Kitsch aspects in film music

Abstract

Abstract History has documented the human species’ struggles to understand beauty and communities’ efforts to grow through education. Figures of universal culture, such as Plato, Aristotle, G. W. F. von Leibniz, A. G. Baumgarten, I. Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, etc. tackled matters of aesthetics with great care. In the postmodernist period art, one of the four pillars of a peoples’ culture, together with language, history and religion, goes through a particular phase about which we cannot unequivocally say that is evolutionary. Under the onslaught of common people’s entertainment culture, contemporary art has a hard time maintaining its initial mission, that of elevating man’s soul and generating aesthetic projections of reality on a cognitive plane. The overwhelming significance that art and natural beauty carry in the intellectual life, beginning with the 18th century, is challenged by kitsch, this scourge, which came to prominence within society from the time when bourgeois civilization reached its peak, towards the end of the 19th century. Following a short presentation of various kitsch forms, associations and typologies in music, history, architecture, sculpture, decorative art and interior design, choreography, media, etc., we discuss kitsch aspects in film music, emphasising unjustified, incongruous and unempathetic associations between music and the rest of the filmic units. At the same time, we also present possible solutions for avoiding association errors. The examples are structured in the following subchapters: stylistic incongruities between filmic units vs. characteristics of the epoch augmented by music; using mainly dissonant or atonal sonorities in movies; exploring different cultures: ethnic music between deformation and authenticity; national and international in Romanian movies; representative songs - the more or less commercial exogenous motivation of film music; regarding the quantity of musical events in movies.