2960 Broadway, 622 Dodge Hall, New York, NY 10027
Colloquium: Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at 11:30am, 622 Dodge Hall
Michael Klein (Temple University)
"Hearing the Apocalypse in Film"
Abstract: Apocalyptic films have taught audiences how the end times will come (Prince 2021). Listing only 1 example for each apocalyptic scenario yields: war (The Book of Eli), human mutation [i.e. zombies, vampires, etc.] (I Am Legend), plague (Children of Men), natural disaster (The Day After Tomorrow), climate change (IO), alien invasion (The Day the Earth Stood Still), cosmic collision (Melancholia), A.I. (The Matrix), dystopia (V for Vendetta), etc. Although there are many studies about such films (Olson 2015; Riccio 2018; Hutchison 2020; Prince 2021; etc.), typical for work in film studies, a discussion of sound in the apocalyptic film is largely absent. When looking at such films from within music studies, the discussions focus mostly on music, relegating sound effects and dialogue to secondary levels (and thus reversing the classic sound editing of film). Following Chion (1982), Kulezic-Wilson (2019), Harrison (2021), among others, this paper focuses on sound design as what Kulezic-Wilson calls “the new score” in film and approaches apocalyptic films more specifically as a large genre that uses sound to place the viewer in relation to the apocalyptic event (pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, post-apocalypse) and to prompt narrative desire (Barthes’s hermeneutic code), a series of questions that the viewer hopes will be answered by the end of the film. This paper will narrow its inquiry to the opening of such films to illustrate how sound often precedes the image track in doing the work of preparing the viewer for what will come.
Bio: Michael Klein is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Music Studies at Temple University. He is the author of two books with Indiana University Press: Intertextuality in Western Art Music (2004), and Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (2015); in addition, he is the co-editor (with Nicholas Reyland) of the collection Music and Narrative since 1900 (2013). He has published on the topics of musical narrative, psychoanalysis, affect, the soundtrack, and the music of Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, and Lutosławski. He is the recipient of a publication award from the Society for Music Theory for his article “Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative” and of a Lindback Award for teaching. He is currently working on two books: one about three cinematic adaptations of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and one about hearing the apocalypse in recent film.
