Unruly Media

Unruly Media argues that we are the crest of a new international style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the influence of audiovisual numbers and music-video-like sync. Music video becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief, low-res clips encompass many forms and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. These three media are riven by one another: a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form. This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform, and it demonstrates that attending equally to soundtrack and image reveals how these media work and how they both mirror and shape our experience.

Carol Vernallis is the author of Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (2004) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013). She teaches Film and Media Studies at Stanford University.

Introduction I. New Digital Cinema 1. The New Cut-Up Cinema 2. The Audiovisual Turn and Post-Classical Cinema 3. Music Video into Post-Classical Cinema 4. Moulin Rouge: Delirious Cinema 5. Music Video, Songs, Sound: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 6. Reciprocity, Bollywood and Music Video: Mani Ratnam's Dil Se and Yuva II. YouTube 7. YouTube Aesthetics 8. Audiovisual Change: Viral Web Media and the Obama Campaign 9. Refiguring Music Video: Beyoncé's "Video Phone" III. Music Video 10. Music Video's Second Aesthetic? 11. Digital Style: Francis Lawrence and Dave Meyers 12. A Music Video Canon? Afterword: Accelerated Aesthetics: a New Lexicon of Time, Space and Rhythm Index