Romanticism and film: Franz Liszt and audio-visual explanation

Abstract

This thesis presents an attempt to explore the relationship between Romanticism as a philosophical and aesthetic category and film as an audio-visual medium. A series of selected and interconnected subjects are explored throughout the central chapters in reference to the hypothesis that discourse and representation itself present various kinds of ‘explanations’ about their subjects. The idea of ‘audio-visual explanation’, in particular, is forwarded as a nominally ‘Romantic’ phenomenon, and is explored throughout in reference to various epistemological and ideological considerations. These aspects include the relevance of schematic cognition to the processes of interpretation, the political dimension of filmic explanation as a social action which impacts upon hermeneutic processes, and the development of the idea of ‘risky archaeological analysis’ as a methodological procedure facilitating the interpretation of texts and their schematic and political aspects. The Romantic pianist and composer Franz Liszt (1811-86) functions as a connecting device, or ‘leitmotif’, structuring each chapter’s analysis of audio-visual explanations in reference to both Romantic aesthetics and more traditional concerns of Film Studies, such as film theory, film history, textual analysis and production contexts. The introduction sets out the theoretical structure necessary for the subsequent analysis. Chapter one relates such structures to the idea of Romanticism, demonstrating, through a theoretical engagement with a variety of philosophical sources, the relevance of Romanticism to film, as well as its applicability to the contemporary world more generally. Chapter two relates the historical development of Richard Wagner in filmic discourse as a precursor to Classical Hollywood film music, and, through a consideration of the musical philosophy of Liszt, demonstrates the wider relevance of Romantic audio-visual aesthetics to this debate. Taking Liszt as an example, chapter three examines the twin ideas of ‘cultural images’ and ‘schematic types’, undertaking a rigorous theoretical examination of the relevance of schematic cognition to Romantic audio-visual explanations. Chapters four and five present detailed case studies of biopics of Liszt, exploring, through textual and contextual analysis, the relevance of the ideas explored in previous chapters with regard to individual film texts. The conclusion summarises the scope and content of this thesis, and restates the still-underexplored significance of Romanticism to both film and the modern world more generally.

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