David Bowie and the Moving Image

Reviews / Votes

To focus on the music of David Bowie is understandable. But you're only getting half of the story. Bowie the visual artist-actor, director, scenarist, storyboard artist, painter, 'icon'-is 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 O'Leary, author of Rebel Rebel (2015) and Ashes To Ashes (2019) * David Bowie's 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 Bowie's 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 Bowie's 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) *