Ten Favourite Films

I've been doing some useful procrastination and have been thinking again about best/favourite films. Last time I made a list of my top ten was about two years ago, and I've seen and re-seen a lot of movies since then. It's rather arbitrary to choose my ten favourites, and the list changes frequently depending on what is fresh in my mind and what mood I'm in. The top three have been the same for a long time, but their relative position changes frequently.

Here is the list, with some comments:

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

Absolutely the funniest film ever made, and gets funnier and richer every time I see it. It is probably the most Shakespearean of all films, in that it deals with the green world and relationships, and has sparklingly poetic yet vernacular dialogue. Hawks later said (in the interview with Bogdanovich, I think) that it was a mistake to make all of the characters crazy, but the genius of the film is that it never lets up on the sustained madness.

2. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

I've always loved the rather cheerfully cynical darkness at the heart of this movie, the best ever made about Hollywood. Wilder gets everything right here; no line of dialogue is out of place and it is directed with a carefully light touch that his other movies don't quite attain (other than Ace in the Hole and, sometimes, Some Like It Hot and One Two Three).

3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

This is the opposite of the previous two, probably the most relentlessly serious movie ever made. Looking in detail at the musical score for my 'Stage and Screen' class showed me the intricacy of what Herrmann and Hitchcock were up to. It's a high modernist work in the tradition of Webern or Eliot, a kind of art I usually don't respond to, but somehow Hitchcock has managed to make it extremely emotional at the same time as being intellectually richer than nearly anything else in the history of art. I think it's the music and the colour palate that most contribute to its unique texture.

4. Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)

Truffaut is my most recent obsession, and this is my favourite of his films. This is the second-best movie about movies. Truffaut is a master craftsman and this film critically engages with the idea of craftsmanship.

5. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Anderson needed to be on this list, and at the moment this is the film I'm most responsive to. I don't understand how anyone could think he is emotionally frigid, as this one leaves me a trembling wreck!

6. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Some other Hitchcock films could have been in this spot (Psycho, The Birds, North By Northwest) but at the moment it's the comical side of his personality that wins out. This is his most amusing film, and it helps that Michael Redgrave plays a musicologist.

7. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Like Vertigo another high-modernist vision with a compelling score and expert cinematography. Anderson manages to sustain an edge-of-the-seat interest for a very long time. It's a film that demands undivided attention and gets it.

8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

This is probably as far from the previous film as one can get, a textbook example of the postmodern, but Tarantino does postmodern better than anyone else, and this is his most successful attempt. The long scenes ebb and flow in quite an extraordinary way that has something in common with Monteverdi. I'm not quite sure what, but my response to this is similar to my response to Poppea: Tarantino seems to use the camera to heighten his dialogue much as Monteverdi uses his music to heighten Busenello's poetry.

9. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1980)

This must have the best acting you could ever see on screen; every character is perfectly cast and Bergman, unlike most modern directors, shoots them in such a way that you can see the performances develop throughout a scene. It never feels like it was assembled from different shots, so invisible is the cutting, yet he uses the affordances of editing to make it breathe like a good musical performance. It goes without saying that the five-hour television version is the one to see.

10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)

Of all the recent films I've seen, this one has made the strongest impression. It's the kind of movie that sneaks up on you. After I saw it the first time I wasn't quite sure what to think, but I noticed that I kept thinking about it. Seeing it a second time proved that it's a brilliant masterpiece.

I'm not sure what all of these come together to say. Any ideas?

What I'm Working On: Wes Anderson, Political Monteverdi, and James Dean

I've been neglecting this blog, so I thought an easy way to get back into it would be to give a quick overview of my current projects. In addition to the usual preparation of teaching duties I have three conference papers in the pipeline, all of which I hope to get published after receiving some live feedback. The first is a presentation for the New Zealand School of Music's Music Forum series of lectures on July 18. This will be probably the final talk version of my work on Wes Anderson before it gets sent out for publication. It's called '"What's This Music? The Performance of Recordings in the Films of Wes Anderson', and it's an expanded version of the paper I gave at the American Musicological Society conference in November. I'll have 45 minutes instead of 20, so will be able to go more in-depth with the material and show some longer film clips. It's really an examination of the ontology of 'performance' rather than a piece of film musicology, as I use scenes from Wes Anderson's films as examples to think about whether playing someone a recording can be considered a performative act. I think it's rather interesting (though I wrote it, after all), but its interdisciplinary nature makes it tricky to decide on the best journal to publish it in. That is not a decision to be taken lightly, because such is the state of academic publishing that wherever it goes it will be weeks, even months, before I get a response either way. The NZSM will probably film the presentation and put it on their website, so people unable to get to Wellington will be able to see it.

Next up is a flashback to my doctoral dissertation with a paper in September on the politicisation of Monteverdi's operas in the early twentieth century at a conference on the early music revival at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Early Music Revivals and their Neoclassical Echoes. This is to be drawn from the first chapter of the dissertation. The research itself isn't particularly groundbreaking, but I give a unique spin on it by comparing the reception of Monteverdi across countries rather than sticking to just France, Germany, or Italy. Looking internationally shows that Monteverdi's music serves as a microcosm of wider aesthetic differences caused by the varied politics of those three countries between the world wars. The roots of this approach surely lie in my undergraduate degree in international relations, which has turned out to be good for something after all. My hope is that a conference proceedings will be published; I think a comparative study like this would serve nicely as an early chapter in the book.

In early December comes the final paper for this year, again in Melbourne, this time for the Musicological Society of Australia. This is the newest work, so new in fact that I've barely started working on it (I plan to make a start during this inter-semester break). It has a rather wordy and clinical title that will need to be sexed up eventually: 'The Articulation of Performance and Character through Music in the Films of James Dean'. I'm going to look at the way James Dean's performances are scored in the three films he made before his famous early death: East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), and Giant (George Stevens, 1956). The first two were scored by Leonard Rosenman, who draws equally from modernist concert music and traditional Hollywood film scoring. I think that the bivalent scores serve as a mirror of James Dean, who was very recognisable as the new figure of the American teenager but whose acting was highly stylised (the idea of 'method acting' being realistic breaks down in relation to Dean, who was doing something strikingly new and very unlike Marlon Brando, to whom he was and is incessantly compared). Dean's acting style was summed up well by François Truffaut: the acting 'flies in the face of fifty years of filmmaking; each gesture, attitude, each mimicry is a slap at the psychological tradition. Dean acts something beyond what he is saying'. That 'something beyond' is articulated by the music in the two Rosenman films. Dimitri Tiomkin's conservative 'western' score for Giant demonstrates this very clearly in its very betrayal of Dean's performance as the inarticulate oilman Jett Rink. Using a jaunty cowboy theme for this fascinating character flattens him out, and makes Rosenman's scores seem even more impressive in their ability to portray an acting style through music. I'll be very happy if I can pull this one off, since as far as I know nothing like it has yet been done in musicology; there have been quite a few studies based on the work of individual directors and their engagement with music (including some things I'm working on myself) but nothing yet on an actor's relationship with film music. This is one reason why I find film musicology so compelling: there are still many new approaches to be tried, and (most importantly, and not true in many other areas of musicology) a scholarly community which seems willing to accept experimentation. This is a somewhat tricky project: there is surprisingly little scholarly work on James Dean to draw on, as most of what's out there consists of fan biographies more concerned with whether or not he was gay than with a serious exploration of his acting and the cult that built up around him. That material is useful for reception history but it doesn't help provide any scholarly apparatus. Some work in the subfields of star studies and film acting studies is useful for providing some models of how to write about acting in more than a simply descriptive way, but none of it deals with embodiment through music. There is some fine work on Montgomery Clift, an actor somewhat similar to Dean in his not-quite-method stylisation, that explores the way he used his voice; this might serve as a nice way to start connecting the audio and the visual. This one is especially good: The Passion of Montgomery Clift. These early stages of work are what I find the most exciting (rather similarly to my preference for rehearsing over performing) because the possibilities are so wide open. Someone famous said there's nothing as exciting as a blank page.

What else? Next semester I'm teaching two classes on my own and team-teaching in two others. My papers are Contemporary Musical Culture and Introduction to Jazz Research, and I'm doing musicianship lectures for the first years and some music theory tutorials for the second years. When I learned a year ago that I would be taking theory lectures and tutorials I wasn't particularly excited, but now that I've survived it for two semesters I find that I've enjoyed getting in touch again with the building blocks of music. The Contemporary class is good fun since I get to talk about music I like for two hours every week. The good thing about a 20th century course is that there is so much material that one is forced to pick and choose, and it's easy to leave out people I dislike. If I were doing the 19th century I wouldn't be able to skip over Brahms, but in the 20th leaving out Carter is OK because there are so many other 'important' people to be covered. I can also get across my agenda of destroying the boundary between art and pop music by talking about innovations in recording by the Beatles, Beach Boys, etc. next to Reich, and by including things like the American roots music revival alongside the early music movement. The jazz paper is brand new for me, and it will be interesting working with a very different set of students with backgrounds unlike my usual classical performance/composition/musicology majors. Jazz research is a huge and growing field, and teaching this paper gives me a good excuse to get my hooks into something new.

So that's my life for the upcoming months. Some might find it desperately dull, but I think it's all rather fun.