Notes; 12/1/2001;
Music and Cinema. Edited by James Buhler, Garyl Flinn, and David Neumeyer. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, 2000. [vi, 397 p. ISBN 0-8195-6410-9 (cloth); 0-8195-6411-7 (pbk.). $70 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]
In the introduction to this collection of essays on film music, editor David Neumeyer makes an interesting and essential observation. "It [is] gratifying," he writes, "to see the extent to which ... film-music scholarship is now a discipline with a past; none of us exploring the subject confronts a blank page" (p. 8). As Neumeyer rightly points out, the question of literature is essential to defining any emerging field of inquiry. It is the irony of that introductory statement, however, that is this book's strength. Music and Cinema is important, even essential, precisely because the opposite is true--film-music scholarship still has little or no "past." Scholars in the field today might not be facing a completely blank page, but that page is hardly full of text. In fact, if we were to construct a past from the citations of almost every author in this collection, the literature specific to film music would appear to be very small, if not singular: Claudia Gorbman's book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Nearly every essay refers to Gorbman's worthy book; many, in fact, work strictly from several of her key arguments. This observation is not meant to undermine Gorbman and the few other heavily citetl scholars like Martin Miller Marks (Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), nor to question the central position they should have in the secondary literature. It is simply to say that, with a primary literature still undefined (witness the contradiction between authors in this collection on the use of preexisting music or popular song in film-music history, for instance) and a relatively small secondary literature (as opposed to the acres of library shelf space devoted to, say, opera), the discipline of film music is still emerging. That film-music criticism does not yet have a past is precisely why this collection of essays is so important.
If the introduction reveals the editors to be over-eager, however, there are two additional, salient observations telling us that this collection and the development of the discipline as a whole are nevertheless in good hands. Neumeyer's warning against the perils of "Beethoven-izing" film-music history shows an editorial approach both current and thoughtful. Just as film studies is still struggling, in some sense, against Andrew Sarris's director-as-auteur theory, film-music studies, too, Neumeyer cautions, should guard against "canonization solely through the imprint of the composerauteur" (p. 21). We should resist casting composers such as Bernard Herrmann, in other words, as film music's Beethoven. In the collection, this statement is reinforced more by the inclusion of Marks's essay on Max Steiner and Adolph Deutsch than by Murray Pomerance's on Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock. While none of the essays in part 3, "Style and Practice in Classical Film Music," overtly asserts a canonical position for any of these important composers, Marks's is the most successful in revealing the problems of assuming that there is such a thing as a "classical" Hollywood score or a "classical" Hollywood composer. (Pomerance's less successful style of narration, his shot-by-shot description of nine minutes of film, is distracting.) The inclusion of Ronald Rodman's essay on composer Herbert Stothart in this section also works subtly toward challenging the auteur theory, although from the opposite end of the argument. The analysis of Stothart's style of pastiche in the early Hollywood musical shows that he is just as original as Steiner or Herrmann, and that the measure of originality and greatness is just as sticky a critical issue in film music as it is in any other music genre. Jeff Smith's terrific article on Henry Mancini simply brings clarity and understanding to a longstanding platitude, that the commercialization of film music brought the death of the orchestral score in the sixties. Under Smith's microscope, which takes in the studio industry as a whole in that decade, Mancini is seen as simply a good film composer rather than an undiscovered Beethoven.
That Neumeyer in his introduction also warns against "Hollywood-izing" film music history, of focusing solely on narrative Hollywood films to the exclusion of all other film industries, styles, and formats, also shows the scope of the editor's decision-making process to be admirably broad and well informed. It is an intention that also seems to have motivated the inclusion of part 2 of the collection, entitled "Beyond Classical Film Music." While Caryl Flinn's and Wendy Everett's essays in this section discuss films that to date have had little or no mention in the critical film-music literature (Everett on autobiographical films for British television, Flinn on recent German narrative film), both address topics that are, in fact, not beyond but central to filmmusic history. They focus on the use of preexisting and popular music in film, and to that end, Everett's conclusions are indeed far-reaching and valid for all films, autobiographical or narrative. That popular song "is able to capture the sense of disp arity between self as historical phenomenon and self as something outside and perhaps at odds with history ... [providing] the moment in the narrative when history and fiction, personal and public, present and past, intersect" (p. 113) is a conclusion that could apply well to Martin Scorsese's films, not only Denis Potter's. True in another way to part 2's promise of discussing nontraditional film music, or music in nontraditional filmmaking--it is not clear, but also not crucial, which reading of the section title the editors intended--is Krin Gabbard's essay on the unusual narrative style Robert Altman uses in his film Kansas City. To suggest that not only Altman but also Scorsese, John Cassavetes, and Henry Jaglom employ a "jazz aesthetic" (p. 15'1) is as powerful an observation as the fact chat what determines that aesthetic is not just the music, but the whole "performance" (gesture, demeanor, dress) of jazz musicians.
While use of the leitmotif has indeed been ubiquitous in film music, I am not really sure we needed a whole section on this topic. Of the three essays in part I, "Leitmotif: New Debates and Questions," Scott Paulin's historically minded article is the most useful in reminding us how deep are the ties between Richard Wagner and film music, and that both the leitmotif technique and the discussion of film as the full realization of Wagner's Gesamthunstwerk surfaced very early in the discussion of silent-film accompaniment. Likewise, devoting an entire section to gender and ethnicity in film music (part 4, "Gentler, Ethnicity anti Identity") seems an overstatement, given that it yields detailed observations on almost every aspect of film but music. Lucy Fischer's article contains a wealth of information on the intersection of the art-deco movement anti film musicals of the thirties, for instance, but it focuses on set, costume design, and choreography more than music. Kathryn Kalinak, on the other hand, did more than convince me just how fundamentally gendered and confused filmic definitions of ethnicity were in the thirties. (How ridiculous it is, for instance, "[h]aving Josephine Baker, an African American, play a Tunisian accompanied by an 'Arabian' leitmotif and dance a Latin American dance" in the 1935 film Princess Tarn Tarn [p. 329].) She also convinced me that the inclusion of film music in the study and definition of exoticism in twentieth-century music history is not only rewarding but imperative. That films such as Baker's are important to the understanding of how Western composers defined non-Western ethnicity musically in the early part of the century is a powerful and provocative suggestion, anti one that is in need of further attention.
Rick Altman's article, which was coauthored by McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe and opens part 5, "Methodological Possibilities," is really more ontological than methodological, but that is hardly noticeable, since it is also one of the strongest essays in the collection. Altman's discussion exposes not only how theoretically confused music, dialogue, and sound effects were in the initial transition from silent to sound film, but how artificial and conscientious our accepted modes of realistic film sound (and music) have been ever since. But if, as this essay suggests, the placement and boundaries of music in film are still in need of definition, then Altman, too, is reinforcing not only the importance of recognizing the infancy of this discipline, but also the value this collection of essays has in contributing to a genre that is emerging as one of the greatest aesthetic challenges music has to offer.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Music Library Association, Inc.
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