more contemporary period of film scoring. Wilson contends that one of the only aspects of silent scoring Davis keeps is a willingness to create musical cues that present non-Western characters and settings in essentialist if not outright racist ways. The choice makes Davis’s claim to authenticity misleading. While Davis’s scores may make a historical film more accessible to modern audiences, they do so by promoting reductive stereotypical constructs.

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