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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841506258 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Music and Levels of Narration Film
Steps Across the Border
By Guido Heidt
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-625-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Film Music Narratology
i. Laughing with film theory
A book written and published in Bristol might do worse than to start with a scene from a film by Bristol's second-best claim to cinematic fame, animation studio Aardman. The film is Wallace & Gromit in 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' 2005), and the scene shows the villagers gathered in the church, anxious because of mysterious goings-on in their vegetable gardens. The old parish priest is wheeled in and, accompanied by ominous orchestral chords, gives a fire-and-brimstone speech, surmising that the culprit is 'no man', but something more terrible, and that in their reckless quest for ever larger vegetables the villagers have brought a terrible curse upon themselves – a curse promptly underlined by a fortissimo organ repeating the chords. But then the village policeman barks at someone to be quiet, the image cuts away from the nave, and we see the organist in her corner, fingers still on the keys, and everyone in the cinema is laughing.
Why do we laugh? Because the organist is not supposed to play this music in this situation, and to pull the rug from under our expectation works like the punchline of a joke. The organist is supposed to be stuck in the storyworld of the film, while the organ chords are at first assumed to belong to a different order of filmic elements: to the machinery that presents the storyworld to us, selects, frames, structures, highlights, comments upon it, but is not part of it. We may just about accept that the village organist is familiar with the topoi of horror film music. But she takes her cue from the preceding orchestral underscore – plasticine life imitating art – and usurps the task of a different kind of filmic agency, crossing a conceptual borderline we usually accept without thinking about it, because it is part and parcel of our understanding of cinema.
When the music is shown to thunder from the organist's instrument, its ostensible source is a surprise. The question at the heart of that surprise – where the music comes from – is the basis of this study. Not, of course, in real-world terms: in one sense, the music comes from a musician in a recording studio; in an equally relevant sense, it comes from a loudspeaker in the cinema or on our television set. But that tends not to be in our mind when we are immersed in a film. For our experience of a film, the real-world circumstances of its production recede into the background, as do the circumstances of its projection (e.g. that sounds actually issue from locations in the cinema or living room, not from their putative sources on the screen). Instead, other frameworks for comprehension take over (though the question 'How did they do this?' may be close to the surface of our consciousness, the willing suspension of disbelief rarely more than a temporary arrangement). One such framework is narrative: how does storytelling work in the interplay between the world unfolded in a film and the ways the medium uses to unfold (or rather suggest) it?
In the church scene from Wallace & Gromit in 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit', that interplay can be approached from different angles. The transition or transgression of the borderline between storyworld and storytelling does not so much tell us what the music 'really' is (i.e. a storyworld event), but lands us in an uncertain space. The reveal of the origin of the organ chords in the film's plasticine world tells us that our initial understanding of them as part of the machinery of horror storytelling was wrong. But elderly village organists do not normally play horror chords to underscore the vicar's sermons, and the music much better fits its interpretation as clichéd horror scoring. To locate this kind of music inside the storyworld seems also wrong, or at least not quite right – we are stuck in an amusingly deceptive space where neither our general knowledge of the world (telling us what music to expect in a village church) nor our knowledge of films (telling us what music normally goes with which kinds of scenes) suffice to make complete sense of the scene. The psychological effect – surprise and uncertainty because of the double 'wrongness' of the music – is arguably more relevant to our experience of the film than the eventual anchoring of the music in the storyworld. We not only learn about the storyworld, but also how the film (mis)leads us to construct our idea of that world, including the sources of knowledge we need to make sense of the film: knowledge about the 'real world', but also knowledge about film – about the way images are framed and camera movements dispense information, and knowledge about musical idioms and how they are employed in films. Given most people's reaction to the scene, it is not hard to argue that the trick the film plays on us is as crucial for our enjoyment of it as our immersion in the story it tells.
But the matter does not end there. If we apply our knowledge of film genres with only slightly more sophistication, the fact that Wallace & Gromit in 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' is not a horror film but a horror spoof might have made us suspicious. Such reveals are a common feature of spoofs; famous examples occur in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971) or Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974) and High Anxiety (1977). This is so obviously the case that the scene in Wallace & Gromit in 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' takes on overtones of a meta-spoof, or at least of an affectionate homage to a spoof tradition, the nostalgic use of a cliché-as-cliché (see also R. Brown 1994: 67–68; Bordwell and Thompson 2010: 291, and chiefly Biancorosso 20093). In this intertextual respect, the film also positions itself historically and tells us which films to use as framework for understanding it.
The village church joke relies on the interaction of two different domains of narrative control, further differentiating the picture:
• The first is the control over what we see and hear (or, rather, how the film cues us to construct an agency that controls what we see and hear). First we hear the organ chords, but do not see a plausible source in the storyworld, nor have any clues that would suggest one. The music matches the preceding orchestral music and the semiotics of horror scoring so well that this seems the most likely explanation. Then we see the policeman admonish the organist, and finally see the organist herself at her instrument, which leads us to reconstrue that this is where the music came from all along, but that whatever agency controls the framing of images and the sequence of shots chose to withhold that information until the opportune moment – the moment for the punchline of the audio-visual joke. We extrapolate the information provided by the sequence of shots and the soundtrack into an idea of a fully-formed spatio-temporal world, and reconstrue shot sequence and soundtrack as a restriction of the information we might have had access to, had the narrating agency allowed us to see into the corner sooner than it did.
This is the equivalent of narrative situations in real life: a friend telling us over a pint in the pub what happened to her that day, using the selection, restriction and ordering of information, but also rhetoric, gestures and facial expressions to make the story suspenseful, funny, harrowing, or whatever else she may want it to be. But we assume that the facts of the story are out there; telling them means to present them so as to achieve a certain effect. This aspect narrative concerns the means to present a story effectively, wherever that story comes from.
• The second domain is the control over the 'facts' of the fiction (or rather, what the film cues us to understand as the facts of the fiction): in this case, the decision to include in the storyworld an elderly village organist who underlines the vicar's mighty warning with a film-score cliché. At issue from this perspective is not how the film presents information it cues us to understand as part of its story, but what information it presents. At issue is the fictional nature of the story, the fact that it is made up, and more specifically, that sometimes stories show us that they are made up, and turn their fictionality into an aspect of their appeal (while other, equally fictional, stories allow us to understand them as if they had been found out there).
With this distinction between story telling and story making, we are bang in the middle of the debate over narratological concepts such as 'narrator' and 'implied author' in film, a debate that has been going on for decades (though rarely with regard to music). From a simple sight-and-sound gag everyone gets straight away, we have stumbled into thickets of film scholarship. This book does not promise to know the way out, but it can look at some of the brambles and flowers and see what place(s) music may have among them.
[ii. Film/music/narratology
Narratological concepts are firmly ensconced in film studies, and narratological questions have concerned the theory and poetics of film since its early days, and were integral already to Lev Kuleshov's and Sergei Eisenstein's ideas about montage as a genuinely cinematic language. Not least the discussions about cinematic representation and reality important to André Bazin or Siegfried Kracauer touch on narratological problems. As a distinct field, however, film narratology came into its own in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with authors such as Christian Metz, Seymour Chatman, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Michel Chion, Edward Branigan etc., building on the work of literary theorists and narratologists from the Russian formalists via Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Mieke Bal, David Herman, Ansgar Nünning, Manfred Jahn, Monika Fludernik etc.
In its heyday in the 1980s, film narratology also spilled over into the study of film music. Kathryn Kalinak illustrated the key question when she retold what may be the most famous anecdote of film music history. It concerns Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1 944) and its motley crew of shipwrecked people drifting in a boat on the open ocean. The composer meant to write the music was David Raksin, and this is how he used to explain why, in the end, he did not:
One of [Hitchcock's] people said to me, 'There's not going to be any music in our picture' and I said, 'Why?' 'Well ... Hitchcock says they're out on the open ocean. Where would the music come from?' So I said, 'Go back and ask him where the camera comes from and I'll tell him where the music comes from.' (Kalinak 1992: xiii)
Of course, Raksin uses a trick: without the camera, there would be no film; without music, it would just be a (perhaps quite) different one. But in the defence of his profession, Raksin not only points out that film, like any work of art, is a made-up thing that cannot reasonably be measured by the yardstick of 'realism', but also that music has, far beyond its realistic representation, long become second nature to film.
'Where the music comes from' was also the question that led Claudia Gorbman to adopt, from Gérard Genette, the concepts of nondiegetic, diegetic and metadiegetic levels of narration (Gorbman 1987). Since then, the terms 'diegetic' and 'nondiegetic' (or 'extradiegetic') have become common terms to describe the relation of music to the narrative structure of a film. Much literature uses them without further ado; some authors have problematized them as too blunt to do justice to the intricacies of individual films, but the theoretical impetus as such seemed to have spent itself for a while.
But in recent years, the discussion has picked up again. Already in the 1990s, Royal S. Brown discussed music playing with the diegetic/nondiegetic divide, without (perhaps wisely) developing this into a more coherent theory (R. Brown 1994: 67–91), while Michel Chion suggested his own, related conceptual system for film sound (Chion 1994 & 2009). Since then, a raft of publications has interrogated the concepts popularized by Gorbman and suggested revisions and refinements (e.g. Levinson 1996; Neumeyer 1997, 2000 & 2009; Buhler 2001; Kassabian 2001; Biancorosso 2001 & 2009; Donnelly 2001 & 2005; Holbrook 2005a & 2005b; Stilwell 2007; Norden 2007; Binns 2008; Smith 2009; Cecchi 2010; Winters 2010; Merlin 2010; Davis, 2012; Winters 2012; Yacavone 2012).
It may be time to take stock, but also to go beyond the methodological discussion of narratological concepts to the exploration of their usefulness for shedding light on individual films and types of films – to ask how film audiences construe the sources and spaces of music, how the ambiguities of such construals and the transitions and fuzzy in-between states might be grouped and understood as instances of particular narrative techniques and of strategies typical for particular genres, situations and filmmakers. Both aspects, the methodological discussion and its application, are concerns of this book.
It does not, however, attempt a grand theory of the functions of film music as an element of a (predominantly) narrative art, which would be a much bigger project: 'narrative theory facilitates description only of the narrative aspects of a text and not all the characteristics, even of a clearly narrative text' (Bal 2009: 11). Functions of film music are naturally a recurrent interest of the literature, be it Aaron Copland's oft-quoted article (Copland 1949; the basis of Prendergast 1992: 213–26), Zofia Lissa's fine-grained account (Lissa 1965: 98–256), Gorbman's and Kalinak's discussion of the 'rules' of classical Hollywood scoring (Gorbman 1987: 73; Kalinak 1992: 66–110), Claudia Bullerjahn's discussion of functions in the context of the apperception of film music (Bullerjahn 2007: 53–74), or the wide-ranging survey of James Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer (Buhler, Neumeyer and Deemer 2010, especially chs. 3–9). The analysis of music's place(s) in the narrative structure of film and that of its functions intersect in complex ways, but should be kept apart as different projects.
Narratology itself is a wide field, and with regard to that, another qualification needs to be made. My study is interested in the machinery of narrative rather than the patterns and trajectories of the stories it is used to tell. The questions about the sequence of events that make a (typical) story that interested Tzvetan Todorov, for example, or the morphological approach to story patterns developed by Vladimir Propp in his analyses of Russian folk tales, or the semiotically-orientated analysis of 'codes' in Roland Barthes' S/Z, do not fall not into the purview of this study. It would be interesting to see how film music might be brought into such explorations: how it can articulate story patterns or codes, or how formal propensities of different kinds of music may mesh with such patterns. But that would be a different study.
The remit of this one is much narrower. It asks not what music does in a film, but only where it comes from with regard to the film's narrative structure; or more precisely, how its place in the narrative structure can be understood and what music can do in a film by dint of this understanding.
In the wider disciplinary landscape, this is a somewhat old-fashioned project. While the narratological discussions referred to in this book go right up to the present day, their roots lie (see above) in the last third of the twentieth century. The reason for what I believe to be the timeliness of this study has to do with the relationship between (film) narratology and film musicology – a discipline that itself has developed its current state to a substantial extent over the same period.
For a long time, it was a favourite pastime of film musicologists to lament the neglect their field suffered at the hand of a discipline centred on high art music. Such lamentation has become obsolete. Film music studies is a burgeoning sub-discipline, with a fast-expanding literature with journals and conferences and much student interest, and with increasing diversification into fields such as television music, music in computer games, music on the Web, etc. Though there are still many gaps on the scholarly map (especially with regard to source documentation and studies), the features of the landscape are becoming clearer. And not only is there much literature, but that literature is diversifying in its range, covering projects from bibliographical surveys via genre studies down to monographic studies of individual film composers and scores.
This study occupies a point on the scale between the comprehensive, be it in the shape of surveys of material or of all-encompassing theories, and the minute, in the shape of studies of individual films and their music: what David Bordwell in the 1990s called 'middle-level research' in film studies (instead of the all-encompassing Theory he was criticizing) (Bordwell 1996: 27). It may also be a good candidate for what Noël Carroll called 'piecemeal' film theorizing (Carroll 1996: 40): to look in detail at a limited aspect of the field, and to use insights from other fields as required to come to terms (sometimes literally) with a particular problem, but without a theoretical framework that spans the entire discipline. When he was writing Langage et cinéma in 1971, Christian Metz envisaged 'a third phase [of film theory] one can hope for one day', in which the 'diverse methods may be reconciled at a deep level [...] and film theory would be a real synthesis' (Metz 1971: 13–14; my translation). At that point, however, he saw a 'provisional but necessary methodological pluralism' in which 'all film study needs to choose clearly its principle of pertinence' (1971: 13–14; my translation). Perhaps the epoch of methodological pluralism is just not over yet, but perhaps Metz's 'real synthesis' was a bit of a pipe dream anyway, and film studies and film musicology should be happy with their different areas of expertise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music and Levels of Narration Film by Guido Heidt. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceChapter I: Introduction: Film Music Narratology
i. Laughing with film theory
ii. Film/music/narratology
The plan of the book
A note on the choice of films
A note on ‘the viewer’
iii. Principles of pertinence
Chapter II: The Conceptual Toolkit: Music and Levels of Narration
i. Fictional worlds and the filmic universe
ii. The ‘historical author’: extrafictionality and the title sequence
iii. Extrafictional narration and audience address
iv. Nondiegetic and diegetic music
a. Narratology, the diegesis and music – some considerations
b. Nondiegetic music and narrative agency
c. Diegetic music: storyworld attachment and narrative agency
d. Diegetic commentary and the implied author
e. Diegetic music: further options
f. Transitions, transgressions, and transcendence: Displaced diegetic music, supradiegetic music and other steps across the border
v. Music on my mind: Metadiegetic narration and focalization
Chapter III: Breaking into Song? Hollywood Musicals (and After)
i. Supradiegesis
ii. Superabundance: Top Hat and the 1930s
iii. The classical style: Night and Day, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain
iv. Transcendence lost and regained: The aftermath of classical style
v. The next-to-last song: Dancer in the Dark (and The Sound of Music)
Chapter IV: Things that Go Bump in the Mind: Horror Films
i. Of implied authors and implicit contracts: Six little bits of theory
ii. …and thirteen examples
Chapter V: Beyond the Moment: Long-range Musical Strategies
i. Music and memory in Once Upon a Time in America
a. Precursor 1: For a Few Dollars More
b. Precursor 2: Once Upon a Time in the West
c. Precursor 3: Duck, You Sucker!
d. ‘Most melancholic of films’ – Once Upon a Time in America
e. Once Upon a Time in America – Three musical themes
f. ‘I say it here and I deny it here’: Conclusions
ii. Life’s troubled bubble broken: Musical metalepses in The Truman Show
a. True life or false
b. Pre-existing music and the world of Seahaven
c. Nondiegetic music and levels of narration
d. Music on the level of film (or not?)
iii. Far from Heaven, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hollywood melodrama and the retrospective prolepsis
a. Present film
b. Dancing to the music of time: Far from Heaven
c. Urban pastoral: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
d. The language of melodrama: Antecedents in All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life
e. Singing the king: A retrospective prolepsis in The Adventures of Robin Hood
Chapter VI: The Future’s Not Ours to See: Outlook
Bibliography
Filmography and Index of Films
Index of Names
Index of Terms