Cultural Memory on Film Soundtracks

This article addresses issues of cultural memory arising from the use of classical music on film soundtracks. The phenomenon is considered in three forms: (1) historical layering, as in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady and Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue; (2) memory and nostalgia, especially in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, and in the possibilities available to classical music in European compared with US films; (3) musical memory in a given culture, from It Happened Here (Brownlow/ Mollo) through to various directors of the New German Cinema. The reception histories of the ‘Deutschlandlied’ and of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are enriched by consideration of their frequent use in West German films of the 1970s, as part of a quest for national identity. Alongside the established critical tool of scopic regimes, the article pleads for attention to acoustic regimes as a neglected aspect of cultural studies.