David Bowie and the Moving Image: A Standing Cinema

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The central image of David Bowies Life on Mars could have been ripped from his own experience: a child sits hooked to the silver screen, reliving fantastical scenes played out on film. Throughout his life, Bowie was similarly transfixed by the power of film. From his first film role in The Image to his final music video before his death, Lazarus, Bowies musical output has long been intrinsically linked to images. Analyzing Bowies music videos, planned film projects, acting roles, and depictions in film, David Bowie and the Moving Image provides a comprehensive view of Bowies work with film and informs our understanding of all areas of his work, from music to fashion to visual art. It enters the debate about Bowies artistic legacy by addressing Bowie as musician, actor, and auteur.

Reviews

To focus on the music of David Bowie is understandable. But you're only getting half of the story. Bowie the visual artistactor, director, scenarist, storyboard artist, painter, iconis just as essential to his work. Katherine Reed's insightful study goes from the Diamond Dogs tour to Bowie's Vittel and Vuitton TV ads to his afterlife in films and shows how intertwined Bowie the rock musician and Bowie the image (and image-maker) always were. * Chris OLeary, author of Rebel Rebel (2015) and Ashes To Ashes (2019) *
David Bowies chameleonic nature was evidence of a keen sense of not just style but how an image could tell a story and sometimes the more ambiguous the story, the more compelling the image. This wide-ranging study literally looks at David Bowie across media from stage to screen, a musical performer, an actor, a conceptualist, a figure both avant-garde and commercial, an 'alien' who reflected his audience back to themselves. * Robynn Stilwell, Associate Professor of Music, Georgetown University, USA *
David Bowie and the Moving Image is an essential starting point for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of this iconic artist. Reed makes a compelling case that Bowies entire oeuvre is permeated by an audiovisual and theatrical sensibility, always extending beyond the music through the power of the accompanying images, whether it is the charismatic chameleon that is Bowie himself, music videos that channel his performance personae, films in which brand Bowie is a defining feature, commercial spinoffs in advertising, or elaborate film and stage narratives, some of which disintegrated before they could be realised. Reed's writing is erudite and panoramic in its scope, drawing eclectically from musicology, studies of performance and audiovisuality, cultural theory and semiotics. The value of this book is in how it draws all of this together, offering the reader an approachable overview of Bowies unrivalled and enigmatic explorations in sound and vision. * John Richardson, Professor of Musicology, University of Turku, Finland, and author of An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (2012) *

Author Bio

Katherine Reed is Assistant Professor of Musicology at California State University, Fullerton, USA. Her research interests include musical semiotics and the use of pre-existing music in film. Reeds work has appeared in Popular Music & Society, Music and the Moving Image, and the Society for American Musics Digital Lecture Series.