Book Description

"In the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 70s, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that elevated and explored the immediacy of lived experience, whether as an aesthetic or political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms associated with temporal alienation or distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown) and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, however, "the past" is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, bridging conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, the representation of media technology, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past"--