David Bowie and the Art of Music Video

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Bloomsbury Academic, Oct 5, 2023 - Music - 280 pages

The first in-depth study of David Bowie's music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie's videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space.

By charting Bowie's creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

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About the author (2023)

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Holly Rogers is Professor of Music and Director of Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where she runs the MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures). She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and co-author of Studying Twentieth-Century Music in the West (2022). She has edited several books on audiovisual culture, including Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017), Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cybermedia (Bloomsbury, 2021), YouTube and Music (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Remediating Sound (Bloomsbury, 2023). Holly is one of the founding editors for Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media and the Goldsmiths journal “Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture”..

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