Further seductions: ‘Mrs. Robinson’, post-Graduate

This article considers Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs. Robinson’ in its original context of The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) in relation to its composition, lyrical content and narrative role. The song’s later use in other films is then examined, with consideration of issues of intention and reception in regard to evocation of The Graduate, and of the part that visual and other elements play in this alongside music. ‘Mrs. Robinson’ is seemingly universally employed as a deliberate nod to Nichols’s film, but a variety of contexts for and manners of this can be identified, in part using Serge Lacasse’s (2000) concepts of ‘autosonic’ and ‘allosonic’ quotation (where the former is the quotation of recorded sound, and the latter that of abstract musical structure, realized through new sonic means). The article argues that these later uses of ‘Mrs. Robinson’ have contributed to a re-inscription of the song’s signification in culture more broadly; much as Benjamin is seduced – led astray – by Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, we ourselves have now been seduced into new and arguably false interpretations of her musical namesake

Pre-existing music as authorial signature in the fiction films of Martin Scorsese

In his review of Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, Variety’s Scott Foundas suggests that having ‘a quadruple album’s worth of classic rock and blues fill up the soundtrack’ contributes to the film being ‘almost self-consciously Scorsesean’ in its style. Yet even a cursory survey of the music heard both in that film and across Scorsese’s oeuvre reveals an eclecticism not accounted for by this view. This chapter argues instead that pre-existing music, and the director’s particular manners of employing it, are common and thus defining features of his work, forming a key part of his authorial signature, and indeed doing so more strongly for him than for perhaps any other mainstream filmmaker

Music by Zbigniew Preisner? Fictional composers and compositions in the Kieślowski collaborations

The collaborations of Zbigniew Preisner and director Krzysztof Kieślowski contain an elaborate network of fictional composers and compositions. This network stretches from their first project — No End (1985) — to their last — Three Colours: Red (1994) — and is exemplified most obviously by the fictitious eighteenth-century composer Van den Budenmayer and the pieces ‘by’ him that feature across several films, and the central composer characters and their music in Three Colours: Blue (1993). This chapter focuses primarily on the music, considering not only its functions and effects within the films, but also the processes behind its creation by Preisner, and the manner in which it both emerges from and forms part of his oeuvre. Preisner’s fictional compositions are written ‘in character’, but reflect real-world models and influences. They also point towards future music written in his own voice, and in any case have come to take a central place in the public reception of his work. As well as providing insight into a key facet of Preisner’s activity, examination of this uniquely extensive system of musical make-believe serves to outline trends and theories pertaining to a broader, relatively uninvestigated tradition of fictional music existing across numerous screen, stage and literary texts

Violet is hopeful for change : social media and Barack Obama's 2008 U.S. Presidential Election Campaign

This thesis explores the use of social media technologies like Facebook by Barack Obama's Presidential campaign and its supporters in the 2008 U.S. General Election. By investigating the social and technological forces driving ongoing changes in the modes of communication used by campaigns and supporters, I argue that the 2008 Presidential campaign was the first major American electoral event in which social media, as I define them, were a significant factor. I also examine the specific , structural and rhetorical properties of the campaign's communications strategy in order to determine what efforts to promote the flow of its messages into and throughout social mediascapes the campaign may have made. My primary research is composed of interviews with young Obama supporters volunteering with the campaign in New Hampshire in the final week of the election period. I conclude from this research that a potentially transformative pattern of communicating with the campaign and with peers characterizes the habits of political expression displayed and described by these young people. Using Facebook, my interview subjectes integrated political signifiers appropriated from the campaign's messaging and branding into their own identities, creating potentially powerful and pervasive new flows of influence within their online communitie

Cape Fear: Remaking a film score

For his 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese had the Bernard Herrmann score of the original adapted by Elmer Bernstein. This article first examines that Herrmann score, before showing how it was effectively ‘re-composed’for the later film, with Bernstein taking its basic components and redeploying them in often entirely new musical and filmic contexts, while also combining them with his own newly composed music and further pre-existing material from Herrmann’s rejected score for Torn Curtain (Hitchcock, 1966). The motivations for the reuse of Herrmann’s music, and issues of interpretation arising from the 1991 score’s compilation status will be considered. The article aims to be relevant not only for scholars of music in moving-image media, but also for those interested in remakes and media intertextuality more generally

Clinical audit in veterinary practice: theory v reality

CLINICAL AUDIT is an effective tool for assessing and improving the clinical care provided to patients. Good guidance has previously been provided in the veterinary literature as to how to conduct clinical audit in veterinary practice (Mosedale 1998, Viner 2009, 2010, 2012, Dunn 2012, RCVS Knowledge 2015). These resources go into depth about how to conduct audit and the types of topics to choose. However, the combination of the limited veterinary evidence-base and the reality of practice makes traditional clinical audit as per the framework derived from the medical field challenging to implement in the veterinary setting. Despite this, it can still be a rewarding and valuable tool to use in practice

Real-time social media sentiment analysis for rapid impact assessment of floods

Traditional approaches to flood modelling mostly rely on hydrodynamic physical simulations. While these simulations can be accurate, they are computationally expensive and prohibitively so when thinking about real-time prediction based on dynamic environmental conditions.Alternatively, social media platforms such as Twitter are often used by people to communicate during a flooding event, but discovering which tweets hold useful information is the key challenge in extracting information from posts in real time.In this article, we present a novel model for flood forecasting and monitoring that makes use of a transformer network that assesses the severity of a flooding situation based on sentiment analysis of the multimodal inputs (text and images). We also present an experimental comparison of a range of state-of-the-art deep learning methods for image processing and natural language processing. Finally, we demonstrate that information induced from tweets can be used effectively to visualise fine-grained geographical flood-related information dynamically and in real-time

Greek love, orientalism and race : intersections in Classical reception

Classics has been characterised as both a radical and a conservative discipline. Classical reception studies has enjoyed exploring this paradox: antiquity has provided an erotic example for modern homosexual counter-culture as well as a model for running exploitative empires. This article brings these aspects of reception studies together, to examine how the Victorian homosexual reception of the ancient Greeks was framed and worked out in a particular imperial context at the end of the nineteenth century