Film studies in lockdown

I wrote up these thoughts on accessing and viewing films under lockdown for the students in my 'Music on Stage and Screen' course at Auckland Uni. Some info is unique to UoA, but I thought someone might like to read it.

Being at Level 3 gives us film scholars the time to catch up on some films. This is a little guide to what you can watch, how, and where.

First, a caveat. We like to think that we have access to ‘everything’ online, but that isn’t actually true. At the height of the Hollywood studio system (the 1930s-40s) each of the eight major studios released an average of 40-50 movies every year. Add to that the various independent producers and we’re looking at a corpus of more than 500 feature films each year, and that’s just the US. At that time there were also important film industries in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, plus burgeoning industries in places like Japan, India, Spain, and Brazil. Only a small fraction of that is actually available for streaming, or even for purchase on physical media. Much of it is lost: it is estimated that half of all films pre-1950 (mostly from the silent era) do not survive. Of my own collection of ca. 2500 films on DVD and Blu-Ray, I’d estimate that at least a third aren’t available anywhere on the internet for streaming or download.

Some studios have been more proactive than others in releasing their films either to streaming or on DVD: in the 1980s businessman Ted Turner bought most of the libraries of Warner Bros., RKO, and MGM and he realised that selling that pre-existing product on VHS was a cheap way to make money. That has been carried on by the Warner Archive, a DVD-on-demand service that has made huge portions of that material available. Many of those titles are also for sale on iTunes/Apple TV. The other studios (notably Paramount, Universal, Columbia, and Fox) have been more selective in what they have rereleased, but all have started some sort of on-demand system. They are not as scrupulous as Warners in finding the best source material for their digital transfers, though. Disney has also (sometimes quite aggressively) made their older product available. Even though Disney+ doesn’t have everything, almost all of the studio’s feature films are available on that service. It is important to realise that Disney+, unlike Warner Archive or the other on-demand studio units, is first and foremost for families, not scholars, so there is some self-censorship with the product. You won’t find Song of the South (1946) there any time soon. Now that Disney has bought Fox some older Fox films are turning up there, but only at a trickle, and it remains to be seen what they will do with the rest of Fox’s huge film library.

What about other streaming services? The picture (especially in NZ) isn’t great, unfortunately. Netflix is hopeless when it comes to older films. It is increasingly becoming its own studio (a high-quality one, at least) rather than a distributor of other studios’ products. Same for Amazon Prime. Neon is even more limited in older material. The best bet, although quite expensive because you have to pay for each film individually, is Apple TV/iTunes. Most of the major films of history can be purchased there. One of the best services is the Criterion Channel, US based but it works in NZ. It is really more of a museum than a streaming service, with carefully curated collections of films from all over the world.

DVDs remain the best bet for more obscure films. Our General Library has a very large DVD collection. Next week they’ll re-start the click-and-collect service, so you can essentially use it like a (free!) Blockbuster. Their DVDs are all in the main catalogue, as are some recordings of streamed films (legal because we are an academic institution). Because DVDs and Blu-Rays aren’t manufactured in NZ, it takes a long time and sometimes a lot of money to get them here. There are also strange licensing laws that mean some American films have never been released on home video in the US, but they have in France or the UK. It’s one of the great annoyances of my NZ scholarly life, to be honest…

Now, assuming that you’ve found the film you want, what are you actually watching? Before the 2000s film actually meant ‘film’, as in celluloid. Now nearly everything has shifted to digital filmmaking and distribution. Most of you will have likely never seen a film projected on actual film, except maybe when you were too young to care. I don’t know if there are even any film projectors still operating in NZ cinemas (if anyone knows, please tell me!). Celluloid works essentially the same way as analog photography, using light to make an impression on the material. The quality is as good as the film stock can pick up, and the impression of motion is created by showing 24 frames of film per second. Digital film works by putting coloured pixels in constantly shifting arrays. The quality of digital photography depends on the number of pixels available. DVDs are in what we now call ‘standard’ definition, with 480 pixels across the top of the frame. DVDs were a vast improvement over the previous home video format, VHS, which transferred the image to magnetic video tape. I still remember the first time I watched a DVD (it was The Mummy, the Brendan Fraser one) and being blown away by how good it looked. Blu-Rays were the next major improvement, and they are still the highest quality digital material you can find at home. They work at ‘high definition’, 1080 pixels across (so about twice as many as DVDs). Now you can buy 2K (2000 pixels, twice as good again) Blu-Rays as well, if you have a TV that can show them. Many streaming services can now broadcast in 2K if you’ve got the bandwidth. If you go to the cinema these days you are usually watching 4K. If you’ve got lots of money you can do this at home, too, although the programming available at home in 4K is pretty limited. 4K does approach the definition you get on actual film, although because it’s still digital it doesn’t look quite the same. Digital photography has improved a lot over the last ten years; if you look at the first digitally-shot films now you can see the quality really isn’t very good. It’s especially noticeable in the blacks: black comes out as grey because digital doesn’t really do true blacks, and you lose a lot of the contrast you can get on film. When we watch older films we are watching digital transfers. A good transfer will attempt to recreate the look of film on the digital source. Beware of mere ‘upscalings’, where an earlier transfer (of DVD or even VHS quality) is shown at higher definition, as sometimes the result is even worse than the earlier transfer because the contrast and colours get out of whack. Some TVs automatically upscale; I turn this feature off on my TV.

What about sound? Again, remember we are almost always hearing digital sound, while older films were recorded with analog. Before the 1950s this was almost always mono (one channel), where now we have 5.1 at least (the 5 refers to five speakers surrounding you, the .1 is the subwoofer). Sound on DVD and Blu-Ray is quite a contentious issue. Should older films be remixed into 5.1 sound? Many releases will have both a remix (sometimes sensitively done but sometimes just a more or less automatic upscaling) and the original mono track. Unfortunately it’s usually just the 5.1 version that is also the restored version, while the mono track is left as it was, often with elements that have degraded over time. Hollywood sound technicians could work magic in getting a vast array of sounds, dialogue, and music onto a single mono track; remixing their work into 5.1 destroys its integrity. What you really want is a restored version of the original track. But the same is true for 5.1; if possible, these more recent films should be watched with some approximation of a 5.1 system if that is what it was mixed in. (I don’t have that myself since I don’t have the space; I use a Bose sound bar that does ‘virtual’ surround.) Many films are released now in special home video mixes, which simplify the cinema version. Often, good headphones will give you the best sound quality for older films if you can’t afford fancy speakers.

A word about aspect ratio. Some people (myself included) get very fussy about aspect ratios. This refers to the proportions of the film frame. Before the 1950s almost all films were shot and displayed in what is called the ‘Academy’ ratio, 1.37:1 (that means the top is 1.37 and the side is 1). That’s the size of a standard frame of 35mm film, less a bit on the side where the optical soundtrack goes. Old TVs are at 4:3, which is almost the same. In the 50s, as a way to combat the increasing importance of television, studios started making films in various wide ratios. The first to catch on was Fox’s CinemaScope, eventually standardised at 2.55:1. Each studio had its own version, all slightly different. CinemaScope worked anamorphically: a special lens squashed the image as it was recorded on the 35mm frame, which was then projected unsquashed. Other systems just masked the upper and lower parts of the standard frame and then projected it in on a bigger, wider screen. Eventually a 16:9 ratio became standard, since it was in between most of the various wide formats. This is the ratio of the TV you probably have at home. So when you watch pre-50s movies you should have black bars on either side, and when you watch something like CinemaScope there will be bars at the top and bottom. Some TVs automatically re-scale DVDs (although not Blu-Rays usually), which is dreadful because you either lose part of the image or it gets stretched out. So make sure you know what aspect ratio your film should be in, so you can turn off that re-scaling setting if necessary and so you can be sure you’re not watching a cropped image. When widescreen films were shown on 4:3 TVs or transferred to VHS they were usually ‘panned and scanned’, a barbaric practice where the cinematographer’s carefully-made compositions would be ruined by putting it in 4:3. When those films were released on DVD/Blu-Ray the studio almost always did it right, but you still find some dreadful old transfers. IMDB will tell you the original aspect ratio.

Happy audio-viewing!

50s Films to See

The other day I was talking to some students about my 50s cinema book project and they asked for a list of 'must-sees'. I am obliging here with a list of ten 50s Hollywood films. Some of these will feature in the book, but not all will fit the theme (see the last post). These aren't necessarily my favourite films of the period but rather the ones that I think best sum up the decade while also being interesting and educational to watch. I'm not including period pieces (difficult as it was to leave out Singin' in the Rain, East of Eden, and Some Like It Hot) because I'm after films that teach about the '50s in a more direct way. I've left out two of my very favourite films (Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo) because to my mind they don't actually say all that much as specifically 1950s films and I've written about them elsewhere.

Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder), 1951
A down-at-heel journalist (Kirk Douglas) manipulates a situation of a man stuck in a cave for good copy. A number of these films make us question the idea of the 50s as being all about sweetness and conformity, but Ace in the Hole takes the cake. This is one of the most pessimistic films ever made; it's all about human mendacity and venality. None of the characters have any redeeming features and the film hints that neither has the audience. It's somehow also very fun to watch, largely because Kirk Douglas chews the scenery with such gusto; he doesn't care that his character is despicable.

From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann), 1953
The corruption of the army just before the attack on Pearl Harbor is exposed through multiple narratives: Montgomery Clift as a regimental bugler being forced to box, Frank Sinatra as an abused soldier, Burt Lancaster having an affair with his superior officer's wife (Deborah Kerr). While it's set in the 40s From Here to Eternity is a good example of a film that questions mid-century certainties, a surprisingly frequent 50s project. The acting is excellent and director Fred Zinnemann packs an extraordinary amount of mood and narrative into two short hours.

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan), 1954
Marlon Brando plays a dock worker who runs afoul of a corrupt union. I debated whether to include Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire (another Brando/Kazan collaboration), eventually settling on Waterfront because it says more to me about the 1950s. This is perhaps the film most ingrained in the HUAC witch hunts, as it is a clear attempt by Kazan to explain and atone for his naming of names before the committee (Kazan's assertions of the contrary notwithstanding). This also has Leonard Bernstein's only film score, which combined with the quintessentially 'method' acting makes for a very intense viewing experience.

The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli), 1955
The staff and patients of a sanitarium are thrown into disarray over the need for new drapes in the front room. The heightened mise-en-scène, acting, and music (the first twelve-tone score for a Hollywood film) combine to make this a perfect example of Minnelli's style in particular and of mid-century melodrama in general. A multi-generation cast also exhibits the multitude of acting styles that were available in the 50s.

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk), 1955
Another melodrama, in which widowed Jane Wyman falls in love with the much younger Thoreau-like Rock Hudson and their relationship is met with derision and dismay from the entire community, including Wyman's children. I'm working on my Sirk chapter at the moment and he's giving me no end of trouble; this film and his other melodramas are filled with contradictions and problems, but that makes them even more fascinating. In this film colour, design, and music act as metaphors for the central relationship and together create an aesthetic of excess that no other film of the period can really match. Minnelli's melodramas are more coherent and, being made at MGM, usually had higher production values than Sirk's for Universal, but Sirk has the edge in his creation of mood using all of the elements of cinema.

Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton), 1955
Two orphaned children go on the run from a fake preacher (Robert Mitchum) who is after money supposedly hidden by their father. The first time I saw this I couldn't get onto its wavelength but on a second viewing I was mesmerised. I'm not sure what changed, but this film is emotionally wrenching, terrifying, and wonderful, a study of innocence and guilt, love and hate, that is unmatched in the corpus. This is actor Charles Laughton's only film as a director, and one feels he put everything into it that he possibly could; he didn't need to direct any other films after. It was also very influential: it's visible in work by Scorsese, PT Anderson, Clint Eastwood, any of the more recent auteurs who are interested in those themes. The film also has an excellent score by Walter Schumann, one of those working-stiff composers who when given the opportunity came up with a masterpiece. This one is sui generis, very difficult to fit into our standard narratives of 1950s cinema.

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray), 1956
There was also a toss-up between this film and Rebel Without a Cause. Both of these Ray films should really be on the list (and James Dean is such a 50s icon that he ought not to be left off) but I've chosen Bigger Than Life for a few reasons, largely because I think it's simply a better film. James Mason is extraordinary in the role of a stereotypical suburban father who becomes addicted to cortisone and goes mad, thinking that God is telling him to sacrifice his son like Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac. Ray skewers two of the decade's leading supposed certainties, the infallibility of the father and the perfection of religion. His mise-en-scène plays into this, as he uses the wide CinemaScope frame to graphically place the characters in relation to each other and to their surroundings in unexpected ways.

The Pajama Game (Stanley Donen, George Abbott), 1957
Doris Day plays a pajama factory worker who falls in love with her superintendent (John Raitt). This is the quintessential 50s musical, in a film adaptation of a stage musical that can stand in stylistically for the other film adaptations of the time, and it stars Doris Day, who personifies the 50s. Is it the best 50s musical? No: it's not Singin' in the Rain or The Bandwagon, nor is in an adaptation of a show as good as Guys and Dolls or Kiss Me Kate, but there's something about its very mediocrity that tells us more about 50s musicals than most others. We also get Bob Fosse's 'Steam Heat', which sticks out from the rest in such an odd way that it's rather wonderful. It also tells us a lot about 50s gender politics.

North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock), 1958
Cary Grant is mistaken for a spy, and is chased around the country by enemies. We need a Hitchcock film, and this is a good one to stand in for all of his 50s work because a) it's such fun and b) it's a great example of cold war paranoia. It's full of iconic moments: the crop-duster chase (without music), the Mount Rushmore chase (with Bernard Herrmann's mad fandango), the sexy dialogue between Grant and Eva-Marie Saint that pushes the envelope about as far as it could be pushed at this time.

Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph Mankiewicz), 1959
Elizabeth Taylor is treated by psychiatrist Montgomery Clift after she witnesses the mysterious death of her brother. Maybe a choice from left-field, this one really explodes our common view of what was 'permissible' in the 50s. Tennessee Williams' screenplay is about lobotomies, homosexuality, cannibalism, incest, and more, all acted out by Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Katharine Hepburn in some of their best performances. This one does not hold back at all, albeit resulting in a very different kind of excess from Sirk. This southern gothic tale is all about dark human desires, while Sirk was interested in the more positive side of desire as quashed by 'polite' society.

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.

Truffaut/Anderson: Parlons musique!

The many stylistic and narrative nods to François Truffaut in Wes Anderson's work have often been commented upon (he's often mentioned in Matt Zoller Seitz's interview book The Wes Anderson Collection). I've recently been binge-watching Truffaut's films, about which I plan to write more later, and having just seen Anderson's new Grand Budapest Hotel the connections seem even stronger than I had realised previously. These include subject matter (Les 400 Coups/400 Blows - Rushmore; L'Argent de poche/Small Change - Moonrise Kingdom), narrative style (Jules et Jim - The Royal Tenenbaums), and shooting style (La Nuit américaine/Day for Night - Fantastic Mr Fox and the American Express commercial). The musical connections are just as striking, and haven't been noted as much. The most obvious one is the use of Georges Delerue's cue 'Le Grand chorale' from La Nuit américaine in both the American Express commercial and Fantastic Mr Fox, as well as a cue from Les Deux Anglaises de le continent/Two English Girls in the latter (which is also heard intertextually in La Nuit américaine as a cue from the score-in-progress of the film-within-a-film Je Vous Présente Paméla). But having just watched Jules et Jim for the first time in a few years, and upon listening to the score in isolation on Spotify in a London Sinfonietta recording, the connection seems deeper than the literal occasional re-use of Delerue's music. Delerue's Jules et Jim score often employs a Vivaldian harpsichord-and-strings texture with interlocking ostinato figures over a repeating bass line. The same description fits most of the scores for Anderson's films, whether by Mark Mothersbaugh or Alexandre Desplat. I'm not sure whether Anderson specifically referenced the Truffaut music in his discussions with his composers or if in describing what he wanted he ended up describing what Truffaut had also wanted, but in either case the impetus clearly came from Anderson, evidenced by the fact that the scores by the two very different composers with whom he has collaborated are so similar. The classicising textures in Delerue's Truffaut music go well beyond Jules et Jim, of course, most obviously in the aforementioned 'Grand Chorale' cue that borrows liberally from the Vivaldi Gloria and Handelian trumpet voluntaries. It's important to note that these are the 'Vivaldi' and 'Handel' of the 1960s 'sewing-machine' style and not of the present's more embodied early music performance. Hence why I use the world 'classicising:' such performances take Vivaldi, who could really be quite unruly, and tame him by using a consistent mezzoforte dynamic, four-square rhythm, and as little phrasing as possible (for more on this, read Richard Taruskin). This can be especially clearly heard in the Vivaldi track from a mandolin concerto on the Grand Budapest Hotel soundtrack album from a 1975 record by Siegfried Behrend, which fits the Andersonian sound world to a T.

There is yet another Truffaut connection with the use of Vivaldi, whose music he used to score L'Enfant sauvage/Wild Child, again in the sewing-machine style (the film was made in 1970). According to Michel Chion (La Musique au cinéma, Fayard 1995) Truffaut was making a specific point with this, using Vivaldi's music for its 'purity and cleanness of line': 'It's perhaps for this reason, among others, that in L'Enfant sauvage, inspired by the Memoirs of Dr Itard about a wild child from Aveyron, he chose to have extracts arranged from Vivaldi's concertos for flautino and mandolin. This composer's extremely fresh line and the thematic simplicity of his refrains, with their rustic tonic-dominant/dominant-tonic harmony, and also their popular character of accompanied melody (in a sonority very "classical music", enchanting, thin and elegant), all come together to serve the purposefully didactic aspect.[...] But also certain Vivaldian tuttis, as when Dr Itard manages to light a spark of comprehension in his student, take on a sense of exultation: of triumph of light over darkness, of clarity over confusion' (p. 389-390). Chion might well be describing Anderson's use of the 60s-Vivaldian style, which would seem to be portraying the same desire for order and reason. In Rushmore this is particularly true: the Vivaldian side of Mothersbaugh's score is heard while Max Fisher goes about his usual business and when things are going well for him, emphasising the character's classicism and need for order. Vivaldi disappears when Max loses control, to be replaced by Mothersbaugh's drums or 1960s British rock. The film ends with the Faces' 'Ooh La La', which comes of course from the rock world rather than the Vivaldi world. Perhaps this is a musical marker of Max's reconciliation between his obsessive Rushmore side and his new looser Grover Cleveland High side: the song is not classical (in the 18th-century/sewing-machine/Stravinsky sense) but its texture of plucked strings and ostinati do refer back to Vivaldi (guitars rather than mandolins). This is a major point of difference between Truffaut and Anderson: the former never used rock music to score his films, the closest he got being the (very classical!) style of mid-century French singer-songwriters (of whom Yves Montand was probably the best-known exemplar in the States, and who also shows up in Rushmore!). Truffaut, then, would seem less willing than Anderson to reconcile the classical and (for the lack of a better word) romantic sides of his characters' personalities. That assertion might surprise Anderson's detractors, who tend to see him as an unemotional clockmaker more concerned with the arrangement of objects within the frame than with meaningful content, but that seems a superficial critique by people who don't share the idea that order is pleasurable. In a film like Les 400 Coups the disorder of Antoine Doinel's life is highlighted anempathetically by the order portrayed in the nostalgic music (by Jean Constantin); Antoine, however, like Catherine in Jules et Jim or Victor in L'Enfant sauvage, does not succeed in re-ordering his life in the way that Anderson's heroes are able to do (Max, the various Tenenbaums, Steve Zissou, Mr Fox, etc.).

In this sense of order, then, The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson's most Truffauldian film. Concierge M. Gustave is not able to re-order his life, and the theme of the film is this very lack of order beyond the 'world of yesterday' (as Stefan Zweig calls it) represented by the hotel and its denizens. This is also the first film by Anderson that does not use any contemporary music, being entirely scored by Alexandre Desplat aside from a few Russian folksongs and the Vivaldi concerto mentioned above. It is set mostly in the 1930s, partly in the 1960s, and is bookended by the 1980s, but we hear no music from these decades. This contributes to the staging of the hermetically-sealed world of the hotel and Zubrowka, the fictional country in which it lies. In this world, even the 'natural' noises are worked into the music that runs through the virtuoso escape sequence: the scrapings of prisoners, the squeaking of cable car wires, the chanting of monks, and probably more (I need to see the film again poste haste). The one outside reference the score contains is a mistake: the prominent balalaikas in the score do sound good, but for me their sound references Russia far too strongly. The rest of the film points to central Europe, so the balalaikas feel out-of-place and, worse, seem to be an example of Western European/American ignorance that many different cultures lie behind the former Iron Curtain. The balalaikas strike the only false note in a film that is otherwise as carefully-judged as any of Anderson's other works, on the musical plane as well as the visual one.

In spite of its many laughs, Anderson's newest film represents a new, somewhat more pessimistic direction for the director, and (as I would have expected) the music plays into the shift in mood. Comparing the final sequence of each film in turn shows that the shift shouldn't really be a surprise, though. Bottle Rocket ends with Dignan still in prison, though I think we can assume he won't be there long. Rushmore has the most optimistic ending, as discussed above: Max has taken control of his life by allowing some disorder into it, as demonstrated by the music. The Royal Tenenbaums ends with the death of the father, but the family is healed. Nico's 'The Fairest of the Seasons' strikes the right bittersweet chord. Similarly, The Life Aquatic ends with both tragedy (Ned's death) and healing as Steve carries his friend Klaus's son on his shoulders to David Bowie's upbeat but ambiguous 'Queen Bitch'. The Darjeeling Limited stays in the same mode of reconciliation-with-life as the previous two films, with the quite unexpected but somehow correct use of Joe Dassin's 'Aux Champs Élysées' (another Truffaut/Paris homage?). Fantastic Mr Fox strikes a new note of ambiguity: even though the family is together and happy dancing in the supermarket to 'Let Her Dance', they are effectively stuck underground forever, the evil Boggis, Bunce and Bean still waiting for them above ground. Moonrise Kingdom also ends more ambiguously, ending with Britten's 'Cuckoo!' from Friday Afternoons as Sam visits Suzy through her window; it's almost an Antoine Doinel-type ending, leaving us hanging (though in a good way) as to what will happen next to the characters. So Grand Budapest Hotel's ending on a more melancholy note is prefigured by the ambiguous endings of the previous films. Again, however, I was bothered by the balalaikas; it seemed somewhat inappropriate to go straight into the credits with some upbeat Russian folk music (the Kamarinskaya). Something more melancholic like the rest of the score would have been better, I think, at least for the first part of the credits. The musical ending of the film proper, however, is perfectly judged, with a return of the yodellers accompanied by cimbalom and whistling over simple harmonies. It's almost a nod to Mahler.

When is a musical not a musical?

In studies of film genre, the musical is nearly always presented as a case study for analysis. Scholars and critics have spent a lot of time seeking to define what constitutes a film musical, but the more I think about it the more I feel they are asking the wrong question. Rick Altman's The American Film Musical (1987) is a seminal text not only in studies of the musical but in genre studies per se, and his structuralist narrative categorisation is still used. In its most basic form, the musical according to Altman stages the formation of the heterosexual couple through music. This often takes the form of a plot that starts with a man and a woman who dislike each other, but as soon as they sing or dance together they fall in love. Every Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie shares this narrative. In Shall We Dance (1937), for example, Astaire is a ballet dancer and Rogers is a tap dancer; their dance styles, as well as their personalities, seem incompatible but they discover in dancing together that they are in love. This plot was reversed in The Band Wagon (1953), with Astaire as the tap dancer and Cyd Charisse as the ballerina. Again, they don't get along until they dance together. There are plenty of musicals, though, that don't involve this narrative or even where it breaks down, but which everyone would still call a musical, so there is clearly something amiss with this categorisation (to be fair to Altman, he does recognise this). In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) the heroine and hero never sing together in the final film (their only duet was cut). One could argue that this leaves a hole in the film, and the boy-next-door John Truett does always seem a bit of drip when compared to Esther. John never sings at all, and non-singing characters in musicals never seem fully-realised. In The King and I (1956) and My Fair Lady (1964) everyone sings but the leading man and lady never have a duet. In both of these cases, though, something stands in the way that would not allow a marriage to take place within the world of the film and, significantly, the world of the original audience (race difference, class difference, age difference). The lack of duets in these cases is actually using the convention against itself, the exception that proves the rule.

If we decide to define the musical based on this narrative structure (boy meets girl, boy and girl fight, boy and girl sing/dance together, boy and girl get together) we run into some troublesome cases. This is exactly the structure of David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but not many people would call it a musical. (That said, I'm sure some producer somewhere is thinking at this very moment of adapting it for Broadway.) Why not? Though there is a lot of music in the film, it is all diegetic, 'real' within the world of the film. The characters never break into song or dance spontaneously, without being able to see/hear a band or recording accompanying them. Raymond Knapp calls this MERM, musically-enhanced reality mode. So let's re-define a musical as being a film in which MERM occurs. That way we include all of the couple-narrative musicals as well as the ones without that plot (Annie [1982] comes to mind). Yet there are plenty of film 'musicals' that do not evoke MERM. One such is Cabaret (1972); nearly all of the music (in the film, though not in the stage musical on which it is based) takes place within the cabaret itself, where it is entirely diegetic. Even though director Bob Fosse intercuts cabaret scenes with outside scenes, the cabaret can always be conceived of as going on in the background. Cabaret does not fit the narrative pattern either; Sally (Liza Minnelli) and Brian (Michael York) never make music together, nor do they get together at the end. So we need a different definition that will fit something like Cabaret. Perhaps a musical is best defined as a film that features a lot of musical performance, which can be based either in MERM or in reality. That sounds good at first, but the complications continue. Take the recent example of Inside Llewyn Davis or its stylistic prequel O Brother Where Art Thou, which do indeed feature many musical performances but which most viewers probably wouldn't consider to be musicals. A definition needs to be found that includes Cabaret but excludes Inside Llewyn Davis, so we need to think about the difference between the two films and their use of music. In Cabaret the music, even though it is diegetic, comments directly on the story (cabaret numbers as symbols of Weimer-era decadence), while in Llewyn Davis the music itself serves a plot function in that the characters are musicians but its subject matter does not do much plot-bearing in its lyrics or notes. Of course there is some connection; a song in one part of the film wouldn't work as well in another part, but without the songs Cabaret would have a very different plot (it would be like John van Druten's toothless play I Am a Camera, on which the musical is based) while Llewyn Davis would have the same plot (though it would be a pretty dull film). So can we define a musical as a film where music has an important plot function? That fits everything we've seen so far, but exceptions can be found. In some of the early Busby Berkeley musicals like Footlight Parade (1933) the music has no plot function at all, and  musical scenes are usually just tacked on at the end when we see the big show the characters have been working on throughout the film. Footlight Parade is about putting on cinema prologues, big musical stage shows that were performed in large cinemas before the movie in the early days of sound film. The musical numbers have no bearing on the movie's plot: the film is about the process of staging the numbers, not the numbers themselves, and the only music is whatever the characters happen to be working on at the time. Footlight Parade is more like Llewyn Davis than like Cabaret, but most would still consider Footlight Parade to be a musical.

I could go on searching for a definition of a 'musical film' but I think I've made my point: when dealing with generic categories there usually isn't a single blanket definition that can fit everything that it needs to. Genre is best seen as a constellation of definitions that overlap depending on the audience. And yet 'musical' seems a relatively straightforward category! In the film world 'film noir' is much more contentious, and the music world is chock-a-block with problematic genres. There's a very good article by Joti Rockwell that deals with some of these questions in relation to bluegrass:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8711239. But if it's so problematic, what's the use of the concept of genre anyway? It is of course of great use: without categorisations like genre we couldn't talk to each other about much of anything. Think of the word 'tree', which is really a generic category. There are some things that we can all agree on as being trees, and there are other things we can all agree on as not being trees. The California redwoods are definitely trees just as Shall We Dance is definitely a musical, and a water lily is definitely not a tree just as Taxi Driver is definitely not a musical. Genre allows us to say things like 'New Zealand has a lot of trees' without having to spend hours saying exactly which trees are in New Zealand. If every different tree had a different name, if every pencil had a different name, if every piece of paper had a different name, we could never get anywhere because we would always be listing things. But even these seemingly foolproof categories like 'tree' can break down. Outside my front door is a plant that I assumed was a bush when I moved in, but in December it bloomed with bright red bristly flowers: my bush was actually a pohutukawa tree disguising itself as a bush. I still resist calling it a tree because it fit so well my previously-established category of 'bush', being a short dense plant with leaves close to the ground. It's the Silver Linings Playbook of the plant world. To sum up, I think that we should stop thinking of genres (or any other categorisation) as autonomous platonic concepts and start seeing them as socially-constructed concepts. Much more interesting than trying to decide once and for all what a musical really is is to ask why it is perceived as such. What is the history of the category? Where did it come from? How has it changed over time? I can't come up with a good concluding sentence, so here's what is probably the best of all the couple-forming scenes, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in 'Dancing in the Dark' from The Band Wagon.

Academy Award Nominees and Their Music (Part 2)

Here are my thoughts on music in the rest of the Academy Award-nominated movies I've seen. Don't look too hard for a thesis, since these are just free-flowing reflections.

Hybrids: The Great Gatsby, 12 Years a Slave

I've called these two hybrids for the lack of a better word: both of them take a variety of musical approaches, none in particular being dominant. 12 Years a Slave has a score by Hans Zimmer and Gatsby has one by Craig Armstrong, but the scores of these two films are the least important aspects of their varied music.

Gatsby's compendium of music has been commented on by many since the film's release, with most critics falling into one of two camps: either the use of current African-American music is a very astute method to help the modern audience understand the excess of the 1920s, or it is a terrible symptom of the dumbing-down of the audience, implying that they would find authentic 1920s jazz so repugnant that they would stay away from the cinema. Scoring the movie with Jay-Z (who also produced) and a host of other contemporary rap, hip-hop, and R&B singers is a good way to make a link between the 20s and the present, but there is actually more at stake here than Luhrmann has been given credit for. It is easy to overlook the most interesting musical connection between the 1920s and now, which is the fact that in the 1920s as in the 2010s the most popular music among white listeners was coded as Black. This is something that Baz Luhrmann captures very well in the film, though it may have been a happy accident: even though we hear quite a lot of so-called 'Black' music we very rarely see Blacks on the screen, and when they are present they only appear in quick vignettes in bit parts. This demonstrates the fetishisation of black-ness among Whites: in the '20s, and probably in the present as well, one could argue that the popularity of African-American music among Whites was a smokescreen to hide oppression. White listeners use their approval of black music as a synecdoche for their approval of Blacks in general, assuming that because they say the music is so good they can get away with forcing Blacks to be subalterns (happy to have them perform on stage, but if they want to listen they'd better sit in the balcony). (My use of 'Black' rather than 'African-American' in regard to the 1920s is to avoid anachronism, though of course Whites in the 1920s were more likely to use 'Negro'.) At the same time, it probably would have been nice to hear more non-anachronistic music in the film, but if it had all been 'authentic' it wouldn't really have been a 'Baz Luhrmann' film. I'm a fan of Luhrmann and I think he manages to bring all of the music together with the images, providing a compelling case against historical authenticity. After all, you can't repeat the past. It will be interesting to see how well the film will have held up twenty years from now, when the current trendy music will be old-fashioned; using Bert Bacharach in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was cutting-edge at the time but now seems extremely silly. On an unrelated note, Luhrmann also provides Leonardo DiCaprio with the most exciting 'star entrance' since John Ford's introduction of John Wayne in Stagecoach.

I struggled mightily with the music of 12 Years a Slave; the score came very close to ruining the film for me. In addition to being nearly identical to Zimmer's score for The Thin Red Line, the score here is very intrusive, my pet peeve when it comes to film music. To put it succinctly, every time I heard the main theme I felt resentment for being told what to think about what I was seeing on screen. The other aspects of the film, including its sonic ones, are such a great achievement that having this pushy score frequently barge in is shockingly inept on the part of a director as gifted as Steve McQueen seems to be. This score exists out of fear, fear that the audience won't be able to 'handle' the tough questions the film asks, and fear that the screenplay and acting can't carry the audience through them. Without the music to direct our emotions in a conventional way (using culturally-ingrained tropes of musicalised sadness like downward motion, long slow tones, string instruments in harmony: the model is clearly the Barber 'Adagio') McQueen and Zimmer imply that the scenes of emotional suffering in the film would be more difficult to watch. That difficulty, however, should be the point! The score in this film is a balm, and I agree with Bertolt Brecht in feeling that music should not be used as such. Music is too powerful a medium to be used in such a simplistic way, the way that TW Adorno disdainfully called emotional listening. Because of its simplistic use of those emotional tropes, Zimmer's music encourages this type of listening. McQueen's professed desire is to make his audience think, but the poor use of music allows us to stop thinking and start merely feeling. There is a rather interesting paradox here: McQueen's goal is Brechtian: he wants to make the audience angry and inspire social change. But his directorial technique is grounded in Stanislavsky, not Brecht: emotional identification versus enforced alienation. The score, though, evoked in me a Brechtian response: in addition to the anger felt at being manipulated, it took me out of the film. For a viewer who doesn't care a fig for Brecht or Adorno the score would intensify the emotional identification because of the tropes to which it makes recourse, but at the same time it focusses attention away from what is happening on screen by acting as a balm. So does McQueen want us to identify or not? Can you be involved and alienated at the same time? Did McQueen hire Zimmer on purpose to annoy people like me? It's all especially annoying because the best single musical scene out of all of these films appears in this one. When Solomon, sold into slavery, attends the funeral of a fellow slave and the others start singing the spiritual 'Roll, Jordan, Roll', McQueen and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor do an extraordinary job of showing the divide between Solomon and the other slaves: Solomon, having grown up in the North, doesn't know the spiritual, and as he slowly begins to sing along, the tension he feels between his desire to regain his family and his feelings for his fellow slaves is palpable in Ejiofor's performance. McQueen shows this all in one long take, allowing us to see the character's entire emotional trajectory. It's an amazing tour-de-force of acting and directing.

Musicals: Inside Llewyn Davis, Frozen

By 'musical' here I simply mean a movie in which the characters break into song. Frozen is a traditional musical in that it employs what musicologist Raymond Knapp calls MERM (musically-enhanced reality mode), while Inside Llewyn Davis is about a musician whom we often see perform, alone and with others. The music of ILD was produced by T Bone Burnett, who also coordinated the music for the Coen brothers' two other musically-inspired films O Brother Where Art Thou and The Ladykillers. O Brother foregrounds musicking and sparked a major revival in 'roots' music in the United States, while The Ladykillers intelligently plays with classical/folk divide (though this is the only way in which the remake improves upon the British original). In ILD, however, the focus is squarely on the music. It is almost a work of musicology-as-film: it is a well-researched treatise on the 1960s folk music movement, the artist's place in society, shifting musical cultures and styles, and the music industry. It also highlights the need for an Oscar (or any award, for that matter) for music supervision: T Bone Burnett's work here and Randall Poster's for The Wolf of Wall Street, among other supervisors' work for other films, have not been given their due, though they contribute to the films just as much as editing, sound design, sets, or costumes. There used to be an award for Adaptation Score that could be transformed into such an award. (It was used mostly for musicals that were adapted from the stage; for example, André Previn won it for his work on My Fair Lady. Marvin Hamlisch won it for his adaptation of Scott Joplin for The Sting.) Burnett's work on ILD definitely fits into this category, as he took folk songs from the 1960s and worked with the actors to create idiomatic performances. The use of music in the film doesn't need much exegesis since it provides its own with astonishing perspicacity. Can a work of art be a doctoral thesis on itself?

The music and lyrics for Frozen aren't all that good (though I do quite like the 'frozen fractals all around'), but they work very well within the film and unlike the other recent Disney musicals like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled they sometimes develop plot rather than being merely parenthetical. 'Do You Wanna Build a Snowman' does this particularly well through careful orchestration and vocal arrangements to display the disintegrating relationship between the two sisters across their childhood. The influence of Wicked is everywhere, and that influence is usually negative, entailing songs that depend on simple modulations and high belted notes rather than intelligent lyrics and interesting harmonic development, as well of course as the plot that was lifted bodily from the musical to the movie. Even more interesting from a musicological perspective is the way in which people have taken ownership of the score, especially 'Let It Go', making their own YouTube videos singing the original lyrics and adapted ones. What's most surprising is that Disney not only has allowed this to happen without lawsuits, but has even encouraged it by including backing tracks on the soundtrack album for singing along. Perhaps this litigious company is opening up? Or do they just want people to buy the album so they can get the backing tracks? The iTunes version also has karaoke versions of the other songs, but they haven't caught on as well (my favourite is 'Love Is an Open Door' but I can't find anyone to sing it with me). A word here should also be said about the 'pop' version of 'Let It Go' that plays over the end credits. The editing of the vocal line on this track is extraordinarily bad; it sounds like each syllable was spliced together from different takes, the pitch correction settings went haywire at the end of phrases, the melismas at the end were performed by a vocoder, and some door creaks were added in at random. It's all very strange indeed, and if spread around a room could pass for a cubist sound installation. Perhaps Demi Lovato is a Braque fan and it was all done on purpose.

I could go on even longer about all of these films, especially if I saw them all a second time, but that's more than enough for now. If anyone is still reading, feel free to add comments. Let's get some arguments going.

Academy Award Nominees and Their Music

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the way music is used across the various films nominated for Academy Awards this year (only the ones I've seen, which unfortunately isn't as many as I would like). I'll be looking at and listening to the following eleven films in this post, the list including the awards for which they are nominated and a quick description of the way music is used.

1. 12 Years a Slave (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with a great deal of diegetic music (music within the world of the film, usually onscreen) from the 19th century.

2. 20 Feet from Stardom (Documentary)
A music documentary, so lots of music onscreen.

3. American Hustle (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Mostly a compilation score (by which I mean pre-existing music used nondiegetically, that is as underscore/background music that the characters in the movie don't hear or for which the source isn't seen on screen), alternating with a new score by Danny Elfman.

4. Blue Jasmine (Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay)
Compilation score.

5. Frozen (Animated Feature, Song)
A musical, so obviously a lot of music: songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, score by Christophe Beck.

6. The Great Gatsby (Production Design, Costume Design)
Everything, including the kitchen sink.

7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects)
Score by Howard Shore.

8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Sound Mixing, Cinematography)
A film about musicians, so lots of music onscreen and off.

9. The Lone Ranger (Makeup and Hairstyling, Visual Effects)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with various quotations of other music.

10. Philomena (Picture, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score)
Score by Alexandre Desplat, with occasional diegetic music.

11. The Wolf of Wall Street (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay)
Compilation score.

These are only a few of the hundreds of films released over the past year, so they can hardly be considered a representative sample, but what's striking is the heterogeneity of the way music is used in this group. The symphonic score is alive and well, and the busiest composers at the moment are all represented here (Desplat seems to be writing music for half of the films that come out these days). No John Williams, but he's nominated for The Book Thief, which I haven't seen. There is also a lot of music happening onscreen as well, though my being a musicologist is obviously going to lead me to those types of films.

I'm going to go through each one, but let's get the question of taste out of the way first: my favourites of these are The Wolf of Wall Street and Inside Llewyn Davis. I didn't despise any of these eleven, but The Hobbit was a great disappointment and The Lone Ranger was a mess, albeit a frequently amusing one. My vote for Best Picture would be The Wolf of Wall Street, though had Llewyn Davis been nominated it would have been a very tough decision between them. I'm more interested in narrative film, so 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary, doesn't really fit within this discussion. That said, however, the film, which concerns the lives of the backup singers who worked for big-name groups from the 1960s to the present, is one of the best documentaries I've seen. The director Morgan Neville alternates interviews with the singers with concert footage, both recent and archival, and gives the audience a well-rounded view of these signers and why they do what they do. So see it if you haven't yet.

Compilation Scores: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street

These three are brought together by the fact that they are scored predominantly with pre-existing music. The previous post on The Wolf of Wall Street described some of the clever ways in which Martin Scorsese used music to convey a wide variety of affects to the audience (that's affect as in Affektenlehre). David O. Russell is after something similar in American Hustle, though his movie has more in common musically with Scorsese's earlier work, where the music used to score the film is drawn from the lives of the characters. The film takes place in the 1970s, and the music dates from that time. Russell isn't as adept at Scorsese in this, however (is anyone?). Where Scorsese was careful to use music the characters would have actually listened to in order to draw them together into an aurally-constructed community, Russell's goal is simple scene- and mood-setting. Mostly we've got rock and disco to tell us that we're in the 70s, in case the hair wasn't enough, though Duke Ellington does play a role in the plot. There is also some new underscore by Danny Elfman, but I can't remember anything about it. In all I was a bit disappointed with the music in American Hustle, since even though it sets the stage well it doesn't really go much beyond that to actually comment on what we're seeing. Russell's previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, was rather more interesting musically, as the final dance sequence could be seen as summing up musically the various aspects of the relationship of the two main characters and their neuroses. But that's for a future post. Blue Jasmine shows off Woody Allen's taste in music as do all of his other films, and his choices are just as successful here. One would never think that the best way to score a drama that mixes Tennessee Williams with Bernie Madoff would be to use early jazz and blues, but it works beautifully. Anyone other than Allen wouldn't be able to do it, but Allen is probably the only person who would want to. The song lyrics or titles often comment on the scene (A Good Man is Hard to Find, indeed) and 'Blue Moon' is a recurring motive within the diegesis. I thought this was a very fine film with consistent and clever use of music, but it doesn't have anything in it as wonderful as the murder scene in Match Point set to Verdi's Otello, the opening Gershwin-scored montage that opens Manhattan, or the motivic use of 'September Song' in Radio Days. Still, competence and intelligence in the use of music is pretty rare these days, so all praise to Allen for doing it.

New Scores: The Hobbit, The Lone Ranger, Philomena

Howard Shore's score for the second Hobbit movie was more of the same stuff we've had so much of already in the first Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Step one: write some dramatic choral music in Elvish; Step two: find a funny instrument (like cimbalom or hardingfele); Step three: use low instruments when underground and high instruments when flying; etc. It's all very well if you like that stuff, which I did when LOTR was first coming out, but I don't find it very interesting anymore. Shore is at least a very competent composer; very few would be able to write so much music without too much repetition. Zimmer and his composing collective's score for The Lone Ranger was quite unmemorable, just Pirates of the Caribbean with some nods to Jerome Moross. The only exciting musical moment was during the finale when the music bursts into the William Tell Overture with a cheekily extended trumpet fanfare that plays with our expectations of when the theme proper is going to start, then continues to play with increasingly grandiose variations and modulations that get deliciously absurd. I wish the rest of the score had had that much wit. That also might have helped the film get a better reception than it did; much of the criticism was about inconsistency of tone, and a more consistently lighthearted score could have mitigated that. Alexandre Desplat's Philomena score, though nominated for the Best Score Oscar, was of the type that would have Adorno and Eisler rolling in their graves. It mostly keeps a low profile and could just as well have been done without. It may seem a funny thing for a musicologist to say, but my view of film scoring is that if a scene doesn't need music it shouldn't have any. Most of The Hobbit does need music because it goes with the epic territory and enhances the excitement being created by the editing, and the music also gives temporal continuity to complex sequences. The final sequence of The Lone Ranger needs music because you can't have the Lone Ranger without his theme tune. But a small-scale melodrama about a woman trying to find her long-lost son doesn't need much underscoring, at least not as shot by Stephen Frears and acted by Steve Coogan and Judi Dench. A film score often becomes a crutch on which to hang unconfident directing, editing, and acting, but Judi Dench certainly does not need such a crutch. Philomena would have been a much braver film if her performance could have had its effect on its own terms, without saccharine music telling the audience what they already know.

The other four films will be discussed in the next post. Look out, Adorno fans: he'll be making an appearance in relation to 12 Years a Slave.

Some Thoughts on Music in The Wolf of Wall Street

Yesterday I went to see The Wolf of Wall Street for the second time in the cinema. After the first viewing I thought that it was one of Scorsese's best films, up there with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. It is certainly his wittiest, more so than After Hours, his so-called comedy that is very interesting but not very funny. The film is an explosion of the ironic vein present in Scorsese's other large-canvas life story movies (especially Goodfellas and Casino), but while those films attain much of their power from the juxtaposition of light and dark, WoWS stays light almost all the way through. Before I get to the music more specifically, a musical example can illustrate the difference. In Casino Scorsese uses the final chorus of Bach's Matthew Passion to serve as a marker of seriousness and sorrow, the piece having this signification not only because of its specific source but because it is the only piece of 'Classical' music among an omnivorous pop tunestack. WoWS's only 'Classical' piece is the Cold Genius's aria from Purcell's King Arthur, which accompanies the mind slowing effect of quaaludes on Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) in a Stratton Oakmont board meeting. The audio-viewer who is unfamiliar with Purcell won't get the joke, but will still note the irony of having an opera aria accompany a comic scene in extreme slow motion.

The second viewing confirmed all of this, but also intensified the frustration I feel at the commentators who insist on seeing the film as glorifying the excesses of Jordan Belfort and his colleagues and who either label the film as morally irresponsible or want to follow it as a role model. Such viewers are clearly not really watching the film, or are seeing only what they want to see. Even though the film is comic, it shows that the consequences of the characters' actions are not at all positive. The question should be asked, however, whose fault this is. Is Scorsese to be blamed for not making his message clearer, or is the audience to be blamed for philistinism? This is meant to be an essay on music in the film, so there isn't space to get into the rights of the author and the rights of the interpreter: you can read Umberto Eco for that. But the problem is certainly not unique to this film; Fight Club is another famous example of a film that has been read as condoning the kind of behaviour it roundly critiques. In case anyone agrees that Scorsese is approving of the behaviour in the film, look again at its last shot: a sea of zombie-like faces (supposedly in Auckland, but the accents are wrong) waiting for Jordan Belfort's wisdom to rain down upon them. Could this be Scorsese's satirical representation of his movie's audience, taken in by Belfort's posturing?

Leaving morality aside for another time, let's get to the music. As with many of Scorsese's films, WoWS is scored entirely with pre-existing music, much of it used non-diegetically (meaning that the characters don't hear the music: it isn't coming from live musicians or a radio or CD player). Scorsese is the great master of this kind of scoring, as he and his music supervisors and producers (here Randall Poster and Robbie Robertson) choose music that perfectly fits a scene musically, lyrically, affectively, and narratively without ever distracting from the acting or cinematography (Wes Anderson is the other expert at this). WoWS uses about fifty pieces of music, listed here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/all-the-songs-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-including-devo-cypress-hill-foo-fighters-more-20131227. But this film is a musical departure from Scorsese's other films that use this kind of scoring. Starting with his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), and taking its full form in Mean Streets, the music has nearly always been representative of what the characters in the film would listen to, and has been carefully matched for time and place: lots of Motown and '60s rock in Mean Streets, Italian music for the early part of Raging Bull, Tony Bennett in Goodfellas, etc. Using this kind of music as underscore brings the characters together into a community: scoring the scenes with music from the characters' experience articulates their interrelationships in a deeper way than dialogue alone, or a newly composed score, would do. (At some point in the near future I'll write a book chapter about this use of music.) WoWS, however, uses a much wider variety of music, and it doesn't really have the same characterising function. In addition to the Purcell mentioned above, WoWS is scored with jazz, rock, funk, ska, disco, blues, etc. We never get a sense of what kind of music the characters would actually listen to. Instead, the smorgasbord of music contributes to the film's sense of excess; literally anything could come next. But that doesn't mean that the music is arbitrary, as Scorsese is playing with the connotations all of this music has. This is a well-theorised aspect of film music (see this collection: http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Tunes-Pre-existing-Ashgate-Popular/dp/0754651371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392595893&sr=8-1&keywords=Changing+Tunes+Stilwell), but I don't know of any other film where this connotative aspect is engaged with such consistency and vigour. Quentin Tarantino is a definite influence, having been influenced himself by Scorsese's earlier films, though Tarantino's choice of music is narrower than Scorsese's in WoWS. I'll need to see the film again with the ability to pause it and reflect before giving too many examples or coming up with a stronger theoretical position, but here are some more instances of Scorsese's rich musical sense.

While Belfort is wooing Naomi, Ahmad Jamal's bop version of 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' is playing in the background: the use of bop implies speed, and the song is itself a a wooing song.

The scene on Belfort's yacht in Portofino, when he is trying balance the need to go to Switzerland for his shady banking, to London for Aunt Emma's funeral, and to New York for the FBI investigation, is accompanied with Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross's 'Cloudburst'. The manic vocalese emphasises the sense of everything flying out of Jordan's control. This is also another wooing song (if you can follow the lyrics!), but because of the speed it seems more desperate; Jordan is trying to keep hold of his wife and all of his other luxuries.

'Goldfinger' is being sung at Jordan and Naomi's wedding, a rather poor choice on Jordan's part, but such is the character that he would probably like being thought of as a Bond villain.

Jimmy Castor's 'Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You' is playing over one of the tracking shots through the Stratton Oakmont office. In addition to the upbeat latin jazz feel, if we were to replace 'mama' with 'papa' the song would fit Jordan's relationship with his father (who is angry about his son's excesses but is fairly happy to go along for the ride). This reminds me very much of a scene in Who's That Knocking at My Door where Ray Barretto's similar 'Watusi' accompanies a party in one of the young men's apartments. The scene starts happily enough, but as the camera cranks faster (resulting in slow motion) through a series of progressive tracking shots across the apartment the party gets more sinister, all while the song's ostinato continues unabated.

Those are only a few examples of the musical craft that went into this film, but there are many more. Each audience member will react differently to the compilation score, depending on his/her own knowledge of the music used and the particular connotations it has, but the ability to be productively re-read is a mark of a good work of art.

How does this fit into my developing theory of film music? It wouldn't fit into my chapter on Scorsese and characterisation because the music in WoWS is more to do with affect and narrative. It therefore has more in common structurally with traditional Hollywood film scoring of the type Adorno and Eisler excoriated in Composing for the Films, with the obvious difference that pre-existing music is being used (so it's actually more like silent film scoring!). But unlike, say, a Dimitri Tiomkin score, the music here doesn't tell us what we already know, nor does it tell us what to think, nor does it hide poorly-executed editing or bad acting (this is the villain's theme! this music mickey-mouses the gunshots! this is cowboy music, and look there's a cowboy on the screen! that house is dangerous! this must be an exciting scene because the music is exciting!). It gives us more information than the visuals, dialogue, and sound effects do on their own, and it allows us as audience members to bring our own connotations of musical meaning to it. Scorsese has always used music as part of his filmmaking toolkit, instead of seeing it simply as something to be added on in post-production for some gloss. Music is as integral for Scorsese as any other aspect of filmmaking, which makes his work an ideal test case for theorising about film music. WoWS is the first of his films to use quite so heterogenous a collection of music, and can therefore join other work by him as a model for the many different uses to which music can be put in film. Already he has shown expertise in using pre-existing music to articulate character (Mean Streets), using newly-composed scores to emphasise the film's themes (Taxi Driver), using new scores to read against the film (The Last Temptation of Christ), making musicianship part of a film's narrative (New York, New York), compiling pre-existing music to destabilise a film from the inside out (Shutter Island), and making films about music (The Last Waltz). Perhaps there's a monograph somewhere down the line (but I have to get the one I'm working on about music and character underway first)!

Key Largo

To start my journey through cinema, I'll write about Key Largo (1948, directed by John Huston), the one film in my top ten that doesn't appear at all in the Sight and Sound poll. In fact it's rarely been given much critical commentary, and I only came across it by chance. A few years ago in my determination to see as many Howard Hawks films as possible, I bought a set of DVDs featuring the four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep (both directed by Hawks), Dark Passage (a real clunker directed by Delmar Daves), and Key Largo. Key Largo took me quite by surprise, and it engaged me even more than the brilliant Hawks films. The film takes place on the eponymous island, where Lauren Bacall and her father, Lionel Barrymore, run a hotel. Humphrey Bogart plays the former commanding officer of Bacall's brother, who was killed in the Second World War, and he comes to visit his friend's family. While he is there, a group of gangsters, led by Edward G. Robinson, decides to hide out in the hotel, which is closed for the off-season. A hurricane blows through and everyone is pushed to their limits.

The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall in this, their fourth and last film together, may not sizzle quite as much as it does in To Have and Have Not, but as actors both have gained immensely in their comfort with each other, Bacall especially by also having four more years of film experience behind her. Both are very much at home with their characters in the film and with their general 'star' personae. But good as their performances are, they are outshone by their supporting cast members. Lionel Barrymore gives the best performance of the late phase of his career, keeping in check the mannerisms often imitated by the likes of Mickey Rooney. Here we see the great actor instead of the cliche. Better yet is Claire Trevor, playing the mistress of Johnny Rocco (Robinson), the head gangster. She won an Oscar for this film, due mostly to her drunken performance of the song 'Moanin' Low', which Rico forces her to sing. She carries this off with an emotional honesty very rare among Hollywood actors of the time. But best of all is Edward G. Robinson as Rocco, standing in for the idea of resurgent post-war totalitarianism. Rocco is terrifying in his determination to make a comeback.

This leads us to the political stance offered by the film, made as the Cold War was starting to heat up. It is based on a play by the unjustly forgotten playwright Maxwell Anderson. The play was set in the 1930s and isn't Anderson's best work. Instead of the Second World War it takes the Spanish Civil War as its back story, and the gangsters even more explicitly represent fascism. The film, written by Richard Brooks and Huston, is an improvement on the play because the stakes seem higher, even though there wasn't a war on in 1948. 1948 was one of the first big 'red scare' years, and Bogart and Bacall were heavily involved in shielding the film industry from it, so their personae in this film make it an even clearer anti-fascist statement. The gangsters are clearly standing in for the right-wing extremists in the US at the time, and the film was somewhat ahead of its time in this way (All the King's Men, which was released the following year, had more of an impact on making people notice what was going on behind this kind of rhetoric. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to stop McCarthyism from destroying a lot of lives). The gangsters are very effective in showing the paranoia inherent in far-right thinking: Rocco talks big but deep down he is frightened of his own vulnerability, a fear that leads to his downfall. This film deserves to be talked about more these days, with far-right gangsterism making such a frightening comeback.

Claire Trever's performance of 'Moanin' Low' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vh8veUgPt8) forms the emotional centre of the film, and also makes the strongest point against the gangsters, whose lifestyle has made this woman miserable. Huston's staging of the scene is extraordinary. Trevor only appears alone in shot as she sings; a more conventional way to film the scene would be to mix the close shots of Trevor with group shots of her and her listeners, but instead Huston separates her from the listeners, shooting the latter (especially Robinson) mostly in close-up. She sings to the lone accompaniment of blowing wind and rain, heightening the sense of isolation. Here is a woman who has been chewed up and spit out by her exploiters. This is one of the bleakest scenes in all of cinema.

Though it ends happily, Key Largo isn't a particularly uplifting film. There are many more Johnny Roccos out there, and not many Humphrey Bogarts to bring them to justice. As a piece of filmmaking it is taut and tight, it has some fine performances, and its message is also important (even though it is not a 'message movie'). Search this one out if you haven't seen it!

Trailer (makes the film look more conventional than it is): http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/7829/Key-Largo-Original-Trailer-.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040506/

Ten Best Films

In the spirit of the newly-released Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, I thought I would compile my own list. Mine is obviously not as well-informed as those of the critics polled as I've not seen nearly as many films as they have (I especially lack experience with Japanese films and silents), so this is really a list of the best films I've seen, rather than the best of all time. It's a list that will surely change as I see more films. To compile it I wrote down all of the films I felt I couldn't live without (I came up with eighty), then I painstakingly put them in order. These are the ten that came out on top:

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
2. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
4. Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1951)
7. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
9. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
10. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

So it isn't a particularly surprising list, and all of these but Key Largo (I wasn't aware how much I like it!) showed up somewhere in the Sight and Sound poll (all the results can be seen here: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/). It looks like I'm definitely a Hitchcocko-Hawksian Cahiers du Cinéma-style auteurist, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

Now the grand project is to write about each of these films, and eventually all eighty on my list.

Best Picture Nominees: The Rest

Moneyball

This wasn’t too bad for a baseball movie, a genre in which I have very little interest. Luckily there weren’t too many scenes of game play (other than an interminable montage of the record-breaking win), as the film is more about the behind-the-scenes world of the game. The subject matter, therefore, is interesting, but the film falters in many places in its craft. What I found most grating was the constant use of shot/reverse-shot setups. Nearly every conversation was staged this way, with alternating shots of one actor speaking or reacting to another. Using more two-shots not only adds variety, but also gives the actors more space to act with rather than against each other. For more effective editing of dialogue scenes, see any Howard Hawks film (and it helps that his dialogue is of rather higher quality than that in Moneyball). So this really isn’t an actors’ film, though Jonah Hill gives a very good performance and deserves his nomination. The other grating element is the score, which was simply awful. It is a fine example of how music can detrimentally overdetermine a film’s action. Ironically, the score to The Artist is much less intrusive even though there is so much more of it. But my biggest qualm is the treatment of the ball players: the film gives a good illustration of how professional sports players are bought and sold like horseflesh, but it should have gone further in critiquing that exchange of bodies. Even though the film’s message would seem to be that you have to look below the surface to best use someone’s talents, the characters on both sides of the ‘moneyball’ theory act in the same way, exchanging people as commodities. In summary (before I turn into Adorno), Moneyball was not as bad as I feared it might be, but it still wasn’t very good. Unfortunately this seems to be a mantra for many of the nominated films, most of which have some glaring flaws but none of which are truly bad (for the record, my benchmark for the truly bad is Black Swan, to which I might devote another post).

The Tree of Life

This is definitely the most ambitious film of the year, and it’s a mess, but a compelling one. Some scenes are stunning, especially those that focus on nature. Malick doesn’t film people very well: there are far too many steadicam and handheld shots, which results in a sense of vertigo, and the many jump cuts draw attention to the camera rather than to the acting and the subject matter. Many have called this a deeply philosophical film, but it’s really rather obvious: you try to reconcile between the way of the Father and the way of the Mother. The scenes of the creation of the world don’t fit but they’re beautiful; maybe Malick should become a nature documentary filmmaker. The present-day scenes with Sean Penn aren’t enough a part of the film to really feel necessary. We don’t need the extra layer. That said, the last dream-like scene is great, as is the first montage of the three brothers growing up. In those scenes, more about mood than about character, the camera’s fluidity works well. The sound design and integration of music is excellent throughout. In short, this is the twenty-first-century version of 2001, just with Berlioz’s Requiem instead of Ligeti’s. Both films share the attempt to tell you everything about life in a little over two hours, and although both fail they are worthy attempts.

War Horse

I seem to remember enjoying this when I saw it last month in the cinema, but I’ve quite forgotten everything about it by now. It’s that kind of film.