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Foreword
Laura Rascaroli
This double issue of Alphaville is a timely intervention into Disney studies and sound and music studies, respectively. It combines two sections that, albeit in markedly different ways, celebrate and investigate far-reaching artistic and scholarly legacies and offer important glimpses into the future of their respective fields.
The opening section is devoted to the 100th anniversary of Disney, which was celebrated in 2023, a century after Walt and Roy Disney founded their Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. The Walt Disney Company is today a monumental mass media and entertainment conglomerate that expands through animation, live-action film, television, as well as its theme parks. Its film studio division alone includes the likes of Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, 20th Century Animation, and Searchlight Pictures. Its expansion into television resulted in its ownership of companies such as ABC television, various cable TV networks as well as direct-to-consumer streaming services, including Disney+. Curating a special issue on its 100th birthday is not so much a celebration of a century of art, representation, and entrepreneurship as an unmissable opportunity to appraise the current state of Disney scholarship, to investigate understudied or new topics that span all the Company’s multiform activities, and to inquire into both the past and future of animation, film, mass media, and entertainment.
The issue’s second section is dedicated to Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (1966–2021). A distinguished music scholar, Kulezic-Wilson’s work on sound design and film music has been pathbreaking. Among other important works, her 2016 handbook of sound design and music in screen media coedited with Liz Greene developed the concept of “integrated soundtrack”, while her second and final monograph on Sound Design Is the New Score (2020) provided sophisticated investigations of a film soundtrack practice that blurs the boundary between scoring and sound design. The articles and video essays in the dossier devoted to her legacy demonstrate the generative impact of her scholarship while retracing and illuminating the scope of her elegant insights.
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson left an indelible impression not only on sound and music studies, but also, with her intellectual rigour and her radiant professional and human qualities, on the people who worked or studied with her here at University College Cork. Kulezic-Wilson was a friend of Alphaville. In 2012, she coedited Sound, Voice, Music, the third issue of the journal. In 2014, she contributed a beautiful essay on Richard Linklater’s Waking Life to an issue on animation. This dossier is our loving tribute to her.
The issue is completed by a rich book reviews section, which also contains an original interview with filmmaker Su Friedrich conducted by Sibley Labandeira.
References
1. Greene, Liz, and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, editors. The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51680-0.
2. Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela. Sound Design Is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. Oxford UP, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855314.001.0001.
3. ——. “Tango for a Dream: Narrative Liminality and Musical Sensuality in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 8, 2014, pp. 60–75. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.8.04.
4. Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela, Chris Morris, and Jessica Shine, editors. Sound, Voice, Music, special issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 3, 2012. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.3.
Suggested Citation
Rascaroli, Laura. “Foreword.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 27, 2024, pp. 1–2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.00
Laura Rascaroli is Professor in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork. She is the author of five research monographs including How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford UP, 2017), The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower, 2009), and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (Wallflower, 2006), and the coeditor of four collections including Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2020, with Jill Murphy) and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (British Film Institute, 2011, with John David Rhodes). Her work has been translated into several languages. She is Editor-in-Chief of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.
