A couple of thoughts on the questions raised by Nelson. Music in the
cinema is what Derrida calls a supplement. The simplest examples of the
supplement already present a paradox - the newspaper which is not
complete without its supplement; the preface or afterword to a book.
Film music is the very model of this paradox of the supplement, being
both inside and outside at the same time. First, in the case of
so-called background or incidental music, it's part of the film but
outside the diegesis. When it enters the story and becomes diegetic,
then it introduces the problematic of the supplement into the diegesis
itself - especially when it's music which pre-exists the film - because
it brings its own set of codes and connotations that come from outside
and beyond the screen. But of course this is also true of all of a
film's music, which is always already inscribed with the associations
that belong to its afilmic cultural location.
At the same time, music also plays a role which shifts between that of a
supplement in the sense of something extra which is included, and a
substitute, which provides something that is missing, For example, it is
commonly supposed that music expresses what is otherwise beyond direct
apprehension - the inner feelings of the characters. Actually music is
much more subtle than this. Look at opera, where you frequently get
situations which make the identification of character and music much
more complex, often ambiguous and even contradictory. Take the notorious
case of the Duke in Verdi's Rigoletto. When he dresses up as a poor
student and seduces Gilda to the heart-melting strains of E il sol
dell'anima, protesting that fame and glory, power and throne, are but
human frailties, we know that that what he's feeling isn't love but
lechery, because in Questa o quella, he's already told his courtiers
that he's on the make. The music he sings to Gilda is thus a kind of lie
(although she can't tell, and falls for him anyway).
Cinema makes extensive use of this kind of ambiguity, or lack of fixity,
to mobilise sentiments which attach and detach themselves, moving
between different characters in quick succession. In another story about
a hunchback, there is Alfred Newman's music for William Dieterle's
version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame of 1939. When Maureen O'Hara as
the gypsy Esmeralda approaches the bound and manacled Quasimodo to give
him a sip of water, the sliding strings which denote her seductive
femininity become an avouchment of her compassion - and not only that,
but the music then seems to attach itself at the same time to Charles
Laughton's Quasimodo, to become first the expression of his frustrated
desire and then of his gratitude for a moment of genuine human contact
(and all this takes not much longer to occur than it takes to read this
e-mail).
Something to chew on perhaps.
Michael Chanan
http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/
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