Music Genre Films

Last week's lecture on hip hop and it's visual representation in film and music videos and the week before's lecture on punk got me thinking about music genre films. It seems that for every music genre, there's a film that is representational of it in someway or another. Hip hop has Wild Style, Do The Right Thing, etc. and more recently Get Rich or Die Tryin', 8 Mile, etc. These films either feature prominent hip hop artists acting, or represent other artists through great use of their music. My question is, does the music make the movie or does the movie make the music? I recently saw, Black Snake Moan, a movie that falls in the blues genre. One could probably say that it is for blues what Wild Style or Do The Right Thing is for hip hop. It represents the environment in which the blues came about (the working class black American south) and one of the institutions that inspired the music (the church). The stories in it even represent blues stories - a man's (Samuel L. Jackson) wife leaves him for his brother so he sings the blues to deal with what his life has become, and a nymphomaniac (Christina Ricci) with emotional issues due to her marine boyfriend in Iraq (Justin Timberlake) and her "itch" for sex finds solace in the biblical and musical teachings of Jackson (who takes her in). What results is a blues film in every sense of the word. The music throughout the whole film is overpowering, whether it's Samuel L. Jackson playing his guitar and singing his blues story in a climactic lightening storm, or just the typical blues riffs to accompany the action of the film. What becomes clear though, is that the music makes the film. This film is clearly about the power of blues music and a sort of representation of the history through the setting of the deep south. Jackson's character, more so than any of the other characters in the film, drives the blues mood to give the audience a lesson of what "blues" really means. The film adds to the growing genre of "music genre films" - creating a visual representation of all the aspects of a specific type of music.