Music in Canadian visual narrative -- musical collaborations in five films of Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this project is to promote an awareness of some important recent contributors to Canadian film music, and draw attention to the collaborative process between composers and filmmakers in Canada. My investigation of film music through a multi-contextual framework engages the larger question of how music adds layers of meaning to film. Music is an agent of narrativity in film, and the case studies benefit our understanding of Canadian film music's potential to inform the multiple narratives through which it passes. This project examines the work of two Canadian independent feature filmmakers, Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema, and the film composers---Mychael Danna, and Lesley Barber and Mark Korven, respectively---with whom they have collaborated since their emergence in the 1980s. Their works serve as case studies for an understanding of the ways film music can engage visual narrative and how the convergence of music and story can inform broader and Canadian considerations. In the first chapter, I discuss film as social text and as personal and cultural expression within a context of national cultural policies. I consider how music, in its ability to mediate and interpret film, and as the product of creative interactivity, becomes a site through which individual and national identities can be negotiated. In a national and social sense, I investigate some of the ways music can be "heard" differently when we acknowledge its particular social, cultural and ideological contexts---within and outside the film. In the spirit of the multidisciplinary approach necessitated by the subject matter, this project brings together interpretive strategies informed by cultural and anthropological studies, film music theory, postmodernism and gender theory, among others. Using cultural studies and ethnographic methods as the backbone for examination of the music's "extrafilmic" contexts, while applying detailed musical analyses in consideration of music's "extrafilmic" roles, the second and third chapters provide layered and multi-variable discussions of the music and music makers of five Canadian films. Egoyan's films, Family Viewing (1987) and Exotica (1994), and Rozema's films, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), White Room (1991), and When Night is Falling (1995) fuel the discussion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".