HopkinsCinemAddicts

The Lighthouse, The VVitch, and the Wardrobe

Minor spoilers for The Witch and The Lighthouse

I watched Robert Egger’s film The Witch (The VVitch) a few weeks ago (I’ve been kicking myself since 2015 to rent it off Amazon, but then it popped up on Netflix) and dear lord what an amazing film.

So then I obviously went and rented Egger’s most recent film The Lighthouse, and honestly I’m not sure which one is better. They’re both so disturbing, so absorbing, so big, so boring (in a good way), so weirdly secretive, so silly for how serious they are.

I want to talk about one really stand-out aspect present in both films (and I know I’m not the first to point this out): the score and sound design in The Witch and The Lighthouse are incredible. All thanks goes to composer Mark Korven (both films) and sound designer Damian Volpe (The Lighthouse) for building so much suspense through a few key sound effects and two really crafty scores. There’s a few things that work so, so well: the jarring way in which the music shifts from whispering to screaming, the constant repetition of certain eerie sounds, and the combination of specific audio and imagery to create such uncomfortable atmospheres.

The Witch is limp without its music. The film is beautiful, but most of the emotion in the film is heard rather than seen. When the eponymous witch first appears on screen, we only see her back. She’s bent over a table, working at something, and even though we can’t see what she’s doing, WE KNOW what she’s doing (horror warning: it involves a baby and hammer). But the image is so dark (the film’s nighttime scenes were shot mostly using candlelight and moonlight) that you can barely make out anything beyond a suggestion of the events. What gets you is the music: a playfully hostile drumbeat paired with what sounds like a hacksaw carving through a block of wood. It’s the soundtrack of anxiety, the musical equivalent of passing a 14-wheeler on a two lane highway. It asks you to start biting your nails. Later in the film, we meet a very evil certain somebody who only speaks in whispers—whose dialogue sounds so physical that you can hear their tongue hitting their teeth as they pronounce the letter ‘t’. It sounds like someone is literally whispering in your ear. It’s unnerving. And the music isn’t afraid to build up to uncomfortable loudness for the sake of atmosphere. A lot of modern horror movies are incredibly lazy in the way they use loudness; when they want to make you jump in your seat, they let everything get really quiet and then they slap you across the face with a blaring sound cue. The Witch isn’t interested in wasting tension. It pulls you to the edge of your seat because it wants to drag you further into the film.

The Lighthouse does some really interesting things with sound (a reoccurring mermaid shrieks at the camera in such an unearthly, washed out way; the squawking of seagulls started to drive me up the wall). But one of the best parts of the whole film (next to Pattinson and Dafoe’s performances) is the constant blaring foghorn that sounds off every five minutes throughout the duration of the film. It’s such an otherworldly, bassy sound—you can’t really tell if it’s something you might actually hear coming from a lighthouse in the 1890’s, or if it’s a completely made up science-fiction noise. But it hits so well because the one sound says so much: its repetition makes you think of horror/insanity, the fact that it’s a foghorn makes you think of the ocean, and the singularity of it connotes isolation. Beyond that, it just sounds really, really cool.

Go watch The Lighthouse and The Witch.

The (Sort of) Homestretch (Vanessa)

The last five weeks of my life have been amongst the most exhausting of my college career. However, today, the day that episode one of HOUSE will premiere alongside Studio North's two other 2018-2019 projects (which I HIGHLY recommend looking into, as they are both stellar projects) makes me realize that those five weeks are also amongst the most rewarding.

April for film majors (and from what I understand a lot of humanities majors...and other majors...let's just go with everyone) is brutal. If you are on the production track, like I am, you are either (1) helping on someone's set, (2) working on your own set, (3) editing a project, or (4) some combination of the previous three at the same time. In addition to studying for exams, writing papers, preparing for projects, balancing your other commitments, and trying to not completely self-destruct by eating and sleeping. Because I seem to like to make my life difficult, I found myself at 4 quite frequently the past few weeks. My priority, however, has been finishing up episode one (which takes viewers to the Chosen Few DJs Reunion Picnic in Chicago) for the premiere.

It has been a time of self-discovery, technical learning, pure frustration, and pure elation. And if the above words don't accurately describe editing, I don't know what does.

To start, I have learned a great deal about myself in this five-week span: from an ability to go through a whole pack of gum in two days just to give the rest of my body something to do while clicking away in Premiere, to an extreme sense of protectiveness over my project and its subjects, to the realization that to best avoid skipping meals while editing for 6 to 12+ hours at a time, one should always pack a couple of sandwiches just in case. This is all to say editing is physically and mentally draining. You are sitting, staring at a screen for hours at a time. Fun fact: the human body is not designed to sit and stare at a screen for hours at a time. I was confused the first few times I stayed at the JHU-MICA Film Center from noon to midnight as to why I would wake up and my back would tingle, my wrists would ache, and my eyes felt strained. Alas, I am not built for editing. But by day three of long editing sessions, I learned the key is really just having good posture. So I would count that as one of the things I learned as well.

As far as the protectiveness over my project goes, working on it for longer stretches of time gave me a deeper sense of attachment to it. Editing, for HOUSE, is an exercise in telling one story through many voices. I wanted to make those voices shine as best as they could. Which ties into the technical learning that occurred throughout the process of editing for a more intense amount of time than I had before.

When you first offload your footage from a camera after shooting, I think your immediate reaction, as a director, is probably "does it look good" and "does it sound ok". During editing, what looks "good" becomes "how do I make this look even better" and what sounds "ok" becomes "oh my god all the sound levels are different and anyone watching is going to know this IMMEDIATELY after the first cut between interviews." Every time I edit a project, I inevitably end up on a youtube page, internet forum, or at the mercy of my more skilled and knowledgeable film friends to figure out how to do something that ends up being incredibly easy. For the Chicago episode, this manifested in the form of three youtube videos on the "maintain power" audio transition tool in Premiere, several videos on color correction that I ended up learning a great deal from despite ultimately leaving the footage to be shown at the Studio North premiere ungraded (another fun fact: color grading images shrouded in smoke is not a simple task), and at least one forum on maintaining consistent audio levels throughout a video.

Overall, a good, albeit sometimes challenging process of absorbing and applying information, sometimes experiencing the joy in actually following the directions and ending up with a decent product, other times ending in looking up another video. Editing, like any skill, is larely about having the patience to continue learning and applying what you learn to practice. This holds true for the Chicago episode. At times it was incredibly frustrating not knowing how to do something you just KNOW can't be that hard to do. But the excitement in finding a solution, whether in terms of restructuring the sequence of your edits or by having an "ah ha!" moment when you finally DO find a solution is exciting.

Which leads me to the final two words: frustration and elation. One of my closest friends, who actually is pursuing a career as a professional editor and doing a spectacular job of doing so, once told me that with filmmaking, your lows are exceptionally low, but your highs are exceptionally low.

Editing is all about attention to detail. And not getting one detail to be as precise as you want can be incredibly frustrating. Along with the protectiveness over a project mentioned earlier comes the desire to achieve perfection. Which is at times, nearly impossible. But when a solution is found, or someone laughs at a joke you set up, or you finally just get something to WORK, it is immensely satisfying to craft a story out of raw material and see it succeed in its mission.

The Studio North premiere induces a weird mixture of excitement and anxiety for me. On one hand, I get to share this wonderful thing with people. On the other hand, this "thing" that I have been with since before it was even shot will soon be exposed to a world of opinions and grievances. Are people going to judge my work? Are people going to judge me because of my work? The long nights of adjusting audio levels, of trying to time a cut perfectly with a bit of music, of hoping and praying that I can convey how much fun house music is and how truly wonderful its fanbase is will be up to whoever is watching it. And hopefully, though an audience might not see those tiny adjustments and won't necessarily understand the long nights that went into creating, they'll feel the energy, unity, and spirituality that I hope the editing of the Chicago episode can appropriately convey.

We'll just have to see. 

Finding and Searching for Inspiration During Post-Production (Vanessa)

At the beginning of 2019 (which was also around the time I started to go through my footage for HOUSE), I was asked to consider two questions. The first: what movies have you enjoyed recently? The second: why did you enjoy them?

A significant amount of work goes into filmmaking of all kinds. From casting, to location scouting, pre-production, scheduling, and everything in between, the process of making a film, no matter the size, is consuming. However, in the midst of all the stress of figuring out the logistics of making and editing a film is the desire to make the darn thing in the first place. The two questions I was asked encouraged me to consider both where my own passion for filmmaking comes from and also what it is about the films of others that inspires me. In essence, I am trying to do more to think not only about where I want to go in terms of the vision of HOUSE but also where my interest in documentary filmmaking comes from.

For this post, I would like to take a step back from talking about editing itself and focus on two documentaries that I have looked to for guidance while editing HOUSE when in need of guidance for how editing works for documentary filmmaking.

The first of these three documentaries is John Heyn and Jeff Krulik’s 17-minute short Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Shot in the parking lot of a 1986 Judas Priest concert, Heyn and Krulik interview fans stimulated by raw excitement, a love of heavy metal, and, of course, alcohol and drugs. NPR did a review of Heavy Metal Parking Lot in 2016 during the week of the film’s 30^th anniversary. It features an interview from Laura Schnitker, an ethnomusicologist (basically someone who studies the intersection of music and culture) and an acting curator at University of Maryland who notes “for anyone who wants to understand what a heavy metal crowd looked like when heavy metal was at its peak popularity in the 1980s, this is a perfect document of that point in musical history…it’s just a great snapshot of fandom”.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot is striking to me because of how simple it is both in conception and in execution, but also so rich in terms of its honest depiction of a particular group of people simply existing in a particular cultural moment. The interviews are cut together so that different people ultimately end up answering the same questions, but in a way that depicts just how excited the fans are to be there. There are moments that are undeniably hilarious: teenagers screaming out random nonsense and proclaiming their love for Judas Priest, an event worker from the Caribbean who talks about how he’s never seen such craziness at home, and plenty of other metal-heads truly just enjoying the moment.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot, to me is an inspiration because it is honest. In the NPR interview, Krulik notes “neither one of us ever set out to do that [make fun of the fans]. I mean, there is manipulation involved: You’re editing it, you’re getting right to the most entertaining content. And that was our agenda, to make an entertaining 15-minute video”. Personally, I think that Heavy Metal Parking Lot lives up to this assertion. Yes, it is funny. But instead of focusing on the fact that, yes, the debauchery of the day makes it so fun to watch, it’s goal ultimately proves to be showing just how much fun it is to be a fan. This has been something I’ve grappled with while editing HOUSE: how do you create an honest depiction of something without necessarily making fun of it?

I look to Heavy Metal Parking Lot for the answer, which is ultimately to select footage the preserves the spirit of community and fun that is central to the house music community. One particular moment that I’ve enjoyed editing is a series of clips featuring interviewees responding to the prompt “describe house music in a few words”. The intrigued responses are just as fun and telling as the overly enthusiastic ones, and lives up to the idea of creating something that is both entertaining, and honest.  

The second documentary that has been on my mind a lot and a interesting point of reference for me as an editor has been this year’s Oscar winner Free Solo, which chronicles the journey of free solo rock climber Alex Honnold. I’ll admit, I was not entirely sure of my own feelings about Free Solo when I first saw it. It’s a spectacularly well shot documentary (the landscapes in particular are stunning) but the main point of curiosity for me while watching Free Solo is just how odd it is to explore the world of Alex Honnold. Alex is not passionate about much in his life. Even his girlfriend, who Is featured prominently throughout it, seems annoyed at just how little Alex seems to care about life. His friends constantly remind viewers of how absolutely terrible it feels to be filming something that ultimately could be Alex’s death, which is his scaling of Yosemite’s El Captain without harnesses or ropes. Alex is borderline unlikable.

However, what is interesting about Free Solo is how it chooses to depict just how deeply Alex loves free soloing. Rock climbing is more than his passion, but truly the crux of his existence. The editing takes care in depicting the complexities of its characters, cleverly juxtaposing images of Alex processing his mission with the beauty of the scenery, which doesn’t necessarily make you want to go climbing, but instead communicates the sense of inspiration one can derive from just how incredibly dedicated this man is to his task. Climbing is Alex’s life. He is less in love with the mountains as he is a part of them.

For me, Free Solo has been helpful with the process of editing house by encouraging me to think about boundaries. Free Solo is really two stories: Alex’s and Jimmy Chin’s (the director). Jimmy is a professional climber and mountaineer and at times Free Solo balances Alex’s narrative of climbing the mountain without equipment with Jimmy (and his crew’s) narrative of climbing the mountain with Alex and with film equipment. It works on two levels, depicting Alex’s grappling with undertaking a task that truly might kill him and Jimmy’s grappling with what it means to film something that is so blatantly stupid yet so fascinating. And what it would mean to film the death of his friend, in the case that Alex didn’t make it.

Editing is about decision-making, and both Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Free Solo make interesting choices that inform the overall narratives that both documentaries depict. At the heart of both documentaries is the notion of passion and of what it means to love a thing or an action as opposed to a physical person. They are vastly different, but accomplish their goals in choosing to sequence different events to construct a larger story as opposed to just sticking random images together. The footage in both is thoughtful, allowing the story of their subjects to emerge naturally. For me, this gets at the core of what I want HOUSE to be: a depiction of the excitement of experiencing something that you truly love. And hopefully, through careful and mindful editing, that feeling will emerge.

What Is Editing and How Do You Edit (10 Hours of Footage Edition) (Vanessa)

In my last post, I talked a lot about the difference between process and processing as it relates to editing. This week, I would like to circle back to that, but now with a focus on process and what editing is.

One of the earliest things I remember learning as a film major was about Sergei Eisenstein and the development of Soviet montage theory. Montage refers to the process of film editing in which a series of shots are edited into a sequence. Montage theory goes on to develop the idea that connecting a series of images has the power to convey different thematic and emotional messages about what an audience is seeing on screen depending on how the editor chooses to sequence them. The common example is that if you cut from an actors face to an image of a bowl of soup, the audience will perceive hunger as the emotion the sequence is trying convey. Which differs from if you cut from an actors face to an image of a woman lying down in a nightgown, conveying a different emotion or concept, such as lust.

What I find so fascinating about editing is just how underappreciated it is, yet how integral it is to how people understand the “language” of movies. Taking a film class was the first time that I really thought about the fact that movies are sculpted in every sense of the word: from how they are created on paper through screenwriting, to the choices made by the director and cast, to how a cinematographer decides to shoot a certain scene, to the decisions made by an editor when piecing everything together to form a movie.

Editing a documentary web series has challenged my own understanding and appreciation for editors because of how the process of building the story really comes from fragments of unscripted material. For HOUSE this is fun (and a bit daunting, if you couldn’t tell from my previous post) because there is a lot to work with. There are different ways to tell the story I want to tell from the footage I have in part because there IS so much footage to begin with. It’s exciting to come across a certain moment in an interview and think “this would be GREAT coupled alongside this other interview!” It’s similar to the feeling of putting together a large puzzle and the exhilaration of when you start to figure out which pieces go where. You have the side pieces and the corner pieces together (or in my case, interviews that you know can be used to frame the larger story you want the final product to convey) and then from there, it’s a long series of trying to push pieces into certain spots and figuring out what does and does not work.

Transcribing my interviews was akin to flipping all the pieces over to the correct side. It’s still a mess to look at, but at least you sort of have a sense of knowing what you are looking at.

Examples from my transcript and transcript "code" of how I categorized parts of interviews

The next part for me was figuring out how to organize the pieces into categories to make the “pushing pieces into certain spots and figuring out what does and does not work part” a little bit easier. I broke my footage into separate sequences in Premiere categorized by what “type” of footage it was and what type of content was within the footage. For the Chicago episode, were people talking about their memories of growing up and listening to house music? Or were they describing the feeling of house music in a certain part of the interview, but not in others? Was one clip particularly rich in footage that could be used as b-roll? Or sometimes, was the footage even usable at all?

The process of documentary filmmaking for me has been so much about asking questions and seeing how people respond to them. And the editing portion of the project has been no different. Another great advantage I have found in transcribing all of my interviews has been that it has allowed me to see what questions I can group together while editing different interviews together. I’ve done more work as a videographer prior to really trying to stick my hands in documentary and narrative filmmaking, which has benefited me as an editor in the sense that one thing I tried to keep in mind while Giovanna and I shot footage was how to incorporate a doctrine of “shoot for the edit” in the midst of shooting for the answers to questions I was asking of interviewees.

Shooting for the edit more or less means keeping in mind that at the end of the day, no matter how great something looks, you still have to give your editor material to work with that can allow your footage to connect seamlessly. In short, it means getting a lot of coverage on everything. It’s one thing to have a shot of someone on the phone and a shot of them hanging up after their conversation ends. It’s another thing to have a shot of a phone sitting on a table, getting the sound of the phone ringing, in addition to having shots of the person on the phone and the person hanging up. It gives you more room to work with in terms of transitioning from one shot with no phone at all to another shot entirely about a conversation on a phone, and it makes a world of a difference to edit.

HOUSE, as I’ve stated before, has been a great learning experience. Are there moments where I wish I had more coverage of an object or of a person? Most definitely.  But there are also moments in watching the footage where I can see my own growth; in the way I ask questions, the type of questions I ask, and in the understanding between Giovanna and me about what we needed to capture.  The later material is more manageable than the earlier material. It is rewarding to see my own development from the first day of the shoot to the last​.

Last semester I thought I could just jump in with editing by simply looking through my footage and working from there. This semester has been a lot about organizing and making my footage “readable” for myself as an editor. In addition to understanding how editing works for documentary versus how it works for narrative. I’m still moving along, but I think the difference is that now, I have a sense of where I want to go, in part because I’m getting better at understanding how to piece my footage together and because I have worked at figuring out how to read my own handwriting, or in the case of HOUSE, reading my own footage and piecing together the questions I asked in interviews to formulate answers about house music and the house music community.

Lights, Camera, Logistics (Vanessa)

Filmmaking (or documentary web series-making in the case of HOUSE) is a lot about looking for answers. How do you get from point A to point B with all the equipment? Who do you cast? Who will be part of the crew?

As the reality for creating a documentary web series shot in three different cities set in, some of those answers became relatively simple. “However you can (within the means of the budget)” and “whoever is willing to do so” quickly became the answers to a lot of questions starting with “how” and “who”.

The Chicago and Detroit episodes of HOUSE were shot over the course of six days: four days in Chicago, two days in Detroit. The crew (for these two episodes) consisted of the following: me, my friend and fellow film major Giovanna (HOUSE's fantastic cinematographer), my brother, my dad, and my mom.  My dad and brother accompanied Giovanna and me to Chicago and my mom and brother accompanied us to Detroit. So, for the summer at least, the crew was truly “whoever is willing to do so”.

Figuring out who was going to do what roles was an adventure in and of itself. Giovanna graciously volunteered to be director of photography, which was fantastic. I told myself I could direct, produce, and do sound mixing, which by some miracle sort of worked out, at least for a few days. In short, having an actual (and excellent!) crew in Baltimore gave me a completely new sense of appreciation for actually having enough people to do everything—that way you can avoid simultaneously asking interviewees questions, mixing sound, holding a boom pole, nervously watching the battery levels on the sound recording device die, communicating with your DP, and telling the part of your brain that keeps asking “WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING?” to quiet down all at the same time.

My brother helping me with the slate.

Casting was also an adventure, seeing as I had no idea how casting for a documentary worked prior to starting to work on HOUSE. The same “whoever is willing to do so” philosophy applied: phone calls, emails, and Facebook messages were sent to friends, family friends, friends of family friends, and friends of friends of family friends. Thus, the cast (aside from the tons of friendly strangers willing to talk to Giovanna and me at the Chosen Few Picnic) was created. Honestly, one of my favorite things about HOUSE and about all of the experiences I have had with filmmaking, and especially documentary filmmaking is all the kind strangers you meet along the way.

Somehow, it all worked out. And looking back, I couldn’t be prouder (and slightly in awe) that it did. Pre-production was, without a doubt, hard. I know I must have given the production chair for Studio North (JHU’s student run production company from which I received the grant to make HOUSE) at least one near heart-attack when we we’re working through how we were going to stretch the budget enough to get through all three cities.

Car travel between cities: 2,540 miles. Not including driving within/around the cities and Giovanna’s flight to Chicago, which was about another 790 miles.

 

As you can probably tell, shooting the Baltimore episode in the fall was a completely different game altogether: substantially less driving (all of the equipment for Chicago and Detroit came from Baltimore because that's where the JHU-MICA Film Center is located, which provides access to equipment rentals for JHU students), larger crew (shout out once again!), and cooler temperatures. Overall, still a great time with great people.

In short: the logistics of HOUSE felt a little on the wild side at times, but I couldn't be happier with the experience. One of my favorite things about HOUSE is that it has been such a learning experience from the very beginning, and getting to see how it all has started to come together throughout post-production (post about post coming soon!) is ridiculously exciting. 

Some more house music until the next post:

Like This, Chip E. Feat. K. Joy

You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), Byron Stingily

Deep Inside, Hardrive

 

What is HOUSE (and house music)? (Vanessa)

This web series would not be possible without my parents, who have always raised me and my siblings to love and respect music both as solace and as art.

My dad is a Navy man, which resulted in me living in eight states and attending a combined total of seven elementary, middle, and high schools before I attended college. The things that were stable in my childhood as a result: family road trips and discussions about music, a deep love for my parents and siblings, and a fascination with how people interact with the world around them.

HOUSE, in particular, comes from the stories of my dad. My parents attended undergrad and met at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the late 80s and early 90s. The Chicago house music scene has its roots in the early and mid-80s as radio personalities and club DJs mixed elements of disco, electro-pop, synthesizers and drum machines (such as the Roland TR-808, the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer, and the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer) and eventually hip-hop to create new sounds that were danceable and innovative. Thus, came the emergence of house music. By the time my parents would arrive in Chicago, house music had expanded to an international audience, included several sub-genres, and became a unique community with a plethora of stories about who exactly made up various house music scenes.

Never one to shy from a good story, my dad would both play house music and tell me stories of what it was like to witness the house scene as a young person living in Chicago during the late-80s. And from that, the inspiration for HOUSE was born as I wondered “what must it have been like to be immersed in something that sounds so vibrant?” and “what must have it felt like to create something like house music?”

If you are a beginner to the world of house music or even to the realm of film production (especially documentary film production), there are three things that I think are important to know for a better grasp on both of these worlds: (1) house music and film production are all about community and being supported by a community, (2) house music and film production are all about passion (for others, music, movies, art, etc.), and (3) house music and film production are all about expression.

Film and house music are both blends of other mediums from which a certain “language” has emerged. At least in my experience, the language of video media (film especially) and of house music is reliant on emotion and experience. With this in mind, I like to think that a documentary web-series about house music, and documentary storytelling of all kinds, is some sort of weird blend of the subjective and objective. You capture someone’s truth while acknowledging that yes, “truth” itself is sometimes informed by emotion, experience, and expression. What is a good story, really, aside from someone communicating what it means to embody an identity, be part of a community, or simply exist as someone experiencing the strangeness that is life?

HOUSE at its simplest, is a story of community and connection within the house music fan bases in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, told through the voices of fans and creators alike. It goes through all three cities and features interviews with those who consider themselves “house heads” or part of the house music community. HOUSE explores how a genre of music can be a sound and a feeling.

Just as importantly, HOUSE’s production is also a story of community and connection between people who love storytelling. Those people have ranged from my dad and my professors who have supported me and helped me create this project (shout outs especially to Meredith Ward, Matt Porterfield, and Lawrence Jackson!!!) to my friends and fellow students who have been a part of the production team, individuals who have been interviewed (and people who have offered tremendous amounts of help in pursuing people to interview), and everyone else who got roped into this ride. One of my friends (another film major) and I constantly joke about how any sort of film/tv/web-series/visual media effort is really just a massive group project. BECAUSE IT IS! And hopefully, to anyone reading this, you’ll get to see that through this blog!

Picture from Chosen Few Picnic and Festival, July 2018 (where we shot part of the Chicago episode!)

Next time: “Casting" a Documentary, Producing and Logistics, and Directing

Until then, some house music:

In The Beginning (There Was Jack)

Move Your Body

Hot Stuff (Ralphi Rosario And Erick Ibiza 2018 Rework)

 

The Garrulous Silence of the Inanimate: Soundscape in Film (Mireille)

Although the birth of film began as silent, sound now dominates the cinematographic experience. Irrespective of the genre or length of the film, the presence or lack of sound and music in a film very often helps build not only the narrative tension, but also the scaffolding for the composition. One excellent example of a short film that uses sound, especially music, to accentuate the mise-en-scène and composition of individual shots is Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956). 

The Red Balloon has only a few words of dialogue, but it is not a silent film. From the very beginning, Lamorisse uses music to create an almost dream-like world into which the characters, as well as the audience, can immerse themselves. The soundtrack starts with the opening credits and continues throughout the film. The music is joyous and consists primarily of major keys and scales, reminiscent of music that is played at a fair. After all, the main character is a red balloon, and though usually silent, magical, and joyous, through the soundtrack, Lamorisse allows us to hear the balloon’s voice and thoughts. Lamorisse pairs the openness of the soundtrack with wide and medium shots that effectively depict the vastness of the world beyond Pascal, a young boy and the other protagonist in the film, and the relationship and struggles between him, the balloon and the environment. With this composition of music and filming even the little details of the everyday Parisian life seem heightened. For example, when Pascal is walking through the streets in the beginning of the film the soundtrack is overlaid with the sounds of city life. The immense grey buildings make the world captured by the frame seem daunting and oppressive, and even more so in contrast to the little boy’s small stature. Many of these wide shots also capture the semi-dilapidated and destroyed ruins of France, a historical reminder of the effects of the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War on the city of Paris. However these shots are brightened with the co-presence of Pascal’s brightly colored balloon and the joyous soundtrack.

Though the tune making up the soundtrack is utilized throughout the film, it is not always light and circus-like. At times Lamorisse alters keys and introduces variation of notes to echo or foreshadow the action and the mood. For example, in one scene, when Pascal unties his balloon from a lamp post, Lamorisse slightly changes the pitch and key of the soundtrack and incorporates minor scales into the original sound while adding 5th minor keys. These alterations create, arguably, the most dissonant sound one can obtain on an instrument, and in fact, in this case prime the audience for the upcoming scene in which the boy is bullied and the balloon is eventually punctured. As the balloon withers away the scene becomes silent as we, the audience, experience the balloon being popped as not only its death but also Pascal’s, and the music which has been their voices until now must necessarily end. The music returns once again and back to a major key only at the very end. It then crescendos so that it becomes the only sound one hears as Pascal floats away with many new balloons.

Although the soundtrack dominates the majority of the film, when the soundtrack is absent Lamorisse compliments the images with the sounds that surround the Pascal and his balloon. This change from strictly soundtrack to simply diegetic sound comes almost as a shock to the audience since the scene becomes attenuated compared to the scenes filled with the soundtrack. For example, when a group of school kids notice the balloon, their calls and screams increase in volume beyond what we may normally expect.  We interpret this shift from soundtrack to diegetic sound as what the balloon is hearing. In fact, the sound of the screams appears to lure the balloon to them. The balloon is intrigued by their sounds and begins to taunt them playfully. Towards the end of the film, the children’s screaming and yelling become even more accentuated just before the final confrontation between them, the balloon, and Pascal. The emphasis of the screaming makes their aggression palpable and the eventual violence inevitable since they have “overpowered” the voice of the balloon.

In The Red Balloon Lamorisse shows us that sound does not have to be presented as dialogue in order to capture the intentions and emotions of a character. Rather, the careful combination of auditory and visual cues can fill the cinematographic experience with subtle messages and themes. In this way, the audience’s emotions are not constrained by the meaning of words, but rather, are shaped by the experience of the sound.

Choose a Song. Choose Life. (Jaeyoung)

 Spoiler Alert: Ending of Trainspotting discussed

 In my Digital Productions class, I had very little difficulty choosing songs for my first two projects. For some strange reason, there is an ocean of very unsettling, experimental music that are available as public domain. For each film, I have spent an hour (or less) in determining my soundtrack. Since my chief goal was to unnerve and frighten my fellow classmates, I simply had to choose the song that best unnerved and frightened me.

 For my latest class project, I decided to script and shoot a short comedy. It is currently in the editing stage, and I have had some difficulty with song selection. The rules of the (song choosing) game have been more complicated for comedy than they were for my horror shorts. For instance, it is not a matter of choosing the funniest song (I can’t simply jam in my favorite Weird Al Yankovic songs and expect my film to be tonally coherent).  The song(s) I choose need to 1) not distract from the story, 2) be light-hearted, and 3) be sensitive to the feelings of the characters. As I scrolled through the edgy-music-filled library, I could not find a song satisfying all three categories.

 I may be thinking about soundtracks in the wrong way (Of course I am! I am a novice). Perhaps I should be more concerned about how the music adds to the movie, rather than how it can be inoffensively inserted. Imagine, for example, Marion’s driving scene in Psycho; without the chilling, intense orchestral piece, it would only be a minutes-long sequence of a woman staring forward and turning the wheels left and right. The music provides an urgency that the images, by themselves, might not fully provide.

 Although the soundtrack to Psycho is a classic, I think that the songs in Trainspotting engage the audience in a more complex way (also, Trainspotting would be more helpful to my current situation because I’m working in the realm of comedy). From the very beginning, with Iggy Pop’s upbeat “Lust for Life,” the audience is introduced to the happy-go-lucky lives of heroin addicts. The enthusiastic drum beats and the reckless, raspy voice of Iggy Pop already complicates the idea that “all drugs are bad, bad, bad.” The seemingly happy, carefree music is in harmony with the thesis of the “Choose life” soliloquy: “I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. The reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reason when you’ve got heroin?”

 Shortly after, when Renton tries to quit heroin using the “Lazy Boy Method,” the music hints to Renton’s eventual failure. Although “Habanera” from Carmen is, for some reason, an omnipresent piece in film, it serves a specific purpose in this film. It pokes fun at Renton’s attempt to overcome addiction, even though he appears hard-set on becoming free.

 My favorite song selection of this movie may be Underworld’s “Dark and Long (Dark Train),” which is played during Renton’s withdrawal hallucinations. The techno trance, sustained by syncopated percussions and a forward-driving, hypnotic motif, is extremely unsettling for a song that is not horror. It is as though the song is teasing Renton. The emotionless song contradicts the horrors that Renton experiences, most notably being a dead baby climbing his ceiling. The song is disorienting in its inhumanity and (if I may indulge in some bad poetry) elucidates the idea that drugs do not care about the people who abuse them. What makes the song even more thematically important is that it continues beyond the hallucination scene. It serves as the undercurrent when he goes to the hospital, plays bingo with elderly people, and visits a friend. The effects of heroin linger, even after the worst parts.

 Underworld’s “Born Slippy” may be the most popular song on the track list, and for good reason. Played during the last scenes of the movie, it is the only song in the soundtrack that communicates any semblance of sadness. The melody that undergirds the singer’s (seemingly) nonsensical lyrics carries a sense of longing and finality that later bleeds into a catchy drum beat when Renton steals the drug deal money from Begbie. It isn’t until the very end that the music resolves to its more emotional melody. Perhaps it is the sparseness of emotion in this song, as well as the sparseness of the emotion in the overall soundtrack that displaces the audience’s own emotional expectation. It seems as though the music doesn’t allow the audience to feel sad, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, it forces the audience to make sense of any perceived sadness while also making sense of the world of drug addicts.

 So.

 How can I apply these lessons learned from this highly nuanced movie soundtrack to my own film? I’m not sure. But a lot of Trainspotting has to do with subverting the audience’s expectation (in both sounds and images), so I may borrow that attribute to forge some sort of new creative avenue. This might mean perusing through more edgy, experimental music.

Inside Llewyn Davis: Shattering Illusions, Dodging Expectations (Ingrid)

(2.5.12. Licensed under Creative Commons at Flickr.)   

    Two Thursdays ago, I was lucky enough to attend a pre-release screening at the Charles Theater of Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ latest project. It isn’t scheduled to hit theaters until December 5^th, but when it does, I say it's definitely worth viewing.

    In all honesty though, it’s an achingly unsatisfying film to sit through. At every turn, I found myself trying so hard to empathize with a character that I just simply could not stand. We catch protagonist, folk musician Llewyn Davis (played by Oscar Isaac), at a fragile stage in his life. Still dealing with the suicide of his partner and the consequent slump in his solo music career, Llewyn couch surfs his way around Greenwich Village, disrupting the lives of superficial old friends and reluctant past lovers, as he fumbles to make ends meet. Cynical and jaded, peevish and tired, Llewyn is a character on the cusp of giving up altogether. The signs of it are everywhere: in his lackluster eyes, his slumped shoulders, his deep sighs.

    As unfortunate his situation is though, I found Llewyn extremely unlikable and self-pitying to an unreasonable degree, wallowing in his misfortune and using it as justification for his lack of motivation. Rather than taking charge, Llewyn resigns to external forces. Sheer coincidence dictates the course of his life: when his friend’s cat slips through a crack in the front door, when he lands a much-needed gig with the help of his best friend, Jim, when the doctor accidentally lets it slip that Llewyn has a son in Akron (the result of a cancelled abortion). It seems a window of hope has opened up for Llewyn when he scores a chance to play for Bud Grossman, music big shot and owner of the famous concert venue, Gate of Horn. But even the way by which Llewyn travels to Gate of Horn is entirely subject to fate; he hitchhikes from New York City to Chicago.

    The film follows his venture to Chicago. It is the middle of winter but Llewyn is too strapped for money to buy a coat. Guitar in tow and thumb in air, he finally hails down a car. But the free ride comes with terribly unpleasant company, a drug-addled jazz enthusiast who spends every waking moment insulting Llewyn and his folk music. After an unbearably long and uncomfortable trek, Llewyn reaches the imposing double doors of Gate of Horn. The trip is set up as a perfect plot arc and this moment, the opportunity for him to turn his career around, is the climax. Conventionally, we expect this kind of success or failure situation to transpire emotionally. But when Llewyn plays for Grossman, it ends in the sinking words, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” Llewyn nods, he understands, says okay, end of scene. There is no uproar, no groveling, no last-ditch cry for reconsideration. Llewyn leaves the venue as quietly as he enters it. It leaves us confounded.

    As viewers, we yearn for progression, for resolution, for things we can predict. It’s only human nature. But the film consistently deflects our notion of a happy ending. After hitting a cat with a car, we expect Llewyn to stop and save it. Instead, he watches the injured cat limp into the shadow and then apathetically drives away. After seeing a road sign pointing to Akron, we expect Llewyn to make the turn, search for and eventually reunite with his son. Instead, he bypasses the city without a second thought. Furthermore, the structure of the film is inherently static. It ends in the same scene it begins with: Llewyn alone in an alleyway, having just been beaten up. This is what I mean when I say the film is unsatisfying. Llewyn spends the entire film drifting, making no headway; he shirks all forms of responsibility, leaving doors unopened, loose ends untied. In a way, the film is almost anti-escapist. It’s unmercifully honest. It’s slice of life.

    And the subtle cinematography honors this reality, capturing all the small details: dust particles in the air illuminated by the harsh morning sunlight, chalky embers drooping from a lit cigarette tip. The camera lingers on close-ups for just the right amount of time, catching the most minute of expressions: an extra blink, a fleeting eye-roll, a brief pursing of the lips, a shiver. Inside Llewyn Davis is as raw and authentic as it gets. 

Motion as a Foundation: Len Lye's Free Radicals (Steven)

Len Lye, an artist from New Zealand, endeavored to treat motion as a foundational element of art, much like color or sound. With this idea in focus, he created works in a number of mediums, including kinetic sculpture, poetry, painting, and film. In many of his films, he employed direct animation: manually scratching or painting the film. While he wasn't the first to use this technique, he was largely responsible for its rise out of complete obscurity following his release of A Colour Box in 1935.

In the four-minute short Free Radicals, which Lye first released in 1958 and then finished in 1979, white etchings in black film leader throb to a drum and vocal solo performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Chad. Free radicals are unstable and reactive chemical species. Of course, the title can also be read as radicals who are free, and Lye's attempt to realize a new movement-based medium is certainly non-traditional. Lye's frames are bonded to the tradition and regularity of the music, but, at the same time, such a rhythmically-focused art form may also have been different and new to many in his audiences. As the title might suggest, the forms Lye creates are incessantly unstable. They writhe and contort until blinking into blackness, lasting between several seconds and a single frame. 

Lye complements the tones and timbres of the music with his animation. The vocals are accompanied by long, swaying lines which reach from the bottom to top of the screen, reflecting the rich, full tones of the vocalist. The more staccato drumbeats receive smaller jagged lines. Lye uses many different instruments to scratch the film, and the resultant textures also tie in to the associated music, with vocal lines being smoother than drum lines.

The most striking element of the film is the hypnotically convincing animation of the forms. Curved lines are projected into space through the emulation of rotation: narrowing sections become more and more foreshortened until they disappear and appear again, reversed, on the other side of the form. Even without the rigid constraints of perspective drawing, simple lines are given shape and mass. The lines bulge and twist around one another, responding and reacting to the beat of the music. Shortly after the halfway point in the film, the only line currently on screen grows and explodes into dozens of tiny strokes, which give way to yet more lines, these sinuous and fat.

In the last minute of the film, events begin to pass more hurriedly. Lines rush towards each other from either side of the screen and meld into one, asterisk-like constructs warp from location to location and then disintegrate into toothy lines, and brushy textures coalesce into dots. There's a sensation of ritualistic intensity and the indeterminate scope of the forms becomes evident: are these forms subatomic particles, bolts of lightning, or galaxies? Foremost, they are motion and light, and anything else is more suggestion than symbolism.

For the most part, Lye's other films employ a greater variety of colors and shades. There is a particular rawness and power to his approach in Free Radicals, though. The dichromatic, spare style strips away everything but the sensation of movement and sound, yet the film is far from the austere perfectionism of many minimalists. It's a primeval, kinesthetic minimalism, closer to cave paintings than to Piet Mondrian. The gritty, imperfect scratches reinforce the idea that this film represents the first few stumblings into a new artform, or rather, one which had always been hiding in film, waiting for Len Lye to recognize, extract, and purify it.

Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (Anthony)

            This post marks my last installment of my Herrmann-on-film series (also including The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)). For the occasion I decided to finish with one of Bernard Herrmann’s most famous films, North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There are many other Hitchcock films that Herrmann wrote the scores for that I could have chosen to write about, but I actually had the chance to watch North by Northwest on 35mm, so I thought it would be a good choice. And let’s be honest here Psycho is great, but it is almost too cliché to choose for this series.

            Anyway, I’ve talked a lot about how important the musical themes that appear in film are, how useful character themes are for maintaining consistency in movie plots, announcing the presence of characters, and also how integral music is to the expression of emotion in film, so I thought I would look more into those pieces in this film, and to wrap up the series talk a little bit more about Bernard Herrmann.

            North by Northwest was Alfred Hitchcock’s fifth film with Herrmann. Preceding this film, in order, were The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), and Vertigo (1958). Hitchcock knew Herrmann very well by the time that North by Northwest came around, and Hitchcock both knew what he wanted from Herrmann and what to expect. Hitchcock also understood the psychological potential of music and its ability to enhance the feelings of characters, enhance the moods of scenes, and heighten audience anticipation, so it was quite useful to have worked with Herrmann.

            That said, Herrmann was a very tough person to work with. Herrmann liked to show off his knowledge of music history, and as such created many scores that demonstrated his awareness of that topic. However, he always seemed to go out of his way to create music that didn’t fit under the umbrella of ‘popular music’. For instance, he always flaunted his knowledge of Wagner by saturating his scores with Wagnerian waltzes, despite the lack of popular interest in Wagner and despite the films not being set in 19^th century Vienna (a time period which Wagner is more suited for). He was also known to playfully and deliberately distort other aspects of his pieces, merely to defy audience expectations, and sometimes in ‘unnecessary ways’ according to critics. To top it all off, Herrmann was a believer in the philosophy of finding the bad things in everyone and everything to make one’s self feel better in comparison. Eventually, this attitude led to Herrmann telling a journalist, “[Hitchcock] only finishes a picture 60 percent. I have to finish it for him”, and thus led to the end of Herrmann’s relationship with Hitchcock. But no one can deny that while that relationship lasted, Herrmann and Hitchcock were able to accomplish some wonderful work.

            Take a look (or listen) to the opening theme of North by Northwest. Over the green, patterned background that we eventually find out is the outline of an office building, we hear a powerful, bombastic Spanish orchestral Fandango. Odd for a movie based in New York and the mid-west to open with a traditional Spanish dance song. But in actuality it makes some sense. A fandango is a dance, like the flamenco, that originates from the courtship of a male and a female who circle around and compete with each other to seduce the other. The story of North by Northwest is at it’s core about a man who after being mistaken for an international agent is chased around the country as he tries to find out who he is being mistaken for and why, but orbiting the center of this whirlwind plot is a love story about a man and woman figuratively, and at some points in the film literally, circling each other and outwitting each other’s enemies. Coincidence? I think not. I think there’s a very good chance that Herrmann and Hitchcock were very aware of this fact.

            Another detail to note about the title theme is the intensity and instability of it. The fandango, like other similar Spanish dance pieces is in 6/8 time (6 eight-note beats per measure). A common ‘stable’ time signature is 4/4 (4 quarter-notes per measure). Why is it stable? It’s a very common time signature, people are very familiar to people, and it is also very easy to count: 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4; such that the usual stressed beats are 1 and 3. In contrast, 6/8 time signatures can be counted with stresses on 1 and 4: 1, 2, 3. 4, 5, 6.         OR with stresses on 1, 3, and 4: 1, 2. 3, 4. 5, 6. Each of these ways of counting are fairly equally common. However, Herrmann, in order enhance the moods of the film, which is wrought with suspense and instability and unsureness, takes the viewer’s expectation for the counting of the 6/8 measure to stay constant and turns it upside-down by switching back and forth between stressing 1, 3, and 5 and stressing 1 and 4. To add to this instability, Herrmann orchestrates the melody such that it appears in the parts of different instruments with differing note ranges. When the instruments are combined and their parts are played together the effect of the disjunct melody constantly shifting around to different instruments is an enhancement of the instability of the piece.

            On the subject of the love story between Cary Grant’s character Roger Thornhill and Anne Marie Saint’s Eve Kendell, Bernard Herrmann works another very subtle detail into the score of the film. Specifically into the theme of the two lovers that appears in the dining car of the train to Chicago, as Roger leans forward to light Eve’s cigarette. At this moment an oboe starts to play a soft, flirtatious melody over a small group of strings. This simple melody in the high oboe part confers the delicate emotional impact of the dining car scene.  And as the love between Roger and Eve intensifies in Eve’s bedroom on the train, the music supports this evolvement by evolving the melody from just an oboe solo over a small string quartet to an entire violin section over an entire orchestra. The fullness of the orchestra versus the sparseness of the oboe all of the sudden makes the playfulness between Roger and Eve seem much more serious and full than before and does a great job of drawing attention to the relationship between the two characters.

    Additionally, for the most part Herrmann likes to leave a lot of silence in his scores. Music is like the cream and cherry on top of an ice cream sundae and water for a plant. It should be used to make something look pretty but should also be used sparingly, for too much of anything is a bad thing. As such, there are very few scenes in which Herrmann arranges music over spoken dialogue in his films, so the fact that Herrmann chose to insert music in this lover scene is quite significant.

    Inserting total silence when the audience expects music accomplishes an interesting dynamic as well. The famous “crop-duster” scene in the second half of the film utilizes this technique. Roger Thornhill steps off the greyhound bus into a silent, flat, and empty landscape and waits on the side of a dusty road to meet up with the man he thinks is George Kaplan. Little does he know he has been duped into a deathtrap by Vandamm’s men.

    As the airplane descends, one would normally expect an orchestra to strike up in song and play along behind the noises of the battle scene between Roger and the airplane, but nothing happens. Not a single note is heard. The audience is left emotionally suspended, waiting for a musical resolve that will confirm their thoughts and feelings and expectations. That is powerful stuff, and Bernard Herrmann was very good at what he did.

    Unfortunately, Herrmann did not have much more time after this film was made to work with Hitchcock. They worked together on three more films and then Herrmann got himself fired. I wonder what more they could have done with each other.

References:

[1] Bray, Christopher. "The Sound of Music." New Statesman, 135.4800 (2006): 42-43.

[2] Lintgen, Arthur. "North by Northwest." Fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors, 31.6 (2008): 161-162.

[3] Green, Edward. "Bernard Herrmann--'pop' Composer?." Popular Music History, 5.1 (2010): 7-20.

[4] Matthew-Walker, Robert. "'North by Northwest.'." Musical Opinion, 133.1476 (2010): 55.

[5] Daniel-Richard, Debra. "The Dance of Suspense: Sound and Silence in North by Northwest." Journal of Film & Video, 62.3 (2010): 53-60.

Character themes in "The Devil & Daniel Webster" (Anthony)

Produced and Directed by William Dieterle

Adapted from the short story by Stephen Vincent Benet

Music by Bernard Herrmann

A small town New Hampshire farmer, Jabez Stone (played by James Craig), suffering from misfortune and poverty has a run-in with the Devil and finds what he thinks is the answer to his personal pain. The Devil gives him good luck and money and Jabez enjoys every minute and dime of his gifts until his last day, 7 years later, when his world begins to crumble beneath him. In his plight, Jabez enlists the aid of the only man who can help him, Daniel Webster.

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Being a "sell your soul to the devil" movie from 1941 it is very easy to pull out the Christian religious undertones in this film: religion is the saving grace, religion protects the soul from the devil, and once one lets go of it, like Jabez Stone does in the beginning of the film, one is susceptible to getting into trouble with forces of evil.

Jabez's character has terrible luck to begin with. On the day that his family is finally hoping to go to church after a long break from going, it's raining, he is the only one around to help his mother and his wife get into the carriage through the mud, his dog is constantly barking, the pig gets loose from the pen, Jabez has to chase down the pig in the rain while wearing his Sunday clothes, he gets his clothes wet, then he has to fix up the pig's broken leg… all of this was too much for him, so he and the family decided not to go to church, but it was when this happened that things got worse for him, and although the film does not go so far as to pull out crucifixes and preachers and talk heavily about god, religion is most definitely present.

For instance, the first time that Jabez and Mary are seen together in their bedroom is after Jabez has sold his soul. Both Jabez and Mary are lying down in separate twin beds and a sign with a phrase and the word "god" clearly written on it hangs on the wall in between their beds. The baby Daniel is later seen sleeping with his mother on her side of the room, separated from Jabez. This appearance of the word "god" is a very blatant demonstration of religion as a contributor to the divide between Jabez and Mary.

We also get to see Jabez encounter religion later on in the film when he is at his height of economic success. Jabez has altogether stopped going to church, but his wife still goes with his mother. In the scene, the church bell rings, and Jabez's mother and wife begin to leave. Jabez isn't phased by it. For Mary, the church bell reminds her of a responsibility. Her responsibility to take care of her soul and protect her soul and her family's souls in the form of prayer. For Jabez, however, the church bells only mean that it is time to invite his friends over to play cards and gamble. In this way, the church futher defines the line between Jabez and Mary.

The religious divide, however, and the influence of religion on films of the time period in which "The Devil & Daniel Webster" was released does not stand alone to me as the only important aspect of this film. I more chose this film for its unique use musical character themes.

Long before 'talkies' and sound film, musical character themes were used to identify the presence of certain characters. Operas, ballets, musicals, radio shows, everything used them. And performing arts forms still DO use them. I talked last month about the different themes for each of the characters in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" as well as their musical qualities and purposes in the film. Character themes are crucial to films. You cannot just play any random sound track over a movie and expect the same emotional results. There's a structure to it. But Bernard Herrmann does something interesting with that structure in "The Devil & Daniel Webster". He does not give the central character a theme.

If you've seen the film and have an superhuman memory for music you may already know what I mean. For those of you who haven't, though, try watching it again and listen for music that is played behind each character. All you have to do is write down a word that describes the feeling you associate with the tone of the music that's playing. If you know your music theory and can tell the quality of the chord (major, minor, etc.) that's fine too, but the main goal is to identify that "feeling" you get. Some characters do not have definitive themes because they are simply not important enough to have them, but whenever you see Mary, Belle, the Devil, Daniel Webster, and Jabez, keep your ears tuned in and you may notice some interesting trends.

Whenever the devil appears on screen you can see as well as hear his presence. His theme, a powerful and frightening minor tune that often enters very suddenly and in a jarring way, takes the viewer by surprise. The theme is meant to catch you off guard in order to enhance the fear of the devil and his evilness. This theme also, though it doesn't always enter the same way throughout the film, doesn't vary. Just like the devil is always evil in the film and doesn't encounter any sort of change in heart, his theme is also unchanging.

Belle's theme is different. As a character she enters at a time during which Jabez is emotionally unstable. Jabez has just had a wildly successful harvest, his crops were the only crops to survive the hailstorm, he has made a lot of money because of it, he has a kid on the way, and he is having a party to celebrate. Then suddenly Belle, the most gorgeous woman Jabez has even seen, enters the picture. Jabez is instantly infatuated. However Belle is not all as great as she seems. We later find out that she is fairly evil on the inside, underneath the staggering beauty.

It is this sweet and sour quality that Bernard Herrmann uses to form his theme for Belle. The theme starts off happy, joyous, powerful, and wonderful. Jabez is standing in the middle of the dance floor watching this beautiful woman dance with every other man in the room. He can't take his eyes off of her. The music speeds up, and speeds up some more. All Jabez wants is to hold her and to dance with her in his arms….

And then the tone of the music starts to change. The melody becomes jagged, the happy (major) chords become minor chords, and then the camera flashes to the devil playing the violin and laughing… it was all the devil's plan and Jabez didn't even know it. This sweet and sour style appears again when Jabez and Belle are out riding the carriage in the snow. The music starts off fast and happy, and then takes a turn and takes on a more serious, somewhat threatening tone.

While Belle becomes a more central character in the film, Mary Stone continues to develop her own theme: a simple, slow, labored and sad tune that reflects her sorrow and worry for her husband, whom she can't understand and relate to anymore. At the end of the film after Jabez has come to his senses and Mary has no more need to worry, that theme fades. But for awhile, as she was filling the role of the "concerned wife," that tune recurred.

Daniel Webster also has a theme. Being the man of justice in the film and the celebrated American hero to the people of the town, Bernard Herrmann shaped Daniel Webster's theme so that it evokes feelings of American pride and justice. His song, though, is not a bombastic type of American pride song. It is more delicate and modest like the way Webster describes riding his cart to Daniel Stone. Slow and steady.

Among this musical complexity, one might expect no less for Jabez, but Bernard Herrmann does something entirely different. He gives Jabez no real theme at all.

At first you may think, "of course he has a theme! What's all the music that plays when he's riding on horses, returning home with Belle, running around the house trying to find his son Daniel, trying to chop down the tree, and racing after the carriage to find Mary?" However, what you would be forgetting is that none of those are actually themes. Those are emotions. When Jabez sees his friend Stevenson lying on the floor in the ballroom of Jabez's new house, the music that plays is not a theme. It's fear. And when Jabez is running around the house to find Daniel and trying to chop down the tree, he is worried and scared and angry at himself. Those songs are meant to create and enhance emotions. Themes are more based on character traits and thus are often more consistent in their nature, like the devil's theme which, as mentioned before, is unchanging and not based off of the emotions that are evoked by the character they are centralized around. Jabez does not have that. There is no consistency in the music that plays in his scenes.

This inconsistency tells us something about his character. Jabez is the central focus of the story, but the music makes it seem as though he is central is such a way that he is defined by everything else around him. In this way, Jabez is very much a dependent character. Dependent on his surroundings. He is independent in some ways, of course. Once he has money he can run his farm and tell people what to do when they work for him, but he is so dependent on everything that forms the foundation of that independent functionality (namely the Devil's money) that when you boil it all down he is almost nothing but what other people make him to be. Can this conclusion be made without the musical component? Maybe it can. But in either case the parallel between the non-musical and musical components is not a mistake.

Bernard Herrmann's Sonic Influence on Robert Wise's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) (Anthony)

(Russian inventor Leon Theremin, with his invention, the "theremin")

This semester I will be focusing on 3 movies with music by Bernard Herrmann. The first one I will be focusing on is The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 1951 science fiction classic, directed by Robert Wise, based in 1950s contemporary America about an alien named Klaatu that landed in Washington D.C., in a flying saucer, on a mission to warn the humans on earth about their newly found destructive capabilities (atomic energy), and to offer them a choice to either (1) use their technology wisely or (2) to give up their planet and the existence of everything on it.

In his score for Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, we get to see a very tasteful, aural display of Herrmann’s talent. A believer in the fact that movie scores aught not be a constant wall of sound in the movie-goer’s ears, Herrmann shows in Wise’s film how important silence and sparseness of music are and how music in film can very much be a creative element, as opposed to just background, ambient noise like the chatter and the clinking of glasses at a party or the creaking of chairs in a conference room.

A wall of sound eventually becomes ignored by the brain, and once it is ignored, it serves no great purpose. So, understanding this, Herrmann liked to step back and take the minimalist approach when composing his scores. Anne Cranny-Francis in her article “Mapping Cultural Auracy: The Sonic Politics of The Day the Earth Stood Still”, quotes composer and Theorist John Morgan on the subject, who writes, “… too often music is considered wallpaper rather than a creative element in movies” (Luchs 1988, online)

In addition to being called a minimalist composer, Bernard Herrmann has also been deemed a “master at the creation of suspense” (Cranny-Francis, 2007) Psycho is the obvious display of this skill, but Herrmann did not stop short of making people jump, lean forward, and shift in their seats in The Day the Earth Stood Still. As matter of fact, he was already beginning to toy with people the second the film in the projector room started rolling.

Not many people notice it enough to say anything, but the theme to the 20^th Century Fox studios animation before the opening credits on the first reel is raised a half-step to B major from its usual Bb key. I had to play it against the rerecorded 1935 and more recent versions (which are used all over the place now, including at the end of every single Simpsons episode) to confirm it, but it’s true, and for people that hear that song enough (as many of the moviegoers in 1951 likely were, given the influence of 20^th Century Fox), changing the tune even half a step has the potential to confuse one’s ear. And I’m not talking about musicians. These kinds of changes go for everyone. It all depends on your memory and familiarity. If you’ve heard any song many times you’ll recognize it on the street, on stage, or in a film. And if it is changed, no matter if you’re a musician or not, you’ll more often than not notice that something’s “a little bit off.”

Another, more impressive addition to the score of the film was the use of a special analog instrument called the Theremin, the 1919 forerunner to the Moog synthesizer. The theremin is the machine that makes the alien-like, high-pitched vibrato sound in the beginning of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Also commonly used in other extraterrestrial movies of the cold war era because of it’s eerie, unnatural sound, the theremin was very useful for composers who were looking for giving their listeners a new, unique musical experience. In this film, the theremin was used primarily to convey the common extraterrestrial and advanced-technology feeling of science fiction movies of the time. The theremin was also used as an intro to the title theme of the film.

On the subject of themes, Herrmann’s score of the film contains many. Themes, in simple terms, are the songs composed to set the tone for films, heighten emotional events in films, and even announce the presence of a certain character. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, there is a title theme that plays during the title scene and opening credits, there are various themes that enhance the stress of the film, like that during the scene after Klaatu escapes from the hospital, and there are also separate themes for the characters Klaatu and Gort.

Gort, the robot that came with Klaatu to earth is one of the protectors of the peace of the universe that were built by Klaatu’s people. He is an indestructible machine that can demolish anything in its path, and is the iron hammer of reason in the universe of the film. As such, Gort’s theme consists of a booming bass. The lower tones implicitly suggest threat and danger and are also thus connected with dominance. This works in parallel with operas that typically designate the high, tenor as the hero, and the bass to the villain.

Klaatu’s theme, which comes before Gort’s first one is very different, relying more on softer, middle voiced horns and the ethereal higher-pitched sounds of the theremin than the dominant bass tones. The combined effect of the higher pitch and the softer volume make Klaatu’s character seem more delicate and much less threatening.

The tonal focus of Herrmann’s composition often depends on which of these characters is present in a scene or where the focus is directed. For the scenes in which Gort destroys the tank in the beginning of the movie and Gort knocks out the soldiers guarding the flying saucer, Gort’s theme of destruction and impending doom is present. On the other hand, when Klaatu sneaks out of the house at night and when he is in the flying saucer before the power outage, the musical theme is dominantly higher-pitched and closer to Klaatu’s first theme in the beginning of the film.

The tonal focus also depends on the emotions of the moment. For example, after the intro credits when the camera opens onto an open ocean Herrmann uses a fast-paced piano arpeggio with some theremin to enhance the anxiety that first scene during which the military officials cannot figure out what to do about the unidentified flying object. 18 minutes and an hour later when Klaatu escapes from the hospital, and after Klaatu is broken out of jail by Gort, Herrmann uses the music again to outline the paranoia of those scenes. What makes the paranoid sections more powerful though are Herrmann’s uses of silence. A majority of the film has no actual background music at all.

Two important silent parts worth paying attention to are when Klaatu (Mr. Carpenter) brings Bobby to the spaceship, and after Klaatu makes his ultimatum offer at the end of the film. The fact that there is no music during the first of these two scenes is evidence that the spaceship itself is not what is important. It is Klaatu’s knowledge that is important. And in the final scene, the silent pan around the different races of the crowd allows the viewer to fully appreciate the weight of Klaatu’s knowledge and his final question.

- Anthony D. Collins

And My Nominees for Best Sound Editing Are… (Natasha)

    Jorma Taccone's MacGruber:  This movie is grossly underappreciated in so many categories of filmmaking, but maybe most of all for its soundtrack.  As MacGruber (a mulleted Will Forte) loads his beloved portable car radio into his red Miata, he changes the station from Rock 98.1 to Soft 87.3.  A most halting transition ensues, switching from "Heavy Soul" by The Black Keys (Hollywood's current go-to for too-damn-cool songs) to the desperate vocal straining of Toto's atrocious "Rosanna," then to the exclamatory saxophone riff in Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street."  This trifecta runs the risk of making the audience laugh too loudly to hear anything for the next thirty seconds of the film.  Sound Editor: Sean Garnhart.

    Greg Mottola's Superbad:  If you ever DJ'd a party with your iPod in high school, this film will put your fancy feet playlist to irreparable shame.  Never has a party seemed more appealing than when my personal favorite, "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC & The Sunshine Band, comes on and every kid on the living room (dance)floor begins to get real funky.  Only slightly less appealing is the one-man party that usurps it, thrown by Officer Slater (Bill Hader) after he and his partner evacuate the living room in response to a noise complaint.  "Don't trust the police/ No justice no peace/ They got me/ Face down in the middle of the street," The Coup raps as Slater pops and locks to the anti-cop anthem "Pork and Beef."  Sound Editor: George Anderson.

    Sam Mendes's American Beauty:  Composer Thomas Newman is a true genius.  The man can do no wrong in my book.  (His association with Jarhead gives it so much credibility that I often forget the trailer was better than the film.)  His soundtrack for American Beauty rivals the eerie softness of David Shire's for The Conversation and the pretty self-referentiality of Cliff Martinez's for Drive, but Newman's surpasses both of these because ultimately, it is as heartbreaking as the film itself.  For other sonic standouts from Thomas Newman, see: Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, Erin Brockovich, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  (It seems a risky move, setting more scenes of a prison to yet more Thomas Newman compositions only five years after Shawshank's release--but director Frank Darabont's formula certainly works).  Sound Editor: Scott Martin Gershin.

    David LaChapelle's Rize:  West coast "indie rap" phenom Flii Stylz recorded some of the most rousing and threatening hip hop ever rapped for this thrilling documentary.  Track titles like "Break It On Down (Battlezone)," "Beaztly" and "Ready to Brawl" accompany the film's furious and beautiful non-choreographed dances--how could you not want this soundtrack?  Every time I listen to "Get Krumped," which is often, I replay the entire dance "battle" between Tight Eyez, Lil C and Dragon in my head and wish that a) teaching myself to krump had worked, and b) I could marry Tight Eyez.  What a talent. Sound Editor: Christopher S. Aud.

    Community, "Epidemiology" (Season 2, Episode 6): This episode continues a groundbreaking trend pioneered by Shaun of the Dead:  Zombie fights accompanied by bad 70's pop that is all the more hilarious because it is diagetic.  What I wouldn't give to act out my own heroic scene of pugilism with classmates who've contracted an aggressive strain of Rabies from the toxic Army surplus taco meat served at the college Halloween party (provided I get to listen to "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" while I fight).  Sound Editor: Ryan Young.

    Very Honorable Mention for The O.C., "The Perfect Couple" (Season 1, Episode 10):  If I had had a makeout soundtrack as sultry yet lighthearted as this in high school... forget it, I still wouldn't have found a boyfriend.  This, my favorite episode of one of my favorite shows, is bookended by scenes of pretty adorable romance, the first featuring Aqualung's "Strange & Beautiful" and the last, "Breathe" by Leaves. My affair with this episode started at 9 PM on Wednesday, November 12th 2003 and has been going strong ever since.  Sound Editor: Jeremy J. Gordon.

 

 

~ Natasha Hirschfeld

Many thanks to Creative Commons for the above image.

The Role of Character Perspective and Conceptual Continuity In Rob Marshall's Chicago and Nine (Yasmine)

 I always wondered why some people find it so hard to enjoy musicals either on the stage or on the screen. Such people would have the film director extract the meaning and plot from a musical in order to turn it into a film devoid of dance and song. I have encountered several individuals whose aversion to musical interludes derives from an inability to reconcile singing and dancing with their fixed views of cinematic reality. I’m more interested in how directors choose to intertwine the show tunes with the narratives. I say that getting hung up on whether the characters in musicals realize they're divulging plot in song is as ridiculous as asking if characters in a film notice that there's a guy following them around with a movie camera. There are film directors who endeavor to accommodate those that would ask such nonsensical questions, using creative concepts to justify sudden outbursts of song. In both of his musical films: Chicago, a film about a wannabe vaudeville star, and Nine a movie about a filmmaker in desperate need of inspiration, Rob Marshall  portrays the musical interludes as figments of the protagonists’ imaginations in order to make sense of the narrative . Despite having similar concepts, song and story are entwined more successfully in Chicago than in Nine. Whereas musical numbers are seamlessly incorporated into the storyline of Chicago, the musical performances in Nine seem somewhat detached from the narrative.

The opening shot of Chicago, a slow zoom into an extreme close up of Roxie Hart’s eyes makes it clear that the her whimsical perspective drives the plot. With the first scene taking place in a jazz club, Roxie wistfully watches Velma Kelly’s sultry stage performance in her medium close up. As the camera cuts back and forth between Roxie’s longing looks and Velma Kelly’s vaudeville act, the camera’s close proximity to Roxie’s face and her transfixed gaze signify Roxie’s single-minded obsession with the glamor of vaudevillian fame. A hard cut from Velma’s captivating performance to the familiar extreme close up of Roxie’s unblinking eyes proceeds the shot in which Roxie begins to sing “All That Jazz,” literally taking Velma Kelly’s place on stage. This brief demonstration of Roxie’s fantasy reveals Roxie’s desire to be on the stage and sets a precedent for scenes that interweave song and plot throughout the film.  

As Guido contemplates how to begin his film, the film studio transforms into a projection of his creative mind. An extreme long shot displays Guido and his cameras facing the silhouette of a set elaborately decorated with stone arches. Symbolizing a moment of inspiration, one of Guido’s favorite actresses (Claudia) appears to him and gives him a kiss, after which the set is no longer dark but gradually filling with color. A warm yellow glow highlights and gives definition to the arches before women adorned in sparkling, seductive costume appear like set pieces in the stage of Guido’s imagination. The majestic traveling shots of the set lit spectacularly with a mesmerizing blue light and the presence of these women juxtaposed with a close up of Guido and his camera signify the evolution of Guido’s creativity. While the image of the camera clearly draws the connection between Guido’s musical fantasies and his filmmaking aspirations, transitions between song and action in later scenes are not as invisible as those in Chicago.

            The musical performances in Chicago do not intruded on the dialogue but tend to blend the concept of the stage with the reality of the narrative.  The scene that best demonstrates the perfect coexistence of musical performance and plot is the one in which Velma desperately pleads with Roxie to perform on stage with her if they both become acquitted. When Velma Kelly begins her appeal to an indifferent Roxie, a light shines in through the window, resembling a spot light as it follows Velma. The appearance of the “spotlight” in such a non-theatrical space (the prison recreation room) indicates that Roxie believes her current surroundings are a stage and that Velma’s attempts to befriend her are one big act. After Velma notices Roxie’s obvious disinterest, all signs of the recreational room fade into darkness; the spotlight hones in on Velma’s face while her dialogue gradually develops into song. The disembodied voice of the figurative Master of Ceremonies gives a title to Velma’s “Act of Desperation” before her prison garb is exchanged for a more vaudevillian costume and the recreation room is filled with theatrical neon lights. Still sitting neutrally at a table in the center of the room, Roxie becomes audience to Velma’s theatrics. Though Velma and the gloomy rec room have transformed, recognizable elements of the prison remain (like the balcony leading to the inmates’ cells). These familiar elements and Roxie’s position at the table remind the viewer that she and Velma have not left the prison, and that the musical performance is Roxie’s own theatrical interpretation of reality.

            Unlike those in Chicago some of the musical performances in Nine appear disjointed from the narrative despite their obvious relation to the plot. Even though “Be Italian” is a powerful, high-energy song that gives insight into Guido’s personality and issues with women, its placement in the scene seems unnatural. Before the number begins Guido recalls when he and a small group of little boys pay the local prostitute, Saraghina to give them a private show on the beach near her hut. The music begins as Saraghina accepts the money, but she neither sings nor speaks at any point and time in Guido’s physical memory; the only time Saraghina speaks is on Guido’s mental “stage.” Whereas Velma Kelly’s words to Roxie led into a song, the lack of dialogue from Saraghina fails to bridge the gap beween the spectacular vocal performance and Guido’s childhood recollection. A shot of Saraghina verbalizing her advice in the memory before the start of the song could have solidified the connection between the two spaces. This would not be necessary if the scene were to merge the location of the main action with Guido’s fictional world instead of maintaining two distinctly separate spaces: the film set and the beach. The contrast between the theatrical space and the realistic memory becomes even more apparent with the noticeable desaturation of Guido’s memory; the vibrant red costumes and dazzling lights seem to clash with the grayscale flashback. The viewer ultimately feels as if the “Be Italian” musical number (like other songs in Nine) is merely inserted but not interwoven with the entire scene. Such scenes in Nine, which lack the seamless combination of action and song, detract from the beauty of the film while also creating an emotional distance between the audience and the characters successfully avoided in Chicago.

 

Music and Mise en Scene: Jewish/Arab Relations in The Band’s Visit (Glennis)

In The Band’s Visit, the dashingly handsome Haled has a rather unusual pick-up line. The young Arab man repeatedly approaches attractive, unassuming Israeli women and says: “Do you like Chet Baker?” Smiling and looking seductive, Haled usually responds to the women’s confused expressions by introducing himself. “I play violin in orchestra,” he says. “But I play trumpet also.”

            Haled’s shameless flirtations with Israeli women suggest that political and religious differences don’t prevent all Arabs and Jews from interacting with one another. In fact, The Band’s Visit reveals just how much Jews and Arabs – and all people, for that matter – have in common. Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film follows an Egyptian police band as it heads to Israel to play at the opening of an Arab cultural center. A mishap involving the spelling of their destination leads the Egyptian musicians to a tiny, remote town far from where they’ll be performing. The band’s interactions with the Israelis who take them in reveal how both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict experience love and loss (and music).

            While the film’s plot sounds simple enough, The Band’s Visit offers sharp and thoughtful dialogue, refreshing comedic touches and authentic performances that make the movie anything but hokey. And as if those weren’t enough reasons for me to like the film, the character Tawfiq (Sasson Gabei) has the most righteous, take-no-prisoners nose I have ever seen in my life. It frankly deserves a movie of its own.

            That said, the use of music and aspects of mise en scene are what make this movie an especially noteworthy study of Jewish/Arab relations. The melodramatic piano theme that plays as the Egyptian band arrives at the airport at the start of the film is a very smart, ironic touch. These men look so serious and put-together in their matching, powder blue, highly-decorated police uniforms. The sappy, simplistic piano melody in the background makes the band members seem over-dressed and out of place.

The next instance when sound becomes particularly important is when the musicians get off the bus at Beit Hatikva (not Petah Tikva). The wheels of their luggage roll loudly (and obnoxiously) against the sand and dirt as they approach the small town. The extreme long shot of the men walking on sand adds insult to injury – they’re in the middle of nowhere and the camera is rubbing it in. The way the men fill the frame in this scene is also significant. They walk in a straight line in the center of the frame, an ironic touch since the no-man’s-land of Beit Hatikva is a far cry from the rules and regulations that dominate their police force in Alexandria. 

            Music is used for the first time as a unifying device – and not for mocking purposes – when Egyptian musician Simon plays his clarinet outside of the Beit Hativka café. Simon’s haunting melody plays out over a shot/reverse/shot pattern of the Egyptian man producing music as a Jewish man, Itzik, watches in awe. The medium shot of the two men after the impromptu performance reveals that music is a shared passion for these lonely souls. Music becomes an especially strong unifying force during an awkward dinner table scene in which a few of the Egyptian musicians dine with Itzik’s family on his wife’s birthday. Silence and scattered conversations in Arabic and Hebrew fill the scene until one of the men starts humming and the other men slowly join in him song. Medium close-ups ensue as each man gains the courage to belt out the tune. The close proximity between the camera and the men’s faces reflects how the men are becoming closer with one another.

            Costuming plays an important role throughout The Band’s Visit. The way Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) is dressed reveals a lot about her level of interest in the Egyptian men. At the start of the film, Dina’s loose, blue sweater, cut-off jeans and tennis shoes suggest the spinster is more concerned with comfort than style. Dina wears this outfit as she cuts open a huge watermelon in front of Haled and Tawfiq. As the Israeli woman skillfully uses an enormous knife, a reaction shot of the two men prove they are impressed and possibly a bit scared. These aspects of mise en scene emphasize Dina’s courage and determination. However, the red evening dress Dina wears to show Tawfiq the town reveals her sexy side. The form-fitting dress clearly catches Tawfiq’s eye, stressing that Arabs and Jews can be attracted to each other despite the many issues that may separate them. That the uptight, conservative Tawfiq admits Dina looks “very fine indeed” is evidence that Arabs and Jews may not be so divided after all.

            A significant use of music happens while Dina and Tawfiq are eating out. After they discuss how other patrons have been staring at them, Dina decides to play an Arabic love song on the jukebox. Because Dina and Tawfiq have been speaking English to each other throughout the film, the woman’s choice of an Arabic song showcases her willingness to understand his culture. As the female singer clearly calls out to a lover, Dina dances in front of Tawfiq. Without his hat – which Dina forced him to leave behind – Tawfiq looks much more at ease and receptive to her advances.

            A final powerful musical moment occurs when Haled plays a trumpet solo for Tawfiq and Dina. The close-ups on their faces as Haled plays his sultry trumpet solo emphasize the feelings of sexual desire that consume Dina and Tawfiq. However, Haled’s position at the table – sitting directly between Dina and Tawfiq – suggests that Dina may not be spending the night with Tawfiq after all. Even without his stiff hat, Tawfiq is no match for Haled’s charm.

Appropriating the Artist: One + One/Sympathy for the Devil (Mike)

Looking as though it were finger-painted, the opening intertitle of Godard’s One + One/Sympathy for the Devil reads, “The Stones Rolling;” already Godard has begun to play with language.  The letters E-O-N-E-O-N, or O-N-E-O-N-E in the correct ordering of the band’s name, are highlighted in red.  One + One.  For Godard here One + One is never unified into the end result, the final product.  Instead, One + One is just that, one and one; two individual, separate pieces, together.  In many ways, this will come to define the film, as Godard presents us with two worlds, two separate realities.  The first is a world beyond Godard’s control, the world of the Rolling Stones, as he documents their process of writing and recording their song “Sympathy for the Devil.”   The second is a world the filmmaker does control, the world of film, a sphere of fragmented narratives whose figures act as his ideological mouthpieces.  He doesn’t present us with a single message, a unified ideological, social, or political critique.  Instead, these sections are meant to conflict and clash, to raise more questions than they answer, and, ultimately, to alter and shape how we view the Stones at work. 

In the opening shot, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sit on the studio floor, guitars in hand, the camera hovering around them slowly (as it does throughout the film).  The song has yet to take shape; it is the creative process in its beginning stage, in its rawest form. Following the rhythm of the guitar, Jagger sing-speaks variations of the same few words of jumbled, even baby-like, rambling.  There are no words, just gibberish.  Language is secondary here (at least at first); we are introduced, first, to sound; pure sound, before there is any meaning assigned to it.  Whereas Godard has too much to say throughout the film, overwhelming us with multiple and conflicting voices and sounds that overlap one another into an incomprehensible noise, Jagger here speaks only gibberish.

Godard cuts from the studio to a London hotel room, where Wiazemsky (who plays Eve Democracy later on in the film) spray paints the words “Hilton” and “Stalin” onto the hotel window, crossing the two at the “t.”  It is a mixing of terms and ideologies that we will see throughout the film.  “Sovietcong.”  “Cinemarxism.”  “Freudemocracy.”  All of them are One + One; conceptual and ideological combinations he never explores specifically, only mentioning them on the walls and streets in spray paint, inviting questions and provoking questions, but ultimately offering no answers.  Over the image, the narrator begins telling us that he’s a Bolivian hiding in a London toilet to escape from the police.  He reads from a pornographic novel (which he calls a “political novel”), replacing the names of the characters with political figures and cultural icons, mixing politics, pornography and pop culture into one philosophical mess.  We are never fully sure what their connection is.  “Raising the toilet lid I could see Elizabeth’s fat white behind on which Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie,” the narrator tells us.  Like Jagger’s singing in the beginning, it is gibberish to us.  The narration will continue throughout the film, running over the image of the Stones in the studio.  What is their role in this political, cultural, and pornographic mess?  Could we just as easily substitute Jagger’s name or Richard’s for Johnson’s and Warhol’s?

“Outside Black Novel” reads the second intertitle in red, the acronym “love” spelled out this time in black.  A Black militant sits in a wheel barrel in a junkyard, reading to us about the history of the blues, its roots, its development, and ultimately its appropriation by young Whites and popular culture for White consumption. “Any group of middle class White boys who need a haircut and male hormones can be a pop group.  That’s what pop means,” he tells us.  We cannot help but think of the Stones in the studio from the scene before, and this is Godard’s intention. Originally starting as a skiffle band (a popular but now-neglected subgenre of music popular in Britain in the 1950s, combining blues, roots, and country), drawing on the styles of Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, the Stones exemplify this appropriation of “Black music” by the White youth culture.

The camera is the unifying force in the film.  It is what connects these fragmented sections together: the Stones, the Black militant group, Eve Democracy, and even the seedy fascist bookstore later on.  It remains consistent in its style throughout, always slow and controlled in its movement, always moving laterally, always circulating back to where it started.  We watch as it hovers throughout the studio, never intruding on the band as they work, drifting around them as an observer (embodying the perspective of the filmmaker himself), capturing the artist and the creative process at work.  We watch as the song evolves from the simple strumming of Jones and primitive mumbling of Jagger into a complex and layered work.  The lyrics begin to take shape, and the guitars from the beginning disappear and are replaced by maracas, congas, and a chorus group.  We watch in real time as the band starts and stops repeatedly, tweaking different sections each time. The song is never the same twice; the instrumentation, rhythm, beat, speed, and Jagger’s lyrics and inflection change each time.  What is significant here, though, is that unlike the other figures and scenes in the film, the Stones, their process and their output, are outside Godard’s control.  The filmmaker here has no real power over them; they are not a mouthpiece for him to convey his ideological questions and theories, at least not directly.  Nor is this necessarily his intention.  Instead, he works to control everything around them, to place them within a context that he creates.

In filming the artist at work, the artist and his or her creative process come to serve different functions for this filmmaker.  For Clouzot and Parreno and Gordon, the artist is a mystery to be unraveled, a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, and yet in filming them we inevitably realize we can’t ever fully know what drives them creatively.  What, though, is Godard’s interest in capturing the Stones at work here?  What does he hope to learn from filming them?  The song itself would seemingly fit with Godard’s own political position; it is an anti-establishment statement that would come to define 60s youth, highlighting atrocities of the past and present (the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassinations, and the 100 years war) as a way to signify their own break with the generations before them.  And yet Godard here is not interested in (or at least he’s not focused on) that.  His interest instead lies in what the Stones represent and to what their creative process tends. This is a study in control: in its creation and its limits.  The limit of creative control, Godard seems to suggest, is at base in its commerciality.  Although “Sympathy for the Devil” became an anthem of the 1960s counterculture, it is also simultaneously a cultural product that is to be commodified and commercialized, bought and sold by record companies and corporations to the masses.  By placing them in the context of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy, juxtaposing scenes of the Stones in the studio with these other fragmented narratives, we are forced to understand The Stones in a different way.  We must re-examine and re-contextualize them within a larger social, economic, and cultural frame; and in doing so, Godard is questioning not the art itself, not its content, but instead what the art and the artist are used for, how they are to be packaged and consumed.  We come to view them less as artists and more as appropriators and as tools and products.  And by placing them within this context, Godard ultimately exerts his authority as the filmmaker over the band, seizing control from them and placing it back into his hands.

Havana, Lisbon and Wim Wenders (Shauna)

It is in an incredible risk to create a film about the struggle of making a film.  A movie partly devoted to the study of sound, not only the production of music by trained vocalists and musicians, but the accumulation of everyday noises by a man with a boom mic seems equally ambitious.  For anyone else, the results might be forced and superficial, but Wim Wenders' products are at once astounding and spontaneous.  Both in Lisbon Story and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders seamlessly integrates the passionate, fatal and trivial aspects of cinema and musical performance.  Whether staged or improvised his narratives never veer into the dreadful realm of predictability.  It is through his profound sensitivity to place, reflected in the local musical and chromatic vibrancy of Cuba in Buena Vista, and the hybrid medieval-industrialized Lisbon basking in Mediterranean light, that the questions of art, music and cinema are raised.  He grounds the two films so authentically in their locales that we eagerly embrace the topics of music and movie-making.

Wenders is not interested in strictly replicating the structure, lighting, energy and mood of the two respective cities, though he masterfully captures the form and atmosphere of each urban place.  He goes beyond simply conveying the essence of a city as an entity: he suggests the emotional sentiments a city might elicit and characterizes the bond between his characters and their environments.  The crosscut is used particularly effectively in Buena Vista to create a coherent portrait of an intimate cast of characters who retain their mannerisms, humor, technical skill, wit and dignity whether at home or on the stage, whether in Cuba, Amsterdam, or New York.  A specific building, street, figure or piece of debris might trigger the memory of another place or time, but Wenders plays visually with nostalgia in such a way that he avoids overt sentimentalism. 

 

Guitarist Ochoa Bustamante (left) and vocalist/guitarist Compay Segundo. Creative Commons, by Hiabba (2008). http://search.creativecommons.org/

Most of the emotional responses and dynamics between character and place are sufficiently subtle to require full attention and multiple viewings.  In Buena Vista, a group of elderly Cuban male musicians and one female vocalist come together to record and perform the nation's provincial and popular music.  They are musicians who have been forgotten or fazed out -- some had abandoned their instruments for a decade or more -- but performers endowed with a striking vitality, humanity and appreciation for their Caribbean culture.  Working with Ry Cooder, Wenders captures the centrality of music to their lives: in the studio, on the streets, in ornate pre-Revolution gambling houses and in abandoned bars.  Rhythm is inescapable, permeating all aspects of life.  Wenders recognizes that the discovery of a culture and locale so inherently bound to music constitutes something refreshing and unique.  Particularly from the European or American perspective, he acknowledged in the commentary, we tend to think of music as a separate entity, something we listen to for a duration and then set aside.  We occasionally go to concerts, listen to the radio or improvise, but these are less integral elements in the fabric of life than they are exceptional circumstances.  In contrast, Cubans constantly discover, produce and collaborate in formal and informal musical exchanges. 

 

Extreme Right: Trumpet player Manuel Mirabal Vázquez. Creative Commons, by Moyo Taxiguerrilla (2006).

One of the film's most revealing sequences occurs when singer Omara Portuondo, clad in a bold print dress, strolls down the street of her old neighborhood amid residents standing on the curbs and in front of dilapidated buildings.  As she wanders through the street, Portuondo sings, partly to herself and partly offering an impromptu performance to the audience that has gathered for her.  One woman of African descent joins her in song, invoking their common career experience and suggesting Cuba's ethnoracial heterogeneity.  During the commentary, Wenders emphasized that the neighborhood promenade scene unfolded spontaneously, a fact that is at first difficult to believe.  The individuals who gather to hear Portuondo balance reverence with anonymity.  They convey interest and desire to hear her voice, yet maintain relative nonchalance and refrain from pressuring or bombarding their locale celebrity.  Their expressions also appear unaffected by the presence of the camera.  The audience embodies civility and appreciation, without the self-consciousness or egotism that often accompanies the presence of a camera.  Indeed, as Wenders asserted, there is nothing "fake" about the people of Cuba. 

Interestingly, the concept of cinematic authenticity is a motif that recurs in Lisbon Story.  Towards the conclusion of the film, the mysterious German filmmaker Frederick challenges the very act of movie-making.  In his diatribe with his sound recorder he equates "Pointing a camera" with "pointing a weapon" and reflects, "...Every time I pointed at something, I had the feeling of depriving things of their life."  The very presence of the camera changes the subject, and the very eye of the cinematographer distorts it even further.  That is Frederick's unhappy conclusion, anyway.  The only way to escape these limitations is to capture figures without their knowledge or consent and without the corrupting influence of the filmmaker's own eye.  Frederick fashions plastic shopping bags, small backpacks and garbage cans into vessels for hidden cameras.  The flimsy blue plastic shopping bag seems appropriated directly from Buena Vista, where it also functioned as a vehicle, but one holding sacred visual elements from the past, rather than illicitly capturing unknown moments in the present. Cuban pianist Rubén González's uses a blue plastic bag to transport photographs of himself and other musicians at the height of their careers.  Against his characteristic orange zigzag button down, Rubén's insubstantial bag of treasured images intimates the pervasiveness of Cuban poverty, but also visually encapsulates Cuban values of relationships, authenticity and meaning in images and lyrics.  Armed only with a minimal plastic shopping bag, Rubén manages to protect the photographs from any blemish, indentation or tear.

 

Bassist Orland Lopez "Cachaito." Creative Commons, by Volume12 (2008).

Visual parallels between the two films run far more deeply than mere recurrent props.  In fact, Wenders captures environmental structures and geographies with suggestive doubles in Havana and Lisbon.  Train tracks function as one structural motif and symbol of transport, change, interconnectedness and, paradoxically, divisiveness.  In Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa Bustamante sings and plays his guitar with a provincial folksiness as he walks towards the steady cam, following the tracks.  In Lisbon, the pace of life around the tracks is slightly more frantic and mechanized.  Trolley tracks in Lisbon Story help propel the protagonist Winter towards the mysterious child employed by Frederick.  Other analogues to the Lisbon trolleys are the putrid green and pink buses imported from the Soviet Union, seeming anachronisms that are actually critical to Havana's contemporary transport infrastructure.   

Wenders grapples with the environmental opposition between old and new in both films, and plays extensively with boundaries.  Boundaries may be physical thresholds, such as the coastal waters crashing against Havana's highways, or may exist in space and time, as with the cross cuts between the group's performance in Amsterdam and their work in the Cuban recording studio weeks earlier.  Diegetic sound bridges across these cuts (Silencio, sung by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) lend a sense of continuity to an editing technique that might otherwise create temporal confusion. 

In both films, cinematography works to suggest navigation and exploration.  It evokes another breed of tension, this time between familiarity and newness.  The mobile camera ventures through the streets of Havana and Lisbon in a series of long takes that capture not only the neighborhood architecture and lighting, but the residents' attitudes and body language.  Wenders relied fully on the mobile cam and two heavier cameras with tripods (no tracking or dolleying), and the subtle irregularities in camera stability humanize the framing.  We are somewhat conscious of the street venturer recording the sights.  He is not a blatant tourist, but rather a selective observer, an outsider who also experiences a sense of connection with the new city.  In Lisbon Story, Winter embodies that "outsider."  En route to Lisbon, he listens to a Portuguese language cassette and struggles to replicate comical phrases.  Yet, although certain cultural and linguistic aspects of life in Lisbon are quite foreign, other elements -- like the exotic voice of Madredeus (Teresa Salgueiro) -- exist independent of national bounds and deeply resound with Winter.  A similar tension arises in Buena Vista Social Club, when the members of the band arrive in New York City for the first time.  In souvenir shops, the musicians recognize certain bobble-heads (Charlie Chaplin, for instance), but struggle and fail to name others (Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy).  By including such sequences detailing cultural connections and deviations, the director reveals something about himself.  Wenders has thoroughly established himself as an international figure in cinema.  Yet, he too must experience the strange, exciting imbalance that comes from traveling: the alien and unsettling juxtaposed with the familiar and universal.  And this opposition is what makes his local environments so vivid, so authentic and so approachable, regardless of a viewer's experiences or background.

Coulais' Soundscape in Coraline (Shauna)

Why is it so difficult to remain attentive to sound while watching a film?  And why is it so rare that we fully appreciate and internalize a musical score?  In a culture that bombards us with visual emblems, cues and representations, image frequently subverts sound, particularly in retrospective analysis.  We subconsciously relegate the musical score to the background, assuming it is more of an embellishment than a fundamental structural component.  Yet, a soundtrack can elicit intense emotional responses and deserves independent analytic and artistic investigation. 

The mise-en-scene acquires a notably warmer pallet in the alternate universe; costumes, props and visible light sources furnish a deceptively enticing fantasy world. Coraline. Creative Commons.¹

The challenge of formulating a non-verbal audio accompaniment to a narrative cannot be overstated.  In constructing an audio landscape, directors risk imposing a generic emotional atmosphere.  Such moods are frequently sentimental or melodramatic.  Exploiting sound to elicit calculated audience responses is highly problematic: a musical score that reduces the climate to shallow, one-dimensional emotions undermines the audience.  Characters and environments tend to lose their originality under the oppressive weight of music that “tells” viewers how to feel.  In turn, audiences habituated to overt musical scores lose the ability to formulate original thoughts about characters, relationships and environments.  A score might inspire angst, pity, joy or elation, but one-to-one equivocations between musical styles and emotions are rarely interesting.  When music is manipulated to induce a calculated response, it fosters complacency among viewers and dulls their capacity to think critically about the music in relation to the mise-en-scene, framing and characters. 

Last weekend, I ventured into Muvico 24 to see Henry Selicks’s acclaimed stop-action film Coraline in 3D.  Until then, I never had a reason to visit Arundel Mills.  But after seeing the film in 2D at The Charles, a trek down to the Mills was my only option if I wanted to see Coraline in all its stereoscopic glory.  The first thing you notice as you enter Arundel Mills is the ridiculous scale of things.  The whole mall is divided into "neighborhoods," each complete with streets and massive cafes facing massive stores selling computers and televisions.  It’s like an airport, only exponentially larger.  During the trailers, the sound was overwhelming and obtrusive, functioning only to amplify the impact of mass destruction, mechanical failure or human brutality.  In a way, the trailers' sound quality and volume conformed to the grotesque scale of the theater and mall.  I consider this type of sound to be exploitative because it obstructs our sense of cinema's visual language and fails to illuminate subtle connections between sound and imagery.

A successful sound universe generally develops an environment's complexity, widening the number of possible associations and interpretations, rather than confining a scene to one monolithic mood (i.e. "melancholy" or "happiness").  Part of what makes Coraline such an intriguing piece of art is the musical score's capacity to evoke new sentiments with multiple viewings.  Instrumental details and subtle shifts in tonality, volume and timbre are integrated with a level of craftsmanship that merits the meticulous language of stop-action animation.  My emotional response is never identical or formulaic.  Rather, I experience conflicting senses of familiarity and refreshing newness each time I listen to the score.  Moreover, within the context of each investigation, it is possible to discern conflicting elements: desire and repulsion, harmony and discord.

It would be a disservice to the film to try to analyze the extensive array of technically brilliant elements, including the interiors and landscapes, the characters' physical forms and movements (angular or wobbly, and often "twitchy," according to Selicks) and the lighting (cool/diffused versus warm/hard).  Instead, I hope to analyze three realms – Coraline's ordinary home, the art deco theater, Bobinsky's circus tent and the other-worldly garden – to investigate how the musical score and mise-en-scene interact to reveal parallels between characters and their micro-environments.  

Bruno Coulais is the film's French composer.  He is also well-known in the U.S. for his compositions in Les Choristes, a film that ardently asserts the power of music to counter repressive regimes.  The presence of youthful singers from Nice in Coraline identifies the musical score as Coulais'.  His work is original and inventive, oscillating between contemplation and agitation.  Perhaps the most challenging aspect of writing a film score is to ensure it is unified without being redundant.  Coulais achieves such a sense of unity by relying on a core group of instruments: horns and oboes, harps, vocals, piano and percussion instruments, along with synthesizers and bells.  He avoids the typical musical motif, instead opting to use certain melodies, rhythms and tones to color specific characters.  Thus, individuals and their environments acquire musical personalities that complement their visual impact. 

Neutral tones, cool accents and diffused lighting predominate Coraline's ordinary domestic existence. A raked stage intensifies the sense of confinement in the drab interior. Coraline. Creative Commons.²

In Coraline's home, a neutral dinginess pervades the dining room.  The accumulation of cool neutral elements - tiles, chipped cabinetry, fogged windows, metallic chairs, kettles and cutlery - cement the sense of ordinary.  Her parents are so embedded in the minutia of domesticity that they seem to become human appendages of the monotonous environment.  In the office, her father's gaunt, hunched body is echoed by precariously piled boxes and canted camera angles.  Coraline's restless form reflected in his computer poignantly encapsulates the gap between her boredom and his frustrations over work.  When he sends her on a mission to list the doors, windows and "everything that's blue," Coraline conveys curiosity, insight, independence and slight brooding.  Her quest is accompanied by Coulais' "Exploration," a light ballad performed with the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra.  A single angelic voice and accompanying harps and piano endow Coraline's childhood with a balance of beautiful innocence and potential darkness.  Using the synthesizer, Coulais compiles harmonies (from the solo vocalist) to create an illusion of multiple intertwined voices.  The result is a sound metaphor for the paradigm of the only child, who relies on her imagination for companionship. 

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, retired British theater performers. Coraline. Creative Commons.³

Within the universe constructed by the "other mother," one of three luxuries used to entice Coraline is an elaborate art deco theater.  There, imitations of Coraline's two elderly neighbors, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, perform an opera complete with intricate costumes, two-dimensional sets and an elaborate pulley system for hoisting figures.  It is a testament to the convincing characterization and deft manipulation of the puppets that we perceive the scenario to be authentic.  Suspended in the world of Coulais' musical composition and Selicks' animation, we embrace the notion of sculpted characters consciously performing against their own two-dimensional mise-en-scene!  Spink's fleshy body is firmly encased in a fish tail and Forcible's voluptuous form is scantily clad in sequins. Rarely in popular cinema is the elderly female body so brazenly displayed, and in this sense, Selicks departs from conventional Western constructs of feminine beauty.  However, Coulais' musical score grounds the scenario in a performance culture, where such absurdity seems natural. The music is highly dramatized and full of affectations.  And perhaps because the sequence is so flamboyant and unexpected, the lyrics assume a greater weight, even a sense of urgency.  It is difficult to ascribe a particular meaning to the opera's narrative, yet the warnings to sailors hint at an ominous future.

Music plays an equally critical role in the faux Bobinsky's circus tent.  It lends a sense of magical-realism through vaguely Eastern European melodies and frantic orchestral maneuvers.  There is a childish quality to the music, which seems to oscillate and glimmer alongside the synchronized mice.  Small bells, cymbals, percussion and fluttering high-pitched brass instruments give the sequence a ephemeral, dreamy aura.  But the music also echoes the eerie oboes, horns and chimes earlier associated with the authentic Bobinsky, blurring the threshold between the two parallel worlds.

The final other-worldly wonder is the Fantastic Garden, endowed with luminescent crocuses, tickling ivy and swarms of hummingbirds.  The garden brims with color, warmth and movement - pulsing with the vitality of an intricate ecosystem.  The visual elements are built up gradually, each striking component giving way to another, until the entire garden is viewed from above to reveal a fauna mosaic Coraline head.  The music develops in parallel fashion: what starts as a few lone violins culminates in a jazzy conglomeration of percussion, cymbals, bells, horns and strings.

After viewing the film in 2D and 3D, I have to say that the 3D format undermines the potent textural impact of Bruno Coulais' musical score.  Although it certainly adds a technically impressive element to the opening sequence, in which needle-thin metallic fingers deconstruct the fibers, fillings and hair of a doll, it deprives the movie of its cinematic essence, giving it the feel of a video game.  Coulais' music, influenced by the French pianist Eric Satie, renders the animation deeply emotional, at once delightful and disconcerting.  Coulais' sound scheme renders Selick's work more vivid, immediate and lasting.  His impact far exceeds anything stereoscopic effects can achieve.

In an interview regarding the film's fastidious attention to detail and craft, Henry Selicks asserted that his main job was "to keep the beauty under control...to knock down the beauty."  Excess beauty is a very real risk when a project involves so many talented people, each engaged in one small component of the whole.  But Selicks, through figure twitches and grit, successfully combats perfection.  He relies on visual language to convey characters' behaviors and mannerisms, and trusts Coulais' music to inform their deeper emotional complexities.  For this he should be commended. 

 

Image Credits:

1. "Pic by Focus Features." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

2. "Coraline's Normal Life." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

3. "Miss Forcible and Spink." Creative Commons. Joanneteh_32. January 30, 2009.

 

 

"People Only Die of Love in the Cinema": Searching for the Normal in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Kelsey)

The very first words spoken in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are "Is it finished?"  This question, a less than auspicious start to a film, is posed by a man to his mechanic.  The mechanic, a young man in a bright blue jumpsuit, replies: "The engine still knocks when it's cold, but that's normal."  So begins Jacques Demy's 1964 film; with this relatively normal, almost colorless exchange between the two men.  Of course, these seemingly mundane lines are sung, because every word of the film is sung.  And the seemingly mundane mechanic shop is infused with every color imaginable, because Jacques Demy turns car repair into a feat requiring Technicolor.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, however, does not deal with these Technicolor trifles with the over the top pageantry of an American musical.  There is no musical number about how much they "gotta dance!" here, and indeed, there is no dancing.  The camera is the thing that follows choreographed patterns, as the film has numerous long takes that move from one character to another without missing a beat.  In fact, the entire film is choreographed, and it is only the characters that remain almost motionless, emotionally stagnant amidst Demy's always mobile, always surprising visual splendor.  The story at the center of the film is as seemingly banal as the dialogue: a girl loves a boy, the boy goes away to war, the girl gets pregnant (of course), and the boy returns home to find that the girl isn't waiting for him.  So goes this bittersweet tale of love and loss.  But the film does not just rise above its uninspired plot: it uses its uninspired plot to explore these uninspired people who are its center.  And while their real life, provincial French counterparts may not be surrounded by pink patterned wall paper that perfectly matches their pink cardigans, their pink headbands, and their pink umbrellas, there is a fundamental melancholy to the film that belies its candy coated exterior.  And those bright colors only serve to heighten the intensity of the emotions: the two main characters, Genevieve and Guy, "je t'aime," "je t'aime," "je t'aime," so often that by any right the words ought to lose all meaning.  And yet, when set to Michel Legrand's lovely score and surrounded by the always colorful set design, their repeated proclamations reach a sort of emotional fever pitch.  So when Genevieve falls to the ground; in a faint at the merest suggestion that Guy has forgotten her, it's almost believable.  Because in this world, where a pretty, pink clad Catherine Deneuve almost fades into the pretty pink background, the visuals and the sound don't just heighten the emotions, they give them an air of verisimilitude that they would otherwise be lacking.

The last scene of the film is set in December, and it is no longer raining but snowing: there's no need for umbrellas in Cherbourg when it's December.  And it is at a gas station that Genevieve and Guy have their last meeting: her in a fur coat and mourning, him in another blue jumpsuit.  The first thing she says to him, after all of their years apart, is that it's cold.  He tells her to come into the office.  There are no declarations of love, only a sad lingering sense of what might have been.  When asked what type of gasoline she wanted to fill her car with, normal or super, Genevieve chooses super instead of normal, just like she chose fur coats over car mechanics once, a long time ago.  So it's cold, and things are fine.  They're normal, perhaps.  And yes, they are finished.  But as she drives away with her child, and his wife returns with his, we realize that maybe, even outside this world of fuchsia wall paper and pseudo operettas, normal might be alright.   

 

A Brief Discourse on the Importance of Music in Film (Alexandra)

Perhaps it is my background in music that makes me prone to picking up so intensely on a film’s soundtrack, but I believe that a movie’s music is one of its most important aspects; a characteristic that is often taken for granted.  A film can reveal so much within its music.  Beyond the creepy background music of thrillers that tells you the killer is around the corner, music has the ability to expose characters’ feelings, actions, and a film’s tensions.

Just as directors carefully choose their shots, they also spend a great deal of time selecting their soundtrack.  Take acclaimed director Martin Scorsese for example.  Though Scorsese is an Oscar-winning director, he is also known for his impeccable use of music in his films.  He has directed a few documentaries on bands, including No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), The Last Waltz (1978), and Shine a Light (2008); but Scorsese’s music in his feature films sticks out the most.  From The Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter,” which has become a Scorsese trademark (played in three of his most famous films), to The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the music picked has a reason for being there.  When “Monkey Man,” by The Rolling Stones, is played at the end of Goodfellas (when Henry Hill goes crazy because of his cocaine addiction), it is no coincidence.  The song isn’t arbitrarily placed there because it sounds good aesthetically, but because its lyrics reflect something in Henry’s psyche.  It is no accident that the lyrics, “I’m a sack of broken eggs/I always have an unmade bed,” encapsulate Henry precisely.

In a 2007 interview with Craig McLean from The Observer, Scorsese said that it is “not just the songs I use in the film. No, it's about the tone and the mood of their music, their attitude. The music itself.”  Referring specifically to The Rolling Stone’s songs (which he was willing to spend $30,000 of a $750,000 budget on), Scorsese puts an emphasis on the energy music can add to a film. 

In Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Doll House (1995), powerful base-heavy music is played whenever the main character, Dawn, gets angry and wants to rebel.  It may be obvious that Dawn’s vexed, but the song accentuates the atmosphere and her aggression.  The beat is repeated throughout the film and becomes a motif that is symbolic of Dawn’s disconsolate life and even of the whole movie.  Similarly, if the climax of The Departed (2006) lacked music, it would just be another scene, with less importance and hardly any energy.  But The Dropkick Murphy’s punk-rock song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” plays loudly, the scene becomes quite intense, and the audience is automatically engaged in the film and aware that something important is going to happen. 

Such as The Dropkick Murphy’s song gained huge popularity after being in The Departed, many movies procure esteem because of their soundtracks.  Garden State (2004) is known for it’s popular soundtrack, and often times its viewers come away from the film deeply moved solely because of the music’s emotional collaboration with the film’s content.  Some films that receive such acclaims due to their soundtracks are often movies about musicians (I’m Not There, 2007) or revolve solely on music for its content (Across the Universe, 2007), but music can be more than just a plot device.

Director Quentin Tarantino, another celebrated maestro of music in film, manipulates music as a sort of “magic object” through which his characters and events are tied together. In Reservoir Dogs (1992), music transports characters through different scenes and situations.  Whenever in a car, the radio plays “K-BILLY'S: ‘Super Sounds of the Seventies’ weekend” show.  In separate cars different characters, all in contrasting situations, seem to converge because of this unifying music on the radio.  Music plays an important role even at the beginning of this film.  Characters are introduced in the opening scene through the discussion of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”  Though the song isn’t actually playing, its placement works to reveal attributes of the characters: who is more vulgar, who is more sensitive, who doesn’t even like music, etc.  The concept of using music to illuminate characters’ qualities is maybe the most overlooked, but one of the most important roles music can play. 

Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) utilizes music both to reveal the deep mental derangement of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, and to explicitly place the film in a time period.  Bateman can give a litany of seemingly unimportant facts about pop music, analyzing the minutest details of Phil Collins, Huey Lewis & the News, and Whitney Houston.  His obsession with analyzing and playing such music is a reflection of his inner ruthless behaviors.  Bateman explains that the song “Hip to be Square,” by Huey Lewis & the News, a smash-hit, isn’t “just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's a personal statement about the band itself.”  A band that Bateman believes has a “bitter, cynical sense of humor.”  Bateman’s close reading of the song and the band are important because they explain some of his sadistic behaviors.  Bateman repeats this musical examination again, explaining Phil Collins’ music’s “intangibility” and Whitney Houston’s “self-preservation and dignity.”  All of the things he touches upon are actually important aspects of himself, characteristics that are only implicitly exposed within the music.  Not only does the music (always juxtaposed with one of his violent acts) explain the inner workings of Bateman, but it also places the audience directly in the time period of the film, 1987.  If the clothing styles weren’t enough, the music successfully transports audiences into the 80s.  Though music does have this innate capability of recreating a cultural and historical time, it does not necessarily have to be reflective of the time to be effective.

The soundtrack to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) imitates the tensions and desperation within the film.  Though the film is sent in 2027, scenes are reflective of World War II concentration camps, reminiscent of the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal, and hold the general, indignant attitude of the public during the Vietnam War.  The movie culminates in a world that has not learned from its past.  Children of Men’s music transcends time to seamlessly make relevant these feelings, to make the images more poignant. The song “Arbeit Macht Frei” by The Libertines, mimics a German phrase (in English: “work will set you free”) that prisoners of concentration camps believed would free them, and plays alongside images that imitate these camps.  The music not only exemplifies these tones, but also reflects the overall despair of the film by including songs such as The Rolling Stone’s “Ruby Tuesday,” whose lyrics read: “Cash your dreams before they slip away/Dying all the time/Lose your dreams and you/Will lose your mind/Ain't life unkind.”  The inclusion of such songs, along with the general themes of the film, are Cuarón’s warning that not learning from a world’s past can only end in hopelessness. 

Everywhere we go music follows us, making us desensitized to it.  Our habituation to music means we easily overlook music’s role in our lives, and even more so in film.  Music’s function is deeper than simply background music.  Focus on the songs the director chooses and you will have a much greater understanding of a film, you’ll learn and experience a good deal more.