Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how soundtracks in films and television can enhance emotional depth while balancing artistic expression and clarity.
Wesley Morris reflects on the role of soundtracks in movies and television, particularly during the Blaxploitation era, where music was used not just to set the mood but to reinforce the emotional narrative of the story. He emphasizes the skill involved in balancing subtle artistry with clear messages, illustrating how soundtracks can elevate the overall experience of the film, making emotions more poignant and relatable to the audience.
In practice
In a film analysis class when discussing the impact of soundtracks.
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.
One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
Those are miracles that no merely human brain can work. The artist is merely the sound conduct of a Force that dictates to him what he should do.
Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it.
What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.