ABSTRACT
Ican hear it as if it were yesterday. I was sitting in a classroom,“watching” John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. Myheart broke every time I heard Gena Rowlands sing the “Dying Swan,” and my eyes welled with tears at the image of a black laborer singing “Celeste Aïda” for a dozen of his coworkers at the breakfast table of this tortured, crazy Italian-American lady. Why, I wondered, did none of the course readings, and none of the readings in any other courses, care about or try to explain this experience? Why didn’t they attend to film’s music, when it seemed to me so obviously crucial? I spent my senior year, and my first year or two in graduate school in the mid-eighties, writing about that film and its music. (My friends referred to it as the only film I’d ever seen.) Fifteen years later, it hardly appears in this book; my questions eventually drew me elsewhere. But its shadows are throughout.
