Sounding Cinema

Concert films show us how musicians make their music, but they also help us hear that music differently. In this episode, we break down how this works in the concert film classic, Talking Heads’ and Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984).   More about the student team:   Luke Heying is a University of Iowa senior (’25) majoring inEconomics with a minor in Music.   Abbie McLaren is a University...

What is it like to hear and see a live musician accompany a silent film? Luke Heying, Abbie McLaren, Will Sinak, and Nathan Platte tackle that question in this episode by exploring guitarist Marc Ribot’s live musical accompaniment to Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) at FilmScene in Iowa City. We talk about the experience of drinking in Ribot’s brilliantly eclectic soundscape for a silent-era science f...

Sounding Cinema turns to the musical television episode! Erika Chagdes, Abbie McLaren, Caleb Payne, and Nathan Platte spotlight the unique and often comedic opportunities that arise when a TV series turns into a musical…for just one episode. By comparing “Once More, With Feeling,” the infamous musical episode from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer , with “Regional Holiday Music,” Community’s glee-ful fias...

Sounding Cinema returns to the immersive musicals of Jacques Demy, exploring the serious whimsy and peculiar pairs of The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Join Abbie McLaren, Caleb Payne, and Nathan Platte as we discuss the ways in which Demy’s film, Michel Legrand's music, and Agnès Varda’s documentary about the film play with and against the formula of the Hollywood studio musical.   Special...

Cecilia Kryzda and Nathan Platte talk with Jack Curtis Dubowsky about his recent book, Easy Listening and Film Scoring, 1948-1978 (Routledge, 2021) . A composer, performer, and scholar, Jack illuminates the vast and underappreciated opportunities easy listening provided film composers and how certain styles and habits shaped later music and film practices. Jack also explains the process of writing...

Rebekah Erdman, Cecilia Kryzda, Anastasia Scholze, and Noah Zahradnik return to Sounding Cinema to discuss Sound of Metal (2020), a film that challenges its central character--a musician-- to listen differently to the sounds and silences that define daily life and the relationships within it.

Sounding Cinema welcomes Rebekah Erdman, Cecilia Kryzda, Anastasia Scholze, and Noah Zahradnik to discuss The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Sound of Metal (2020), two titles that push film sound to its extremes. In the first of a two-part series, we consider how director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand unsettle a strikingly realistic story by having the characters sing all their lines...

Join Nathan Platte and Anastasia Scholze as they explore how music and sound draw us closer to film. First stop: the shifting soundscapes of Robert Wise's films (West Side Story, The Haunting, The Andromeda Strain, Odds Against Tomorrow, and many more).