At 06:00 PM 10/31/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>There is one message totalling 73 lines in this issue.
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>Topics of the day:
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> 1. Music Score and Emotions
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>Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:21:43 -0000
>From: Michael Chanan <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Music Score and Emotions
>
>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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>End of FILM-PHILOSOPHY Digest - 30 Oct 2003 to 31 Oct 2003 (#2003-342)
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