Industry and Craftsmanship in Popular Cinema: An Initial Exploration of Vassil Kojucharov’s Archive

Abstract

Born in Sofia in 1937, Vassil Kojucharov studied Composition in Moscow with Aram Khachaturian during the late 1950s. At the end of the decade, he moved to Italy where he spent the rest of his professional life as a composer, director and teacher. Even though Kojucharov was not a “big name” in Italian film music production, surveying his personal collection allows us to catch a glimpse of his work on more than fifty films in different popular genres (spaghetti-western, crime, horror, spy, commedia sexy ). Scores, notebooks and tapes provide the starting point to explore his approach to film music, in a negotiation between aesthetic, cultural and industrial issues. These documents provide a fresh perspective on the fragmented, often artisanal, production processes of Italian popular cinema during those decades in which industrial and technological modes of production, such as the modular conception of the soundtrack as a set of independent and reusable elements, self-borrowing, and editing of pre-recorded sounds served the representational conventions of each cinematic genre.