Sunday 26 May 2019

Journey Into Obscure Hollywood Films

Writing a book on film necessitates viewing a wider corpus of films that will actually be discussed in the book. This is because context is important: I can only convincingly write about Doris Day, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and all the others if I have a good knowledge of the milieu in which they were working. I've discovered some real gems from this process, but also some astonishingly bad films. I'll share a few of these with you here.

Midnight Lace (1960). Let's start with a clunker. This seems to have been a paint-by-numbers attempt by Universal to play along with the trendy thriller genre of the late 1950s-early 1960s. We have a major star, Doris Day straight off of Pillow Talk, paired with an established but newly relevant star, Rex Harrison fresh from My Fair Lady. Secondary characters are played by John Gavin, whom Universal was setting up as a newer model of Rock Hudson, and Myrna Loy and Herbert Marshall for some old Hollywood glamour. This is the old Gaslight story: a woman whose husband attempts to drive her mad. Day had played essentially the same role in 1956's Julie, an unknown and not very good film, but better than this one. Day gives a two-note performance, shifting between her sunny persona and the frightened version of the same, as honed in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Universal contract director David Miller couldn't hold a candle to Hitchcock, and the film is competently shot but no better. The score is by Frank Skinner, who composed the music for most of Douglas Sirk's melodramas. This film shows that his rather overblown scores needed Sirk's purposefully overdetermined filming style to make them work. Here there seems to be simply too much score, and the fact that it lacks melodic or harmonic invention makes it seem even more elephantine. This is set in London but you'd barely know it, since most of the characters other than Harrison are American, especially John Gavin (even though he's playing a Londoner; no gift for accents had he).


Murder By Contract (1958). This one is known by Martin Scorsese fans, as he often brings it up in interviews. It's a very low budget B-movie by Columbia, but a great example of what Scorsese calls 'smuggling'; the filmmakers, led by director Irving Lerner, used budget limitations to make a stylish and taut thriller that touches on weighty and difficult issues. At the centre lies an existentialist hit man played by Vince Edwards, hired to murder a woman who was witness to a murder case. She does not go down easily; the film would almost be a dark comedy were it not so full of existential despair.

Crime in the Streets (1956). Another crime film, directed by Don Siegel and starring John Cassavetes, brilliant but not at all passing as an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent. This was an attempt to even further darken the social problem films of the time like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. There is not much attempt to explain Cassavetes' delinquency, which seems to be the point. Sal Mineo plays a role similar to the one he played in Rebel. Most interesting is Franz Waxman's score. He is working in an Ellington-like jazz idiom, but the unfolding of the score is typically Waxman. The opening credits cue is like a dissonant hot jazz version of the opening of his Sunset Boulevard score.


The Strange One (1957). This one is a real lost gem. Adapted from a successful Off-Broadway play (called End of a Man) that made Ben Gazzara a hot prospect, most of the cast was brought over directly to the screen along with director Jack Garfein. This is very much a 'method' product, with the whole cast coming from the Actors Studio. Gazzara is excellent as a military school bully. In his first sequence, a hazing of new students at the school, he wears a bizarre combination of shorts, knee socks, Hawaiian shirt, and carries a swagger stick. Eventually he gets his comeuppance, but only after wreaking a lot of havoc. The film is clearly a comment on 50s militarism. It isn't entirely successful, but it's stuck in my head more than many of the other films I've watched recently.


My Dream is Yours (1949)
Imagine the following story conference at Warner Brothers, 1949:
–We need a big musical number for the new Doris Day/Jack Carson picture.
–What's it about?
–Day plays a widowed mother trying to become a movie star, with help from Carson.
–So I suppose a big 'Hooray For Hollywood' type thing is in order?
–That's been done. Find a different angle. Remember a few years ago at MGM when Gene Kelly sang and danced with Jerry the Mouse?
–Yes, in Anchors Aweigh.
–It was a big hit. We should have our stars sing and dance with our own cartoons. Bugs Bunny, for instance. Let's work a song and dance with Bugs Bunny into this picture.
–A picture about a widowed mother? Does it fit?
–Sure, kids like Bugs Bunny. Use the kid angle.
–But if the number is meant to be for Doris...
–Put the kid in it, too. Doris and Jack can hold their own.
–So it's Doris, Jack, the kid, and Bugs Bunny?
–It's a goldmine!
–But how does Bugs come into it? I'm not sure it makes much sense...
–Who cares about sense? Get Jule and Sammy to write a hit song around it and the sense will take care of itself.
–Ah, but Jule and Sammy are in New York.
–No problem. Dig some old tune out of the trunk. No one will notice. Even better, find a dead composer, like they did with that guy Schubert in Blossom Time. No royalties!
–Schubert... he worked for RKO, right?
–I don't remember. But he's dead, and no relatives come crawling out of the woodwork.
–How about... oh, what's his name, the pianist. Big deal in the last century. Frank something.
–Frank List?
–That's the guy. Hungarian Rhapsody. Stokowski makes a big deal of him at the Hollywood Bowl.
–So we find some trunk tune by Frank List, put some new words to it.
–No, we might as well use that Hungarian Rhapsody. Go with a proven hit and jazz it up a little.
–Good idea. But we still don't have a situation. Why are Doris and Jack and the kid and Bugs singing and dancing the Hungarian Rhapsody? A gypsy number?
–Gyspy numbers were last year. Now it's holiday numbers. White Christmas, Easter Parade.
–Hey, Easter! That's it!
–Why Easter?
–Easter... bunny... Bugs... Bunny!
–Perfect. But how does it fit into the plot?
–Easy. We set the movie at Easter.
–And we dress Doris and Jack as rabbits.
–Obviously, but why have they got rabbit costumes?
–Dream sequence?
–Yes! A surefire hit!

Here's the proof:
Is this the worst number in the studio's history?

Let's end with Cairo (1942), not a 50s film but a very good example of excellent studio craftsmanship that deserves to be better known. This falls between genres, which is possibly why it is so little discussed: part musical, part comedy, part World War II spy movie, it features Jeanette MacDonald and Ronald Young, each of whom thinks the other is a Nazi spy hiding out in Cairo. There are some very funny scenes, some good musical numbers (especially Ethel Waters singing 'Buds Won't Bud') and some clever in-jokes. MacDonald is playing a version of herself, a movie star who has escaped the Hollywood grind and is enjoying singing in a Cairo nightclub. Young plays a small-town reporter who ends up stranded in Cairo. Adventure, comedy, and love ensue.

Saturday 18 May 2019

Greimasian Semiotic Models in Le nozze di Figaro (or: what I did on my Sunday afternoon)

As I prepare to direct this September’s annual opera scenes production I’ve been exploring our chosen works (Act Two of Le nozze di Figaro and Act Two of Die Fledermaus) from a variety of angles. I’ve settled on a ‘sociological’ production, highlighting the class conflict inherent in Figaro and the class complacency inherent in Fledermaus. But other methodologies also inform my preparation. Simultaneously I’ve begun exploring Schubert’s Winterreise, and I am reading Lauri Suurpää’s study of the cycle, Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Suurpää takes a fertile analytical approach that melds Algirdas Greimas’s actantial semiotics with Heinrich Schenker’s musical analysis, and it struck me that a melopoetic approach incorporating the Greimas models could also enlighten Figaro and Fledermaus. By ‘melopoetic’, I mean an approach that takes into account both music and text. I came across the term in Stephen Banfield’s writing; I prefer it to Suurpää’s ‘musico-poetic’, but they mean essentially the same thing. Suurpää’s book is founded on some arguments I would question, notably his view of music’s non-referentiality and his process of looking at the music alone before the text, but the analyses of Schubert’s songs that result from his Greimas-plus-Schenker methodology are fascinating. I am not a full-blooded Schenkerian so when it comes to the music I won’t be following that methodology to a T; rather, I’ll use some of his insights but also some bits of Caplin’s form-function models and my own (admittedly basic) observations from trying to teach undergraduate music theory in the clearest way I can. Really this little analytical project comes from the pack-rat mentality of a lot of contemporary music analysis. We use elements that we like from a mix of different theories, depending on the piece at hand and what fits it best. I like telling my students that the music tells you how to analyse it (in a metaphorical sense; I’m not so foolhardy as to claim agency for abstract music): if you know about various analytical tools and if you listen closely to the music the best techniques tend to emerge without much ado.

Algirdas Greimas was a Latvian-French semiotician whose work has unfortunately fallen somewhat out of favour in the humanities (albeit less so in Finland, where Suurpää is based). Drawing from Russian formalists like Vladimir Propp, he attempted to come up with models for how narrative works. His most important tool is the semiotic square, a method for deconstructing supposed binaries, putting them into a multi-dimensional space that allows us to see how concepts float around between supposed absolutes. His other major contribution, which I used extensively in my doctoral thesis (Monteverdi on the Modern Stage, Oxford University, 2012), is the ‘actantial’ model of narrative. The basic idea is that in a narrative (which can range from a whole story to a single sentence) a Subject (S) looks for an Object (O). A Sender (Sr) sends the Subject out to look for the Object, and the benefit of that quest goes to a Receiver (R). A Helper (H) might help the Subject on the quest, and an Opponent (Op) might make the quest more difficult. These are all called actants. They need not all be characters in the story; they might be things or abstract concepts.

Aladdin is about to open in cinemas, so let’s take that as an example to illustrate these actants. Aladdin is the Subject, or the protagonist. His Object is twofold: Princess Jasmine and also the concept of respect (i.e. to show the world that he is not just a street rat). The Sender here happens to be the same as the Opponent: Jafar sends Aladdin on his quest for the lamp thinking that the boy will help him attain great power, but when Aladdin ends up with the lamp for himself Jafar opposes his attempt to gain Jasmine and respect. Aladdin’s Helper is the Genie. The Receiver (that is, ‘who benefits’) is Aladdin himself, but also eventually the Genie and Agrabah as a whole. The powerful thing about this actantial model is that one can also place other characters as the Subject. In Aladdin, as with other complex narratives, this shows that the story is articulated and kept interesting by criss-crossing desires and quests. There are at least four primary Subjects in this story: Aladdin, Jasmine, Jafar, and the Genie. These actors take on various actantial roles depending on whose story we follow at any given moment. But to cohere as a story, one Subject usually needs to take an overarching position. In Aladdin that is the title character. Usually it is through his subjectivity that the audience is focalised (focalisation is another narratological/semiotic concept, developed by Mieke Bal; the short explanation is that focalisation, making the audience seen through a certain character’s eyes, is how narrative identification works and how narratives are ‘followable’ by readers).

Now let’s turn to Act Two of Figaro. This opera is one of the most complex of the period, and its primary Subject its debatable. This is one of the many things that makes this opera so interesting both for audiences and for performers: everyone can be seen as the protagonist, their intersecting desires are highly volatile, and Mozart sets these desires to music of astonishing invention. While some previous operas, by Mozart and others (notably Monteverdi), managed to musicalise similar narrative complexities, Figaro was and is the exception rather than the rule. Thinking about focalisation can help us place the Subject here. In the first part of the act the Countess is focalised. She begins the act alone on stage, Susanna, Figaro, and Cherubino subsequently direct their statements towards her, and the major ‘events’ of the act hinge on the relationship between the Count and the Countess. She is also only offstage for a single scene (in which Cherubino and Susanna run around in a panic) but during that scene she still remains at the top of our minds because the other characters are panicking for her sake. Only in the Finale do other characters really threaten to move to the centre, especially Figaro: his quick thinking becomes foregrounded and the Countess’s confusion does not stand out from that of the other characters. Act Three could then be argued to focus on the Count, Act One having been mostly seen through Susanna’s eyes and Act Four shifting back and forth among Susanna, Figaro, the Count, and the Countess.

I will focus here on the Countess’s opening cavatina, ‘Porgi amor’. There is more than enough there to get us started on using these semiotic models for analysis. Da Ponte’s text for this aria is very short, four lines alone, and it is with the text that such analyses should begin. In nearly all cases, the words came before the music, and in opera it is the verbal narrative context that must come first. This is doubly true of Figaro, based as it is on a pre-existing play. Mozart was setting both characters created by Beaumarchais and words created by Da Ponte.

Porgi amor qualche ristoro Grant, Love, some relief
al mio duolo, a’ miei sospir. For my pain, for my sighs.
O mi rendi il mio tesoro, Either return my treasure to me,
o mi lascia almen morir.       Or at least let me die.

In this cavatina (or entrance aria) the Countess (Subject) looks for relief from her sorrows (Object), which could take one of two forms: the Count’s love (which I’ll call O1) or her own death (O2). The Sender is abstract: pain and sighs. The Countess’s miserable state is what leads to her cry out for help. The Receiver is also the Countess: it is she herself who will benefit from the relief Love offers. The Helper, here more a hoped-for Helper rather than an empirical one, is Love: it is Love whom the Countess implores to help relieve her pain. The Opponent is not literally spoken, but it is the Count: he is responsible for hindering the Countess’s search for happiness. It is notable that the Opponent is here the same as Object, but they are two different versions of the Count. The Op version is the Count as he is at this moment (who causes ‘duolo’ and ‘sospiri’); the O version is the Count as he was in the past (the ‘tesoro’). The Countess wants to change her state, from being miserable to having some sort of ending, either in happiness or in death. We can use functional notation to show this:

([Sr → R] → [S O]) ([S ∩ O] ← [H Op])

Actant Reference
S Countess
O1          Count (tesoro)
O2 Death (morire)
Sr Sorrow (duolo, sospiri)
R Countess
H Love
Op Count

The arrow (→) shows a syntactical relation: the Sender is related to the Receiver (Sorrow leads the Countess to make this plea). shows a disjunct relationship: at the beginning the Subject does not have the Object, the Countess does not have relief. The double arrow () shows a change of state. The Countess wants her state of absence of relief (S O) to change to one where she does have relief (S ∩ O), and it is the Helper, and not the Opponent, who will allow that change to happen: Love, in opposition to the Count as he currently is, will help the Countess to attain relief. I have tried to clarify the structure a bit further by placing the wished-for state in italics (although Grimes and Suurpää does not use that technique) because it does not exist: it is hypothetical, dependent upon how the rest of the narrative will play out. We discover by the end of the narrative that the Countess does get the Count back, at least temporarily, but looking at this aria on its own we do not yet know that, and the rest of the act is going to make it seem increasingly less likely that the Countess will get what she wants.

The power of Greimas’s actantial model is that it allows us to examine narrative as a state which may or may not change; this is valuable because it allows us to see narrative structures apart from the durational factors of narration. The functional model above is an abstraction of the overall situation described in this aria. This is potentially helpful to singers playing roles like the Countess, as it forces us to look at the state of the character at a specific moment. It gives us licence to forget momentarily what is going to happen next, thereby being ‘in the moment’ with the character. Here we see that Stanislavskian techniques, the most common contemporary methodology of acting training, and Greimas come from a similar place, namely Russian formalism, in which structures of feeling at any given moment are at least as important as the unfolding of a narrative. In real life we have hopes and desires but we cannot be sure what is going to happen to us next; actors playing characters in a drama should be able convey a similar state. Adding musical analysis to this does enforce a time vector because music can exist only in time, but if the actor knows the overall state of desire (or, in Stanislavskian terms, the motivation) she can use the music as a springboard for changing that state in real time.

So how does Mozart set this state of affairs to music? In brief, he uses the affordances of the ‘Classical’ style to express what is going on poetically. The first two lines of poetry offer a case in point: ‘Porgi amor qualche ristoro/al mio duolo, a’ miei sospir’, ‘Grant, love, some relief/for my pain, for my sighs’. These lines are set to a very simple eight-bar phrase that moves globally from the tonic (I) to the dominant (V), a mini closed form. The phrase is in a musical sentence structure (two-bar motive followed by a similar two-bar motive, then an expanded four-bar answer: a-a’-b). The first half of the sentence, setting the first line of poetry, outlines a simple move from tonic to dominant and back again to tonic. The line splits in two poetically as well as musically:
Porgi amor / qualche ristoro. 
I         V         V     I
The a and a’ section of the sentence can be reduced to a simple repeated motive of a leap up to a suspension which is then resolved (first a 4-3 on ‘mor’ then a 9-8 on ‘storo’). The sentence’s b section is then a trip down the scale with a 10-5 linear intervallic pattern (LIP), ending with a half cadence. The phrase as a whole divides nicely into four parts both musically and poetically, Mozart setting very clearly the two hemistichs of each line. ‘Porgi amor’ is an imperative form that demands a follow-up: we need to know grammatically what the Countess is imploring Love to do, just as musically we need the I-V movement to be resolved back to the tonic. The second two bars provide the answer: ‘qualche ristoro.’ This allows for an ending both grammatically and musically: the grammatical structure is closed off by the object of the verb, and the music returns to tonic. But Da Ponte’s poetic sentence continues, as does Mozart’s musical one. He could have set those four bars as a self-contained phrase, but instead he turns that repeated motive into the a and a’ of a musical sentence. The second line of poetry also divides neatly into two halves, using parallel grammatical structure, each half being a prepositional phrase: ‘al mio duolo — a’ miei sospir’; ‘for my pain, — for my sighs.’ The first hemistich uses the LIP, while the second rounds off the phrase with the half cadence. The melody, while outlining the descending scale, leaps back up in both halves, which we could interpret both as a character note (the Countess desires the resolution of the scale but has trouble attaining it, as she has trouble attaining her desire) and as affective word-painting (the upward movement followed by downward movement being like a sigh). That this first phrase should end in a half cadence is obvious: just as the Countess is unfulfilled so should the music be. Moving back to the tonic at the end of this phrase would be ‘wrong’ in that it would provide the Countess with resolution too soon.

Mozart transforms this half cadence into a modulation: the careful use of an A natural (leading tone to B flat) causes the next phrase to take B flat as its tonic. Where in the first phrase the voice was in charge, now we have a motive in thirds in the orchestra which the voice echoes with a similar motive two bars later. Rather than an eight-bar sentence structure, Mozart sets the next two lines to an eight-bar period, with two parallel four-bar phrases. Using a parallel phrase structure makes sense as grammatically the poem’s structure is also parallel: ‘o mi rendi il mio tesoro/o mi lascia almen morir,’ ‘either return my treasure to me/or at least let me die.’ In terms of our actantial model, this second half of the poem tells us what the two potential Objects are. As potential objects, it would still be too soon to return to the global tonic so this entire phrase stays in the dominant. Mozart adds a post-cadential expansion over a B flat pedal, repeating the fourth line and ending on a seventh chord, transforming our B flat tonic back into the dominant of E flat and therefore ending on a dramatic half cadence, the voice reaching the top A flat, its highest note in the aria. The repetition of the fourth line, about death, allows us to add to our interpretation: perhaps Death (as O2) is the most desirable option for the Countess at this stage. The text alone puts the two potential Objects on more or less equal footing through the parallel grammatical structure; through repetition Mozart raises the stakes by foregrounding Death.

The aria is only half over. Mozart repeats Da Ponte’s entire text, getting different meanings out of it the next time round. He goes through the first two lines very quickly, the voice declaiming them on semiquavers over an accompaniment with the same rhythm which alternates rapidly between I and V, the same music for each line, the second line ending on an applied V/V which throws us back into the dominant. The semiquaver movement is borrowed from the orchestra’s motion in the first half and the vocal line in the third and fourth lines, here for the first time heard in the voice and orchestra simultaneously. By suspending the harmony (the rapid I-V alternation makes this section feel like a pause in the harmonic rhythm) Mozart implies the Countess’s uncertain state of mind: having returned to the tonic she is still not able to make it really ‘stick’. Mozart then uses his favourite ‘frustration’ technique of having a deceptive cadence that requires back-tracking to the predominant and a new cadence. The back-tracking here happens over the words ‘almen morir’, another way in which Mozart foregrounds the Death Object. The Countess does finally attain a perfect authentic cadence, but on the word ‘morir’. Has she determined to die? Maybe not: Mozart adds a coda in which the last two lines are repeated yet again. But again he closes on ‘morir’ with the perfect authentic cadence, and the orchestra finishes the aria off with two further bars to reinforce the tonic. (Note that my reduction graph is not kosher in a Schenker sense. I'm just trying to show visually what I'm discussing, not follow any analytical orthodoxy.)

Musically one might think that the Object has been found, as the piece has been rounded off with multiple firm cadences in the tonic. Mozart could have hardly set the text otherwise, though, as to end a closed form anywhere other than the tonic would not have been acceptable in 1786. It was a given that Mozart needed to end the aria in the tonic with a PAC; how, then, to reconcile this with my argument that the aria displays the desire for a wished-for state which is unattained? This does not preclude the use of closing cadential material. The aria does indeed represent a closed form, but it shows only one state of many in which the Countess will find herself throughout the opera. To see how this works we need to look at tonal functions in the opera as a whole. Act Two can be seen as ‘in’ E flat as it both begins and ends in that key. This aria, which is part of a larger opera and not a stand-alone piece, therefore represents only tonic expansion in the global sense. The countess begins and ends the aria in the same state, i.e. a state of unattained happiness or unattained death. That it ends in the tonic only shows that the Countess has not changed over the course of the aria. In fact, one can argue that she does not change over the course of the entire act because it ends in E flat. Narratively this is also true: if anything, she ends the act even more despairing than she was at the beginning. She does, however, change over the course of the opera. The opera as a whole is ‘in’ D major: it begins and ends in this key. Globally, the Countess moves from E flat to D, two distantly related keys. If we compare Susanna and Figaro, whose first duet in in G, the dominant of D, we can see that they shift less than the Countess over the course of the opera. Susanna and Figaro learn some important things about each other, but they start the opera in love and they end it in love. The Countess has the more radical change of character, her state of being as set up in ‘Porgi amor’ changing a great deal by the end: she does finally attain her ‘tesoro’.

As with any analysis, there is more to be said. I haven’t discussed the long orchestral introduction, which uses material from the aria proper. What role does the introduction have? Neither have I much discussed the aria’s rhythmic features, or much about its vocality (how it fits within the voice of a singer). These will all have to be saved for another time, or another analyst. I hope this little analysis here opens up a space to look at the rest of the opera in this way. This one relatively short aria having generated so many words is an indication that maybe it does. It is in fact all rather daunting. The prospect of dealing with the Act Two Finale is frankly frightening: most of the opera’s characters come together with their very different actantial roles overlapping in very complex ways, all taking place over what Wendy Allenbrook argued was an extended dance-suite (there’s yet another level to add onto narrative and music: that of movement). That will have to wait for another time. Anyway, three cheers for Greimas!