Dear Colleagues,

Self-reflexivity (also known as: metareference, metaization, …) is a popular concept across various arts and media and has recurrently been subject to scholarly interest in many disciplines, with interdisciplinary studies gaining more attention in recent decades. There are plays within the play, there is metalepsis in novels, there are movies that deal with their own mediality (e.g., Blow Up (1966, M. Antonioni) or The Truman Show (1998, P. Weir)) and, finally, as more recent studies have shown, there is also self-reflexivity in music.

In all mentioned phenomena, individual media/arts reflect their own mediality (or: the conditions of their production/reception) within the same medium. But this still leaves room for the question of how metareference can occur when different media/arts are involved. This is precisely the case in film, a medium where sound/music and image constantly intertwine. A quite intriguing example is the gang fight in A Clockwork Orange (S. Kubrick, 1971) that takes place on a deranged theatre stage and that is underscored with Rossini's ouverture for The Thieving Magpie. The opera-borrowed stylistics expose the presentation of violence as a mere scene, thus challenging the spectator to reconsider her own position on the cinematic violence assembled in the movie.

Contributions for this Special Issue of Arts may focus on theoretical considerations or on case-studies. Questions that can enrich the discussion include:

• In what genres, and by which means, does film music (characteristically) create/support metareference?
• Under exactly what circumstances does the interplay between intra- and extradiegetic music gain a self-reflexive function? And (how) does the case of music-induced self-reflexivity alter the view of diegetic functions of film music?
• In which situations does the use of musical quotations generate a meta-reflexive layer?

Dr. Florian Kraemer
Guest Editor

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• self-reflection, self-reflexivity
• metareference, metaization
• film music
• hermeneutics
• diegesis, metadiegesis
• intermediality