Off the Planet

    Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema
 

Over the last decade, music and sound have been increasingly recognised as an important – if often neglected – aspect of film production and film studies. Off The Planet is an important contribution to the emerging body of work in this field and is targeted at both cinema studies readers and film music students and aficionados.

Off The Planet comprises a lively, stimulating and diverse collection of essays on aspects of music, sound and Science Fiction cinema. Following a detailed historical introduction to the development of sound and music in the genre, individual chapters analyse key films, film series, composers and directors in the post-War era. The first part of the anthology profiles seminal 1950s productions such as The Day the Earth stood still, the first Godzilla film and Forbidden Planet. Later chapters analyse the work of composer John Williams, the career of director David Cronenberg, the Mad Max series, James Cameron’s Terminators and other notable SF films such as Space is the Place, Blade Runner, Mars Attacks! and The Matrix.

Contributors include leading academics and researchers from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The editor, Philip Hayward, is Professor of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney and co-editor of Perfect Beat – The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture. He has written and edited several previous books, including Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late 20th Century (1991), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen (1994) and Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music (1999).

John Libbey – in association with Perfect Beat Publications

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