Music over Words and Sound over Image: "Rock Around the Clock" and The Centrality of Music in Post-Classical Film Narration

This article argues for the centrality of the Bill Haley and His Comets song "Rock Around the Clock" in creating post-classical sound through its appearance in Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock. The song turns the cinema into a music delivery system and relegates the image to perhaps only accompanying the sound. The audience for each film also repurposes the cinema space for active response in the form of dancing and thereby challenges theorizations of the cinema as a series of images meant to be received by a passive audience.