The Sound of Pictures

Listening to the Movies, from Hitchcock to High Fidelity

Andrew Ford

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781921825743
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

The Sound of Pictures is an illuminating journey through the soundtracks of more than 400 films. How do filmmakers play with sound? And how does that affect the way we watch their movies? Whether pop or classical, sweeping or sparse, music plays a crucial role in our cinematic experience. Other sounds can be even more evocative: the sounds of nature, of cities and of voices.In The Sound of Pictures, Andrew Ford listens to the movies. He speaks to acclaimed directors and composers, discovering radically different views about how much music to use and when. And he explores some of cinema's most curious sonic moments. How did Alfred Hitchcock use music to plant clues in his films? Why do some 'mix-tape' soundtracks work brilliantly and others fall flat? How do classics from A Clockwork Orange to The Godfather, Cinema Paradiso to High Noon, use music and sound effects to enhance what we see on screen?Whether you're a film-buff or a music lover, The Sound of Pictures will enrich your experience of the movies.'Andrew Ford's book is delightfully snippy and entertaining. More importantly, it's also wonderfully informed in a way that will enhance film viewing past, present and future. A hugely enjoyable and revelatory read.' —Margaret Pomeranz' The Sound of Pictures will be joyfully read by movie and music fans alike.' — Canberra Times 'Enjoyable and rewarding' — Adelaide Advertiser 'Beautifully written' — Sydney Morning Herald 'A must read' — Courier Mail

LISTENING TO THE MOVIES

Classical Music in Films

In Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), following the sweep of the Krakow ghetto, the German soldiers seeking to complete the liquidation return at night to search for Jews who are still in hiding. One man is inside an upright piano. As he climbs out under cover of darkness, unaware that there are soldiers listening downstairs, he steps lightly on the keyboard. The resulting cluster of notes alerts the soldiers, who rush upstairs and start shooting. The next thing we see is a German officer sitting at the piano playing Bach while the shooting continues in other rooms. It is a chilling moment, not least because it reminds us – if we needed reminding – that the Nazis were not monsters, but human beings behaving like monsters, and that some of them were accomplished and cultivated in other areas of their lives. Spielberg can’t let them be too cultivated, however. In the doorway, as the officer plays, two soldiers watch in surprised admiration. One asks the other, ‘Is it Bach?’ The second assures him that it’s Mozart. How much better, how much more horrifying, had the second soldier given the correct answer: ‘It’s Bach. The prelude from the English Suite in A minor.’

The use of classical music to denote culture – even in Nazis – has become a cinematic commonplace. In Lifeboat, as far back as 1944, Hitchcock has his young Nazi sing Schubert, and in The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002) it is Chopin’s music that helps sustain the central character, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), in the Warsaw ghetto, and ultimately charms the Nazi captain who discovers him.

Polanski’s film opens with Szpilman playing Chopin in a radio studio during a German bombing raid, but after that it is two hours before we see him play again. There is, however, a scene in which we hear music. Szpilman arrives at a safe house. He is in poor shape, sick and malnourished, but left alone in the apartment, he seems restored by the presence of a piano. The last thing he is told by the people hiding him is to make no noise, so when he approaches the piano and his face relaxes into a half smile, we worry that he will give himself away. Immediately there is the sound of an orchestra. It plays the introductory bars of Chopin’s Grande Polonaise Brillante, as Szpilman, heart-stoppingly, raises his hands in the air and launches into the solo part. But then another camera angle shows us these hands hovering just above the keys, miming out the music that he is playing only in his imagination. The scene is actually more touching than the famous scene with the German captain. Szpilman plays him Chopin’s G-minor Ballade (or at least highlights of it) and persuades him, through his playing, not to shoot him or report his presence. On the contrary, the officer now brings him food, gives him his coat and tells him to hold tight for a couple more weeks because the Russians are coming. Over the closing credits, Szpilman, on stage with an orchestra, plays the Grande Polonaise Brillante for real.

In spite of the fact that The Pianist tells a true story, based on the memoir of the real-life Szpilman, the film would quickly lapse into sentimentality did it contain too much piano playing. One of the strengths of the film – and presumably this was also based on fact – is that the eponymous hero is unable to do the thing the title implies, which is why the scene in which he mimes out his performance is affecting. By giving us so little of it, Polanski ensures that the music seems significant. We may never knowingly have heard a note of Chopin before, but we feel the power of his work and, indeed, its humanity. The sound of this rather flamboyant music, where previously there had been none, is all the more dramatic.

In modern Hollywood, classical music rarely has so noble a role to play. In the minds of mainstream American filmmakers, this art of ‘old Europe’ is associated with intellectuals. And intellectuals are, at best, untrustworthy. Just as Hollywood villains now generally speak with English or European accents, so they like opera or play the piano. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) bloodily kills two guards and escapes his cell, all while listening to a recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg variations. In the sequel, Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001), we discover Lecter himself playing the same piece on the piano in his well-appointed Florence apartment. This ability to play presumably makes him extra villainous. It’s as though eating people were not enough.

It wasn’t always so. In Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), on the run for an act of wartime sabotage he did not commit, stumbles, handcuffed, into the house of a blind man, Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glaser). Phillip’s grand piano is not the sign of danger it might be in a recent American film. On the contrary, it is comforting and reassuring; it denotes civilisation. The man plays a few bars from Delius’s Summer Night on the River, explaining to Barry that, like himself, Delius was blind. The scene reminds us of the blind man who befriends Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s novel. Because he cannot see the creature’s startling appearance, he treats him kindly. By the same token, Phillip cannot see Barry’s handcuffs, though we later learn he had heard them the moment Barry entered his house and decided his visitor was harmless.

The tendency of classical music to elevate a character in this way was quite common in the 1940s, just as common, in fact, as today’s tendency for classical music to incriminate. Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) has a subtly calibrated score by David Raksin, but also uses the late string quartet in C sharp minor by Beethoven, arranged for string orchestra. This is unusual musical territory for a film noir, though the Coen brothers in their noir-ish comedy-thriller The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) had Scarlett Johansson as a not-quite-good-enough child pianist work her way through several of Beethoven’s sonatas.

Force of Evil is the story of two brothers, Joe and Leo Morse. Joe (John Garfield) is a lawyer working for a gangster. Their aim is to wipe out all the small-time banks in the illegal numbers racket and take over their business. Leo (Thomas Gomez) is one of these small-time bankers, but while his business might be illegal, he’s a decent enough fellow with an old-fashioned boss’s attitude to the welfare of his staff, whom he treats as family, especially his secretary, Doris (Beatrice Pearson). The Beethoven quartet plays during the tense, climactic scene in a restaurant in which Bauer, Leo’s bookkeeper, is shot and Leo himself abducted. Straightaway we cut to a piano playing a slow boogie-woogie bass in the bar in which Joe is chatting up Doris. The jazz piano is a cliché, but the Beethoven isn’t. This is not easy music, even in the concert hall, and it certainly isn’t reassuring. It is the first movement of the quartet that we hear, with slow, stark and rather chromatic melodic lines yielding a kind of gentle, tortured lyricism. It’s certainly no one’s idea of restaurant music, and its very oddness is why it is so effective.

Robert Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is the central character of Bob Rafelson’s film Five Easy Pieces (1970). Once a piano-playing prodigy, he now works on an oil rig. The film has no score, only classical piano music and country songs, and the main title features Tammy Wynette singing ‘Stand By Your Man’. It becomes clear that Bobby is opposed to this song both in terms of its sentiments and its music.

‘It’s a question of musical integrity,’ he explains.

Five Easy Pieces follows Bobby back to his childhood home when he learns that his father is dying. After checking his pregnant girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) into a nearby motel, Bobby visits his musical but highly dysfunctional family, including his brother Carl Fidelio Dupea and his sister Partita. He spars with Carl’s girlfriend Catherine (Susan Anspach), another pianist, but they end up having sex anyway.

There are not many films that give their music details in the opening credits, but this one does, listing four Tammy Wynette songs and five classical pieces, four of them hardly so very easy: Chopin’s Prelude in E minor and Fantasy in F minor, Mozart’s Piano Concerto K 271 and the D-minor Fantasia, and Bach’s ‘Chromatic’ Fantasy and Fugue.

It is the simplest of these pieces – the Chopin prelude – that Bobby chooses to play to Catherine, telling her it is the ‘easiest piece’ he knows. But it is a flat performance. Bobby himself admits that he felt nothing and played it better when he was eight years old. It might not be obvious to Bobby, and the film doesn’t spell it out to its audience, but Rayette sings her country songs with more feeling and musical insight than he plays Chopin. Five Easy Pieces is not musically judgmental at any level and neither does it invite us to judge. But as Bobby finally abandons Rayette at a truck stop, we are certainly able to make the connection between an ability to behave well, or at least with regard for others, and the ‘musical integrity’ that Bobby spoke of at the start of the picture but only Rayette demonstrated.

If modern Hollywood views classical music – and classical music lovers – with suspicion, it is not true of the independent sector. The Canadian film Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006) makes use of the C-major prelude from the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and it also draws the composer into Jonathan Goldsmith’s score (such as it is) by making one of Bach’s lute preludes the basis of a section of music using electric instruments. This comes with the opening credits as the two main characters, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Julie Christie), walk away from the camera across a wide expanse of snow. This can only be a conscious reference to an earlier Canadian film which uses rather more Bach, François Girard’s Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993).

In The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2009), Prince Albert is associated with Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ (Serenade). It is one of the composer’s best-known songs and eventually we will hear it played as a piano solo by Albert (Rupert Friend) to Victoria (Emily Blunt). But, long before that, the song begins turning up in the score whenever she thinks of him. It is subtly done, too. We do not hear Schubert’s melodic line in Ilan Eshkeri’s score, merely the distinctive accompaniment. This is a reversal of the usual approach to musical quotation in films, in which a song or other piece of music is heard and then its significance underlined by its remaining in the score, quoted wistfully or triumphantly at some later key moment. In The Young Victoria, the score anticipates the song. If we recognise the accompaniment, it lets us a little further into the story. If we don’t, at least it primes us for the song when it comes.

Martin McDonagh’s very different film, In Bruges (2008), does something remarkably similar with ‘Der Leiermann’, the final song in Schubert’s cycle Winterreise – a winter’s journey. Carter Burwell’s score makes much use of the harmonic structure of this song and the melodic line, especially the opening phrase, but this time we hardly notice until the song is sung on the soundtrack, encapsulating the sense of melancholy verging on madness in this otherwise very funny film about two assassins.

Pascale Ferran based his French-language film Lady Chatterley (2006) on John Thomas and Lady Jane, D.H. Lawrence’s second go at writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (Lawrence wrote his novel three times, and the third version is the familiar one.) The story is the same in all essentials: Constance Chatterley, married to the crippled and impotent Sir Clifford, finds sexual fulfilment with his gamekeeper, called Parkin in this version. The main difference in the telling is one of tone, the second writing of the novel more poetic and less wilfully coarse than the final version. So this is a correspondingly tender film, and musically – indeed sonically – of considerable interest and detail.

The film begins with Sibelius’s Valse triste, which establishes the early twentieth century and the melancholic mood of the Chatterleys’ house, if not its English (or even French) location. Thereafter, music of any sort is sparingly used. But we do hear Constance (Marina Hands) playing Bach on the piano, and we notice that she plays tolerably well. Off screen, she launches into the tricky, chromatic D-minor fugue from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, giving up after a couple of bars, before opting for the easier C-minor fugue from Book I. After another false start, she plays on to the end. So the music is part of the household, but it is also a symbol of her gradual sexual awakening. As the sound of Connie’s playing drifts in from the other room, Sir Clifford’s nurse, Mrs Bolton (Hélène Alexandridis) comments to her employer that she didn’t know ‘my Lady played the piano’, to which Sir Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) replies, ‘We’d all forgotten.’

Shortly after, when we see Connie walking happily and purposefully to the hut in which her affair with Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo’ch) will take place, there’s another burst of Bach on the soundtrack – just a few seconds of perky music from the Partita in C minor. It’s a brief and simple moment, but it tells the audience a lot. The music is quite gratuitous, like a sudden happy thought that strikes her as she walks along. She is very clearly a changed woman, and she is about to change more.

Sudden bursts of baroque music have enlivened other films, particularly from France. In L’Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1970), the music of Vivaldi stands for enlightenment. The wild child of the title (Jean-Pierre Cargol) has been living in the forest like an animal, it would seem since birth. At the start of the film he is hunted down and captured by men with dogs. There is no music and no dialogue here, only the dogs’ excited barking, the hunters’ exhortations and the heightened sounds of the forest. As soon as we meet Dr Jean Itard (played by Truffaut himself), we enter the civilised world of Vivaldi – the gentle 6/8 Siciliano from his concerto in C for flautino and strings.

The story is essentially true. Truffaut based his film on the real doctor’s own account of the events, which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century (so the music is almost of the right period, Vivaldi having died some fifty years before). Itard becomes convinced he can educate the boy, whom he names Victor, and save him from a future in a Paris freak show by taking him home. Home, musically speaking, is another concerto by Vivaldi – also in C, but for mandolin and strings. Victor’s steps towards civilisation – having his face washed, learning what a mirror is – are always marked by music, sometimes no more than a few notes. All three movements of the mandolin concerto are used and because they have thematic similarities – strong similarities in the case of the fast outer movements – there is a sense of musical unity. The music always comes in bursts, the fast movements associated with achievement – Victor walking upright – the slow movements for setbacks. So it serves as both punctuation and illustration, presented in a simple, storybook manner. But then that is true of the whole film and, one might argue, of Truffaut’s work in general.

Robert Bresson’s films, in contrast, have some of the qualities of classical painting, and his use of music is even cooler than Truffaut’s. Bresson’s music is less tied to the action of his pictures, more to their philosophical, perhaps even spiritual, content. In Pickpocket (1959), the music is from the opera Atys, by the seventeenth-century composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. There is no obvious connection between the story of the opera (a love triangle gone wrong) and the film, so the question arises why a filmmaker in the mid-twentieth century would want to use music from 300 years before. What does the film gain?

Well, style for one thing. This is the story of Michel (Martin La Salle), who picks pockets for kicks, giving himself something between a sexual and an intellectual thrill. He is also the film’s occasional narrator and in his detached manner resembles Camus’s ‘outsider’, Meursault. Like Meursault, he has a dying mother. Although his thieving disgusts his friends, to Michel it is almost a calling, and Lully’s orchestral overture (we hear no singing), with its slow, stately, dotted rhythms in the French baroque manner, brings something like nobility to the enterprise. In one scene, in which Michel is given a masterclass in picking pockets by a nameless accomplice played by the illusionist Kassagi (who was also the technical adviser to the film), Lully’s music transforms the demonstration of lifting wallets from coat pockets into s...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• THE ROLE OF MUSIC
• FIVE COMPOSERS
• LISTENING TO THE MOVIES
• FIVE DIRECTORS
• EPILOGUE: THE SHARED EXPERIENCE OF SOUND
• SOME FURTHER READING & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FILMS MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK