Popular music and cinema: how the rock artist is represented on the big screen Alessandro Bratus Università degli Studi di Pavia alessandro.bratus@gmail.com The question of how rock is narrated in cinema raises very interesting issues in the context of the current scientific debate concerning audiovisual communication and the methodologies of its analysis. Gaining an under- standing of the configurations taken on by the relationship between form and substance, content and container, can open up useful perspectives in the analysis of a range of materials which have not yet been the subject of a spe- cific enquiry into the structural organization of sound and image. In spite of the heterogeneity of genres and directing techniques, these films do seem to represent a category possessing unitary features; the values they express, as indeed the similar narrative and formal procedures, lay the foundations for a shared language based on recurrent situations and strategies. 1. Reflections on direct cinema as the basis for analysing rock films As Keith Beattie points out in his historical and critical account of docu- mentary film, direct cinema most popular and commercially successfull sub- genre is the so-called „rockumentary‟ (Beattie 2004: 97-102). This kind of films gave the go-ahead for a major development within this cinematic trend, espe-