Full text loading...
-
Walter Reisch: The musical writer
- Source: Journal of Screenwriting, Volume 10, Issue 3, Sep 2019, p. 295 - 306
-
- 01 Sep 2019
Abstract
Academy Award-winning Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch’s (1903–83) career started in Austrian silent cinema and ended in Hollywood. Reisch wrote the screenplays for silent films, many of them based on musical topics (operetta films, biopics of musicians, etc.). He created the so-called Viennese film, a musical subgenre, set in an almost mythological Vienna. In my article I am analysing the characteristics of his writing in which music plays a crucial part. The article details the use of musical devices in his screenplays (his use of music, the influence of musical melodrama, instructions and use of songs and leitmotifs). The article closes with a reading of the final number in the last film he was able to make in Austria: Silhouetten (1936).
Funding
- The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project number P 31422