I've recently started working on a book on Howard Hawks's use of music in his films, and as a way to get my value judgements out of the way I thought I would here give a gut-reaction ranking of his entire oeuvre. Over the past few months I've gone through all of the films chronologically, which has been a fascinating exercise. Watching them all in relatively quick succession shows just how much thematic material repeats from film to film: while the personnel surrounding him changes, there are most definitely elements that the whole oeuvre has in common. Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Peter Bogdanovich, and many other critics have listed these, so I don't want to take more time here to do it and instead get onto the films themselves. This ranking is based on my primal reactions and personal taste; the book's readings will of course be much better critically justified!
First, a caveat: I'm not ranking every film Hawks had a hand in, only those he directed large portions of. So I'm not including Viva Villa! (about a quarter directed by Hawks before he was fired and Jack Conway hired), The Outlaw (for which Hawks only shot a day or so of material), or Corvette K-225 (Hawks only produced, though apparently he had something to do with the screenplay). Of his eight silent films I'm only including the two I've seen complete: Fazil and A Girl in Every Port. The Road to Glory and The Air Circus are lost, The Cradle Snatchers is mostly lost, and I've not seen Fig Leaves, Paid to Love, or Trent's Last Case (please tell me if you've got a copy of any of those!).
1-10: The Immortals
These ten are the films that no film lover should miss, whether or not they care about Howard Hawks.
1. Rio Bravo (1959)
While Bringing Up Baby is my favourite film in absolute terms, Rio Bravo is my favourite Hawks film because it so perfectly distills everything the director is about. Its dramaturgy never falters in spite of its leisurely pace, it has the only Dimitri Tiomkin score that I really like, and it has the best performances most of its actors ever gave. It's nominally quite long, at 141 minutes, but every moment is packed with action and/or feeling and the time flies by amazingly quickly.
2. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Long my favourite film, Bringing Up Baby is simply the funniest ever made. Words fail, just watch it.
3. Red River (1948)
With the exception of over-acting Joanne Dru, this is the best-cast of all of Hawks's films. John Wayne demonstrates that he can actually act, Montgomery Clift becomes a star, Walter Brennan shows that he was the best character actor in the business, John Ireland and Harry Carey Jr. show how to support the leads, and Harry Carey Sr. adds nostalgia value. Each of the minor members of the team is fully characterised, which makes this a great film to get lost in. That also makes analysing it quite challenging: I try for critical detachment but keep getting caught up! (This is true of all of these great films, and I found the same thing writing my doctoral thesis on Monteverdi operas.)
4. To Have and Have Not (1944)
In which Bogart and Bacall demonstrate what chemistry means. Every performance here is good, especially Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael. I reckon this is Hawks's most musically sophisticated film.
5. Ball of Fire (1941)
Gary Cooper is watchable when doing comedy, and Barbara Stanwyck is especially watchable here. They are surrounded by a fine supporting cast and a great script by Billy Wilder. Alfred Newman's score is very clever; ironically, the music here is much better than in the 'musical' remake, A Song is Born.
6. His Girl Friday (1940)
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell have great chemistry here. There are some unfortunately preachy moments in the film (very unusual for Hawks), but most of the time it's expert filmmaking.
7. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Like Red River, this one is full of well-rounded supporting characters. It also has one of Cary Grant's best performances.
8. The Dawn Patrol (1930)
Hawks's first sound picture and his first real masterpiece. This one has everything: action, comedy, and engaging performances (especially from Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr). Hawks shows right off the bat how good he is at dialogue directing, and the screenplay has a clear, organic structure. The air battle sequences are beautifully done.
9. Scarface (1931)
Hawks seems to have got all of his grisly guignol tendencies out of his system with this one, his most violent and dark film (but also very funny). Paul Muni overacts, but George Raft is great as his sidekick and there are some good supporting performances and cracking Ben Hecht dialogue.
10. Hatari! (1962)
Many critics would not rate this as high, but it provides the most pure pleasure of all of Hawks's films apart from Rio Bravo and Bringing Up Baby. Yes, it is overlong and sometimes wooly in its structure, but it's two and a half hours of joy.
11-20: Good
These ten are amusing and interesting, not masterpieces but still quite good.
11. Twentieth Century (1934)
There is an awful lot to like here, especially the cast and the dialogue, but I can't help but wonder if Hawks had stuck more closely to the play with its single setting on the train whether this would be even better. As funny as it is, the long prologue before we get to the train feels somewhat unnecessary. As the play and the musical adaptation (On the Twentieth Century) showed, there is plenty of intrigue to keep us occupied in the single location. Here is an example of the drive to 'open out' stage plays for the screen not really being necessary.
12. Air Force (1943)
Pure propoganda, but well made and effective. The pilot's death scene, written by William Faulkner and subtly scored by Franz Waxman, is the most moving scene Hawks ever shot.
13. I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
Solid middle-period Cary Grant paired with Ann Sheridan, and some amusing situations and dialogue, don't quite manage to let this take off into screwball hilarity.
14. Ceiling Zero (1936)
Hawks made this aviation film between the more famous Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings. James Cagney is the only really great thing about this one, but he's here at his very best and the rest is watchable.
15. The Big Sky (1952)
A little known middle-period Hawks western, with fine performances from Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin. This is constantly engaging if never quite breaking through to sublimity. It's Hawks's most under-rated film.
16. Monkey Business (1952)
More mid-career Cary Grant, mismatched with Ginger Rogers and a screenplay that starts well but descends into dullness. Grant's scenes with Marilyn Monroe are the best part.
17. The Big Sleep (1946)
If The Big Sky is Hawks's most under-rated film, this is his most over-rated. Yes, it's fun to get lost in, but at the end of the day the plot makes no sense and I get the feeling that the whole thing doesn't really amount to a hill of beans (to quote another Bogart picture). But Bogart and Bacall are wonderful to watch, as are most of the supporting cast, and the nutty dialogue is amusing. I don't like the Max Steiner score, which is a little too repetitive and obvious.
18. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Hawks seems to have mostly been phoning in the dialogue direction, and the songs (the best part of the picture) were directed by Jack Cole. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are excellent in spite of mediocre dialogue.
19. Barbary Coast (1935)
The strange combination of Edward G. Robinson, Joel McRae, and Miriam Hopkins destabilises this film, but makes it interesting. Hawks was never as good at doing period pictures as he was with contemporary subjects, but this makes a gallant attempt at recreating gold rush San Francisco.
20. The Crowd Roars (1932)
Auto racing doesn't really float my boat, but James Cagney is good as always. The dialogue direction feels like a step backwards from The Dawn Patrol.
21-31: Falling Short
Compiling this list has made me realise that Hawks made quite a few films that don't quite work for various reasons. Sometimes it's miscasting or an unfixable screenplay, or they just rub me the wrong way.
21. Sergeant York (1941)
This is a Hollywood propaganda film and little more (compare to Air Force, also propaganda but much more compelling). I don't find much evidence of Hawks here; it's really more of a studio film than most of Hawks's other work. I find Gary Cooper annoying here and elsewhere (other than Ball of Fire).
22. A Girl in Every Port (1928)
This is widely recognised as the first truly Hawksian film, in that it deals with the male group/conflict subject matter he would return to so often. It's a very breezy film, and not as stolid as many other silents. One can feel Hawks wanting to break into dialogue.
23. Tiger Shark (1932)
Edward G. Robinson is wonderful here playing a Portuguese fisherman, but the rest is not.
24. The Thing From Another World (1951)
There is some debate as to whether this was ghost-directed by Hawks or was actually done by the credited Christian Nyby. Whether or not he told them where to put the camera, Hawks's fingerprints are all over this, almost to a fault. Like so many science fiction films of the period, it is overly schematic and predictable. This is anathema for Hawksians, but I prefer The Day the Earth Stood Still.
25. The Criminal Code (1931)
Walter Huston and Boris Karloff are always watchable, but this one is pretty forgettable. It is a backwards step from The Dawn Patrol in its speed and vivacity.
26. Come and Get It! (1936)
The Hawks sections of this (approximately half, before he was replaced by William Wyler) are decent but no more. The same can be said of the Wyler sections. In his biography of Hawks, Todd McCarthy describes the film that could have been, making the one that was made seem even more disappointing.
27. A Song Is Born (1948)
Aside from its jazz sequences, this is an unnecessary and dull musical remake of Ball of Fire (often shot-for-shot).
28. The Ransom of Red Chief (1952)
Hawks's only short film, released as part of the omnibus O. Henry's Full House. Hawks's film is a mediocre adaptation within a mediocre group of five O. Henry adaptations.
29. Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
This is a largely inert film with a lovely performance by Paula Prentiss and the occasional good scene. One gets the impression that Hawks was phoning it in.
30. Rio Lobo (1970)
This is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't as bad as some make it out to be. The first half goes along very well; it's really only the second half that falters, as it becomes an uninteresting rehash of Rio Bravo. Most of the acting as bad, but I quite like Jorge Rivera's performance: he finds a very Hawksian balance between serious and tongue-in-cheek.
31. El Dorado (1967)
An imitation of Rio Bravo, this can only pale in comparison. Without the precedent of Rio Bravo, would this be seen as a better film? In a way it's a meaningless question, as the intertextual references are so explicit here. El Dorado is more interesting as a semiotic case study than as a film. The French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma went nuts for it because it seemed to confirm all of their auteurist theories, but even they don't quite claim that it's a great film.
32-36: Disasters
Even Howard Hawks can fumble horribly, as these turkeys demonstrate.
32. Red Line 7000 (1965)
Some people out there (Robin Wood and Quentin Tarantino among them) swear by this auto racing film, but it is Hawks at his most derivative, and it also features some truly awful music. The acting is bad, but the cars perform well. Stick to The Crowd Roars if you want a film about cars. I should say, though, that I've only seen this in a pan-and-scan VHS version. A new blu-ray is coming out later this year, and seeing it in the right aspect ratio and digitally restored might make a difference (I doubt it).
33. Fazil (1928)
This one is a curiosity in that it features every orientalist stereotype in the book. There are some intriguing scenes, but Hawks had not developed much of his signature style and there is little to set this one apart from all of the other Middle Eastern-themed films of the 1920s.
34. Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
It is often said that Hawks excelled in every genre, but this film belies that claim: he failed miserably in the historical epic. The unrelenting score by Dimitri Tiomkin, the abysmal acting, and the stolid dialogue drag this one down into the lower depths, but the production design (by the great Alexandre Trauner) is first-rate and there is some good editing, especially in the pyramid building sequence and the climatic burial. But the success of these sequences has little to do with Hawks and are more the work of Trauner and editor Rudi Fehr. Those sequences can't save the film.
35. Today We Live (1933)
Miscast Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford star in this boring First World War drama. The first few reels of this, which take place at Crawford's country house (she's meant to be English), are unbearably awful, with the slowest dialogue in the whole Hawks canon. Franchot Tone does manage to liven things up in a decent performance, but Cooper and Crawford are both dull as dishwater.
36. The Road to Glory (1936)
This is Hawks's worst film, and surely one of the worst to ever come out of Hollywood. An unnecessary remake of the French film Les Croix de Bois, this is Hawks doing the First World War even worse than he did in Today We Live. The whole thing runs as slow as molasses, and Frederic March gives a particularly awful performance in the lead. Lionel Barrymore hams it up in the worst possible way, yet he's still the best thing in the film. The dialogue is poorly edited and has the pacing of a bad stage performance. It all reeks of sentimentality, and there is a particularly egregious performance of Schubert's 'Ave Maria' in a church while it is being bombed. June Lang, the female lead, gives the worst performance in any Hawks film (there's a reason you've never heard of her), not helped by wooden costars and unsensitive direction. It's just plain awful.
There we go, Hawks's films ranked according to my taste. Percentage-wise there are only a few duds, and considering how prolific Hawks was over a long period it's a pretty good track record. I suppose I fall into the typical 'auteurist' category of critics, who find even bad films by an 'auteur' interesting. Now I've got to write that book...
Monday, 7 August 2017
Friday, 3 March 2017
L'enfant et les sortilèges: Dream or Reality?
Here is opera production journal part two! Danger: Freud ahead.
At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').
After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.
This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.
The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.
The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.
The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).
When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.
At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').
After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.
This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.
The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.
The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.
The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).
When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Towards a Production of L'enfant et les sortilèges
This year the greater part of our university's opera production will be Maurice Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. As part of their coursework, the students in the cast have to write a journal documenting their experiences with preparation, rehearsals, and performance, and in the spirit of solidarity I am going to do the same as I prepare to direct the opera.
My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.
What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).
But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'
I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).
So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.
How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.
With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.
My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.
What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).
But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'
I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).
So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.
How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.
With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.
Monday, 9 February 2015
Leit-musique vs the Modular Film Score
In his two-volume tome Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition Richard Taruskin mentions Igor Stravinsky's subsequent loathing of what the composer derivatively termed the 'leit-musique' in his 1910 ballet The Firebird. This is the descriptive plot-bearing music that was liquidated from all three of the suites Stravinsky culled from the ballet (the last, dating from 1945, which Stravinsky suggested should replace the full ballet score even when choreographed). The music consists mostly of bits of previously- or later-developed themes (Leitmotifs) that float through a rather nebulous sometimes-tonal sometimes-octatonic pitch space. Stravinsky didn't like this music because it was too descriptive, subjective, and emotional, three things the composer in his subsequent arch-Modernist guise could not support. At least the main dances could be detached from their context and studied as pure music. To hear how this works, listen to the 'Magic Carillon' (reh. 98 in the original score) through to the Dance of Kastchei's Retinue (reh. 126). The main theme of Kastchei's Dance gradually starts to form out of the musical ether at the beginning of this section, but Stravinsky delays a full statement until the dance itself six minutes later. Fragments of other themes float through, and the music is highly descriptive of what would be happening onstage, having clearly been worked on in close collaboration with choreographer Michel Fokine.
Whatever we think of Stravinsky's rejection of the descriptive music (which according to Taruskin is actually the most interesting music in the ballet, and the culmination of this kind of balletic scoring), it is clear that the 'classical' Hollywood film score operates on very much the same principles as this 'leit-musique': dramatically descriptive, motivic music of rapidly shifting tonality sometimes coalescing into fully-stated themes. Max Steiner and Erich Korngold are excellent exemplars of this technique in its early days. In Steiner's score for Casablanca, fragments of 'As Time Goes By' are heard throughout the film, alerting to the audience to the past relationship between Rick and Elsa even when the dialogue is not specifically alluding to it. At the emotional climaxes the full theme is stated. The recent master of the technique is John Williams, without a doubt the most influential film composer of the last forty years. The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, featuring River Phoenix as young Indy and an adventure on a train, provides a good example. The cue is called 'Indy's Very First Adventure' on the soundtrack album. The music is there to pull the story along, just as it is in the Firebird, and at first it is mostly unmelodic, meandering around various keys. Occasionally Williams will give us a snippet of melody or cadence-directed harmony, usually when something on the visual track is meant to induce wonder or excitement (for example, some Spanish-inflected music is heard as Indy discovers an antique cross in a cave and music with a more definite rhythmic contour plays as Indy runs across the top of a train). As the opening sequence progresses, allusions to the main Indiana Jones theme (the 'Raiders March') can be caught by astute ears (at 8'30'' in the horns and trombones, deconstructed melodically at 9'15'', just the beginning of the theme in the usual trumpets at 9'46'', and as very short points of imitation shortly after). At 10'30'' a foreshadowing statement of the Holy Grail theme can be heard, just as the block of leit-musique in Firebird that precedes the dance of Khashchei's subjects features hints of the dance's theme. Finally the cue ends (at 12 minutes!) with a near-complete statement of the Raiders March: the young scout has passed through his first adventure and grown into our hero. From its first major outing in Jaws in 1975, this neo-Steiner style dominated big-budget neo-classical Hollywood at least until the early 2000s.
But the past decade has seen a shift in the 'default' style of Hollywood music from leit-musique to a more modular-based scoring practice. In this style of scoring, repetition and variation of small melodic or harmonic cells governs the score rather than floating motives and themes. I would predict that Howard Shore's scores for the Lord of the Rings trilogy will be seen as the last hurrah of the earlier style; since then it seems that the majority of scores that the public has really noticed have been of the modular type, notably Hans Zimmer's scores for Christopher Nolan's Inception and the same director's Batman films (composed in collaboration with James Newton Howard), the scores by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher's The Social Network and Gone Girl, and various scores by two other big names in film music at the moment, Alexandre Desplat and Thomas Newman. While it is in action movies that these scores are most noticeable (largely because of the quantity and decibel-level of the music), the style extends to every sort of film, just as the leit-musique style did previously. Animated movies are usually scored more conservatively than live action, but Newman's scores for Pixar films show how pervasive the modular style is: in Finding Nemo there is really no 'Nemo theme' and 'Dory theme', but rather a texture of repeating figures that are carefully manipulated by Newman to match the onscreen action or emotion. Compare his cousin Randy Newman's more traditional scores for the Toy Story films. Newman's Finding Nemo and Wall-E, or Desplat's scores for Wes Anderson, show that this technique can be just as sophisticated as leit-musique (I can't even imagine a motivic score working for Anderson). But just like leit-musique the modular score is easily abused; in some of the more inane superhero or science fiction movies the pounding of the repeated figures becomes unbearable. Zimmer's score for Interstellar forces the audience into submission rather then offering them an intelligent way into this tricky film.
Where does this modular music come from? The (perhaps too) obvious answer is that is is derived from concert minimalism by composers like post avant-garde Philip Glass and John Adams. This film music would fit nicely into Robert Fink's thesis of recombinant teleology in music (which takes in minimalism, disco, and the Suzuki method among other things), arguing that this type of music is based on repetition on a micro level to create development at the macro level. A possible influence within film music is Bernard Herrmann, who favoured repeating patterns over melodic themes, though the effect of his scores is usually quite different from that of Zimmer's or Desplat's. The driving music in Vertigo and Psycho does have a great deal in common with these modular scores, but Vertigo's music is always in search of cadential resolution, a feature borrowed from Tristan und Isolde, which modular music usually is not. The pattern repeats until it stops, often quite suddenly. But the musical technique in Vertigo's driving scenes is similar, if not the musical goal. Herrmann sets up a cell-based pattern, usually rhythmic, which he varies through orchestration and register but which retains its fundamental identity as a cell. Herrmann works within the bounds of tonality, knowing that by delaying resolution the audience will share Scottie's frustration as he tries to figure out the mysterious Madeleine.
Film scholar David Bordwell writes about 'intensified continuity' in the filmmaking of the past few decades, where directors, cinematographers, and editors use the basic language of classical Hollywood film but use more and faster cuts, more variations in close-up and long shot, and more camera movement. The use of a modular score that develops slowly and continuously rather than offering fragments floating through the texture might mitigate the sensory discombobulation caused by the rapid imagery. But that would not explain the effectiveness of modular scores in Wes Anderson's films (I'm thinking particularly of Desplat's scores for Fantastic Mr Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel), as Anderson rarely moves his camera and favours planimetric shots. Perhaps with Anderson we are meant to notice the small variations that Desplat puts into the modules as the films run past. His most interesting scores have been for Anderson.
The rise of modular score might also be a symptom of a lack of desire for melody or 'theme'. Can anyone think of a movie theme more recent than those for Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings that have served as a major signifier for the film in which they appear? Frozen is the obvious exception, but as an animated musical it is a rather different kettle of fish. Perhaps the days of tune-plugging are over, not necessarily a bad thing. Similar trends can be heard in popular music, with the rise of beat-based music out of underground clubs and into the mainstream.
This clearly requires more thought (and more film-viewing), but this trend seems quite obvious, and would warrant discussion even if Zimmer, Desplat, Newman, and Reznor/Ross were its only practitioners, so important have their scores been. Of the films I've seen recently, the one that takes the modular scoring farthest is Gone Girl, which has nearly wall-to-wall music and very subtle variations on simple material based on the scene being played. Reznor and Ross are playing the scenes in a similar way to early Stravinsky or Williams, but using the language of modular development rather than leit-musique. Of course this isn't the only way that films are scored now, I'm merely claiming that it is a prominent trend. Leit-musique is still around, as are alternative approaches like Jonny Greenwood's Messiaen-influenced music for Paul Thomas Anderson, or Martin Scorsese's continued genius in scoring films with pre-existing music. But it seems that the big-budget, award-winning scores are mostly of the modular type.
Whatever we think of Stravinsky's rejection of the descriptive music (which according to Taruskin is actually the most interesting music in the ballet, and the culmination of this kind of balletic scoring), it is clear that the 'classical' Hollywood film score operates on very much the same principles as this 'leit-musique': dramatically descriptive, motivic music of rapidly shifting tonality sometimes coalescing into fully-stated themes. Max Steiner and Erich Korngold are excellent exemplars of this technique in its early days. In Steiner's score for Casablanca, fragments of 'As Time Goes By' are heard throughout the film, alerting to the audience to the past relationship between Rick and Elsa even when the dialogue is not specifically alluding to it. At the emotional climaxes the full theme is stated. The recent master of the technique is John Williams, without a doubt the most influential film composer of the last forty years. The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, featuring River Phoenix as young Indy and an adventure on a train, provides a good example. The cue is called 'Indy's Very First Adventure' on the soundtrack album. The music is there to pull the story along, just as it is in the Firebird, and at first it is mostly unmelodic, meandering around various keys. Occasionally Williams will give us a snippet of melody or cadence-directed harmony, usually when something on the visual track is meant to induce wonder or excitement (for example, some Spanish-inflected music is heard as Indy discovers an antique cross in a cave and music with a more definite rhythmic contour plays as Indy runs across the top of a train). As the opening sequence progresses, allusions to the main Indiana Jones theme (the 'Raiders March') can be caught by astute ears (at 8'30'' in the horns and trombones, deconstructed melodically at 9'15'', just the beginning of the theme in the usual trumpets at 9'46'', and as very short points of imitation shortly after). At 10'30'' a foreshadowing statement of the Holy Grail theme can be heard, just as the block of leit-musique in Firebird that precedes the dance of Khashchei's subjects features hints of the dance's theme. Finally the cue ends (at 12 minutes!) with a near-complete statement of the Raiders March: the young scout has passed through his first adventure and grown into our hero. From its first major outing in Jaws in 1975, this neo-Steiner style dominated big-budget neo-classical Hollywood at least until the early 2000s.
But the past decade has seen a shift in the 'default' style of Hollywood music from leit-musique to a more modular-based scoring practice. In this style of scoring, repetition and variation of small melodic or harmonic cells governs the score rather than floating motives and themes. I would predict that Howard Shore's scores for the Lord of the Rings trilogy will be seen as the last hurrah of the earlier style; since then it seems that the majority of scores that the public has really noticed have been of the modular type, notably Hans Zimmer's scores for Christopher Nolan's Inception and the same director's Batman films (composed in collaboration with James Newton Howard), the scores by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher's The Social Network and Gone Girl, and various scores by two other big names in film music at the moment, Alexandre Desplat and Thomas Newman. While it is in action movies that these scores are most noticeable (largely because of the quantity and decibel-level of the music), the style extends to every sort of film, just as the leit-musique style did previously. Animated movies are usually scored more conservatively than live action, but Newman's scores for Pixar films show how pervasive the modular style is: in Finding Nemo there is really no 'Nemo theme' and 'Dory theme', but rather a texture of repeating figures that are carefully manipulated by Newman to match the onscreen action or emotion. Compare his cousin Randy Newman's more traditional scores for the Toy Story films. Newman's Finding Nemo and Wall-E, or Desplat's scores for Wes Anderson, show that this technique can be just as sophisticated as leit-musique (I can't even imagine a motivic score working for Anderson). But just like leit-musique the modular score is easily abused; in some of the more inane superhero or science fiction movies the pounding of the repeated figures becomes unbearable. Zimmer's score for Interstellar forces the audience into submission rather then offering them an intelligent way into this tricky film.
Where does this modular music come from? The (perhaps too) obvious answer is that is is derived from concert minimalism by composers like post avant-garde Philip Glass and John Adams. This film music would fit nicely into Robert Fink's thesis of recombinant teleology in music (which takes in minimalism, disco, and the Suzuki method among other things), arguing that this type of music is based on repetition on a micro level to create development at the macro level. A possible influence within film music is Bernard Herrmann, who favoured repeating patterns over melodic themes, though the effect of his scores is usually quite different from that of Zimmer's or Desplat's. The driving music in Vertigo and Psycho does have a great deal in common with these modular scores, but Vertigo's music is always in search of cadential resolution, a feature borrowed from Tristan und Isolde, which modular music usually is not. The pattern repeats until it stops, often quite suddenly. But the musical technique in Vertigo's driving scenes is similar, if not the musical goal. Herrmann sets up a cell-based pattern, usually rhythmic, which he varies through orchestration and register but which retains its fundamental identity as a cell. Herrmann works within the bounds of tonality, knowing that by delaying resolution the audience will share Scottie's frustration as he tries to figure out the mysterious Madeleine.
Film scholar David Bordwell writes about 'intensified continuity' in the filmmaking of the past few decades, where directors, cinematographers, and editors use the basic language of classical Hollywood film but use more and faster cuts, more variations in close-up and long shot, and more camera movement. The use of a modular score that develops slowly and continuously rather than offering fragments floating through the texture might mitigate the sensory discombobulation caused by the rapid imagery. But that would not explain the effectiveness of modular scores in Wes Anderson's films (I'm thinking particularly of Desplat's scores for Fantastic Mr Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel), as Anderson rarely moves his camera and favours planimetric shots. Perhaps with Anderson we are meant to notice the small variations that Desplat puts into the modules as the films run past. His most interesting scores have been for Anderson.
The rise of modular score might also be a symptom of a lack of desire for melody or 'theme'. Can anyone think of a movie theme more recent than those for Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings that have served as a major signifier for the film in which they appear? Frozen is the obvious exception, but as an animated musical it is a rather different kettle of fish. Perhaps the days of tune-plugging are over, not necessarily a bad thing. Similar trends can be heard in popular music, with the rise of beat-based music out of underground clubs and into the mainstream.
This clearly requires more thought (and more film-viewing), but this trend seems quite obvious, and would warrant discussion even if Zimmer, Desplat, Newman, and Reznor/Ross were its only practitioners, so important have their scores been. Of the films I've seen recently, the one that takes the modular scoring farthest is Gone Girl, which has nearly wall-to-wall music and very subtle variations on simple material based on the scene being played. Reznor and Ross are playing the scenes in a similar way to early Stravinsky or Williams, but using the language of modular development rather than leit-musique. Of course this isn't the only way that films are scored now, I'm merely claiming that it is a prominent trend. Leit-musique is still around, as are alternative approaches like Jonny Greenwood's Messiaen-influenced music for Paul Thomas Anderson, or Martin Scorsese's continued genius in scoring films with pre-existing music. But it seems that the big-budget, award-winning scores are mostly of the modular type.
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
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:
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?
Monday, 16 June 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, 10 April 2014
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.
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.
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