Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling

Nino Rota wrote some of the loveliest and most beloved of all film music – The Godfather, The Leopard, the Zeffirelli Shakespeares, nearly all of Fellini and more than 140 popular Italian movies. Yet his music doesn't quite work the way we've come to assume music in film works: it doesn't seek to draw us in and identify, nor to overwhelm and excite us. In itself, its pretty but reticent melodies, its at once comic and touching rhythms, and in its relation to what's on screen, Rota's music is close and affectionate towards characters and events but still held back, not detached but ironically attached.

This book gives a detailed account of Rota's aesthetic, suggesting it as a new approach to how we understood both film music and feeling and film more broadly. In the process it also provides a first full account in English of his life and work, linking it to notions of plagiarism and pastiche, genre and convention, irony and narrative. Rota's practice is related to some of the major ways music is used in film, such as the motif, musical reference, underscoring and the difference between music in and music outside the film's fictional world, showing the way that Rota both conforms to and undermines the standard understanding of these. There is a section considering the issue of queer cultural production and chapters on Rota's favourite genre, comedy, and his most productive directorial association with the great Federico Fellini.