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.
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
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