Unruly Media

Unruly Media argues that we're on the crest of a new international, intermedial style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn, driven by digital technologies and socioeconomic changes, 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, after migrating to the web, becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief and low-res clips encompass many forms, and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. All three of these media are riven by one another: a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals structural commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form.
Music video, YouTube, and postclassical cinema remain undertheorized. This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform-to try to characterize the audiovisual swirl. Unruly Media includes both new theoretical models and readings of numerous current multimedia works. It also includes several chapters devoted to the oeuvre of highly popular directors, their films, commercials and music videos. Unruly Media argues that attending equally to soundtrack and image can show how these media work, and the ways they both mirror and shape our modern experience.

Carol Vernallis teaches Media Studies at Stanford University. She is 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).

- 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