IN the movies, "Pop music is like a knife. You twist it and nostalgia comes pouring out." (Steve Woolley, producer. Quoted in Celluloid Jukebox).
Steve Woolley has a point. And yet, let's not get too nostalgic here - let's not forget that 1996 marks the 40th anniversary of the year Hollywood realised that when you twist this particular knife, cash comes pouring out. Primarily from the pockets of teenagers.
Indeed, it was roughly 40 years ago today that two seismic events took place which would subsequently shape "youth culture" and confirm its position as a site for financial and ideological exploitation for the rest of the century. And I don't mean the creation of Kentucky Fried Chicken or large scale field tests for the first birth control pill.
In Nashville, Elvis Presley was recording Heartbreak Hotel, and in Hollywood Sam Katzman was producing Rock Around the Clock. Within a matter of months the former, a slice of musical film noir, would lead to millions of teenagers declaring, like John Lennon, that "before Elvis there was nothing". The latter, meanwhile, initiated the kind of riots in cinemas, which signified that disenfranchised youths of the 1950s had finally found a new beat they could move to. And rebel through. And, yes, folks, this beat was called rock'n'roll.
However, "the great founding myth of pop film" was the release the preceding year of The Blackboard Jungle, according to the editors of the collection of essays in Celluloid Jukebox (Popular Music and the Movies since the 1950s). In their introduction, Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wooten claim that the setting of Bill Haley's recording of Rock Around the Clock against that movie's credits "represented perhaps the only moment in cinema history when people got up from their seats and danced" in an instinctive rather than prescribed fashion, thus creating a pivotal moment, "in which cinema - the reeled off repetition of an already fixed image - suddenly became live.
Nice notion, right? But maybe too neat a leap beyond the realisation that rock'n'roll always had more to do with attitude than with music. As such, surely those non musical moments which made the collective youth consciousness dance, and redefine itself, during the early 1950s were of similar importance? What about Brando in The Wild One, mumbling his wonderful riposte, "what have you got?" when asked "what are you rebelling against?" and wearing the denim jeans, leather jacket and white t shirt which still epitomises "anti establishment".
Likewise, James Dean striking out against his father, while at the same time imploring: "Talk to me, please" in East of Eden. This was the movie which prompted Francois Truffaut to proclaim that "in Dean today's youth discovers itself". Accurate observation or not, the axis of cinematic history certainly began to spin with the success of East of Eden, turning adolescents into both the prime movers, and prime consumers of movies; which, to this writer at least, is the point at which "pop" films were born.
Either way, in his Celluloid Jukebox essay, Twisting the Knife, journalist Mark Kermode accurately identifies that "The Blackboard Jungle has gone down in history as `the first rock film' acknowledging the awesome power of Haley's music to capture a critical moment in American social history". Zipping through the similar seat ripping success of Sam Katzman's original "teen exploitation" pies (Rock Around the Clock, Shake, Rattle and Rock and Don't Knock the Rock), Kermode also notes that "although none can be seen as `good' films, they have grown in stature over the years into classic celluloid time pieces." The same is true of "the Elvis Presley movie catalogue", he suggests, explaining that, "nobody took Jailhouse Rock seriously in 1957, but it is now regarded as something of a cultural landmark.
In this sense, Celluloid Jukebox is of seminal importance and will, one hopes, add to the developing tendency to view the products of pop - such as Presley's movies - from a cultural rather than purely aesthetic perspective. Clearly, its authors take their cues not from the increasingly redundant area of traditional rock/movie criticism, but from the kind of cultural analysis formulated by the likes of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall.
WORKING along these lines, in Long Black Limousines: Pop Biopics, poet/movie critic Michael Atkinson presents the apparently endlessly resonant Elvis Presley as central to an understanding of ourselves, popular culture and pop biographies. Commenting on the fact that "no major Elvis biopic has ever been produced outside of a handful of American TV movies," he believes that such a biography may be unnecessary.
"Though undeniably totemic, Elvis' story may be too archetypal", Atkinson writes: "Modest country schmuck to instant sensation worshipped by millions, to lonely despot slumped dead over his gold plated toilet. Successful but empty and wasted by fame. It's the same story, one way or another, at the core of The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors. La Bamba, Lady Sinks the Blues, Sweet Dreams, Sid and Nancy, Backbeat, The Rose etc.; it's just the true story of pop culture, true because it's ours, we made it and we live by it."
Acknowledging that "pop music biopic didn't begin with Elvis," he claims "it just suddenly had more at stake". Why? "With Elvis, the dimensions of pop expanded nova like to nearly every neglected corner of the media quotidian; suddenly the nature of pop music changed, from simple entertainment to something that could control your life."
Most of the writers here agree that there is no such thing as "simple entertainment" - that the meaning of every word written, every note sung and every frame in a movie is dictated, to a certain degree, by the socio political space occupied by its creator at a particular point in time. And that the audience response is similarly determined.
But let's flashback to Mark Kermode and his use of Steve Wooley's knife metaphor, which applies, specifically, to the way in which "found" music is inorganically grafted on to soundtracks, often simply to avoid the cost of paying composers to create original scores. And other costs.
"Wooley is particularly down to earth in his assessment of the function of pop music in movies, which he describes as the cheapest farm of period scenery, or `wallpaper', available to a filmmaker: if you can't afford the sets, slap on a distinctive period tune and the audience will imagine the rest," Kermode writes, in relation to such movies as Quadrophenia and Grease. However, he also observes that directors such as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino use pop music in a more subversive manner, as in the latter's "bizarre choice of 1970s bubblegum pop as a striking counterpoint to the (sometimes hideous) modern day action of Reservoir Dogs" and suggests this is because "like Scorsese, Tarantino is musically literate, and knows that the exact placement of a song within a movie can shape and change the nature of the on screen story, and that the relationship between music and action does not have to be harmonious."
In the book, Scorsese himself agrees, pointing out that: "Popular music doesn't have to serve simply as mood music or be an unimaginative device for establishing a time period" and cites as a striking early example of this The Public Enemy (1931), where "William Wellman uses popular tunes in the background played out against the chilling violence on screen, creating a sense of bitter irony and authenticity."
And yet, if it's subtextual subversion you want, check out Kenneth Anger's underground 1960s classic, Scorpio Rising, which, tellingly, presented Brando and Dean as role models for its gay hero. According to Jane Gilles in her essay, As Above, So Below: 30 Years of Underground Cinema and Pop Music. "Anger juxtaposed several benign pop tracks with a devilish montage of swastika sporting, drug snorting biker boys and biblical movie clips, creating an anarchic collage that simultaneously revered and yahbooed the orthodoxies of both film and music". She also gives long overdue credit to experimental film makers such as Antony Balch, who made the pre East Rider hallucinatory short, Towers Open Fire with William S. Burroughs, in 1963, and Tie Cut Ups, in 1967, which "is a more overt cinematic equivalent of Burroughs literary technique".
This fascinating postmodern lineage is further explored, and brought up to date by Giles, through the work of directors such as Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman and Pedro Almodovar, with particular reference to teenage Riot Grrrl graduate, Sadie Benning, whose "clutch of no budget experimental shorts brings us full circle, intimately connecting with Scorpio Rising via Derek Jarman".
MORE than this, Jane Gilles argues that left of field film makers such as Benning ensure that when popular music is used in movies it will not merely lead to audiences drowning in bucketfuls of nostalgia. On the contrary, she suggests that the result will be a hybrid, cutting edge form of art which challenges rather than serves the state, in a hegemonic sense - which is hardly the case in terms of the majority of mainstream youth movies, from Rebel Without A Cause right up to Antonia Bird's newly released Mad Love.
"In the age of MTV, where every other pop promo looks like an underground film montage, what counts is the tenacity of the outsider who works against cultural assimilation and compromise," Giles concludes, highlighting the best way forward for independently minded filmmakers, and rockers. And "indie" films and music.
"The work of Kenneth Anger, Derek Jarman and Sadie Benning is not just outside the mainstream, but constitutes the cutting edge of experimental film making. Each has used their counterparts in music to inflect and underscore the dense, fragmented and intensely personal imagery of films which work to challenge conformity and effect change.
