Recorded May 12, 2023.

An in-person lecture by Prof Richard Dyer(King's College London) as part of the Irish Screen Studies seminar organised by the Department of Film in the School of Creative Arts.

This paper by Professor Richard Dyer starts from a consideration of the trope of ‘our song’, the song, that is, that film characters feel in some way is associated with or even expresses their relationship – ‘As Time Goes By’ in Casablanca (1942) is perhaps the most famous example. It then considers how often such songs turn out to be illusory, looking especially at three relatively recent European examples, and arguing that the problem of ‘our song’ never really being ‘ours’, always escaping us, is in little the contradiction at the heart of communication.

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