Austro-German Melodrama and Its Film Music

For its significant impact onto the post-World War II society in particular and the history of cinema in general, film melodrama has been comprehensively studied in the fields such are film studies and contemporary history. However, a consideration of its audiovisual elements, manifested principally in the film music, has with some notable exceptions been mostly neglected. Our project aims to close this gap and provide the scholarship and the wider audiences with an understanding of representation, as well as constitution of gender, society and history through film melodrama. For this, the project focuses on the Austro-German post- war melodrama features as a primary research object and uses the methodologies from gender studies, film studies and music studies in tracing the representation, narration and emotion in the film music. In the preparatory phase, the project has identified around forty relevant film melodramas with available film- and music materials produced in the 1950s and 1960 in Austria and West Germany. Whereas the creative signatures as well as their number of film directors are quite diverse, the film music composers are represented by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, Anton Profes and Alois Melichar as well as Franz Grothe and Mark Lothar. The main goal of the project is to determine and analyse mediation strategies utilised by film directors and composers. Tracing the notions of media construction mechanisms aimed at the audiences of the Wirtschaftswunder-society is therefore conducted based on the analysis and through the function of music in the post-war German-speaking film melodrama.