Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
'misterioso' (despite its tempo marking of 'presto'). The more the repertory grew,
therefore, the more it seems to have fundamentally stayed the same, dictated by functional
requirements. Most pieces were expected to communicate their essential messages within
the space of a few bars, and often had to be broken off for the next cue. (In Bradford's list,
the shortest items are timed at thirty seconds, the longest three minutes.) Under the
circumstances, too much stylistic variety was suspect, but clich+00E9s were not (and they
made the music easier to play); moreover, familiar music (like the text that sometimes
went with it) might be valued highly for its allusive power, even if the reference was
imprecise.Similar considerations apply when evaluating compiled scores. As mixed in
their repertoire as cue sheets, many were stereotyped and seemingly haphazard, and all
were liable to be altered greatly from performance to performance. However, in several
cases both the selection and the synchronization of the music were carefully planned, and
led to results well above the norm. Three examples can serve to illustrate the range of
possibilities, as determined by types of films and circumstances of their
production/distribution.
1.
Walter C. Simon's music for the 1912 Kalem film The Confederate Ironclad: this
concise piano score, from an impressive series Simon created for Kalem in 1912 and
1913, was written for an advanced example of film narrative at that time. It fits the film
exceptionally well, and even though much of it is 'original', it is very much like a written
out cue-sheet score, with several pre-existent tunes.
2.
Breil's orchestral score for The Birth of a Nation can be seen as a Simon score writ
large, with the added interest of extensive original music involving more than a dozen key
leitmotivs, plus effective varieties of orchestral colour. By this time too, the repertoire has
been opened up to include a large number of nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic
works, more suitable for orchestral than piano accompaniments, and necessary for such a
film epic. There is no doubt that Griffith wanted music to be an integral part of the film
experience and, although the degree of his involvement cannot be known precisely, he
certainly played a role in encouraging Breil's ambitious efforts.
Mood music: an orchestra playing on the set to create the right atmosphere for a scene
from Warner Bros.' The Age of Innocence( 1924)
3.
The Axt-Mendoza score for Vidor's Big Parade follows the Breil model and is no
less a major piece of work, though with neither the same amount of original music nor the
personal stamp of the Griffith scores. Indeed, just as this later epic displays a smoother
style than Griffith's, the score shows how, by the mid-1920s, film music had Berlin, had
become a prime locale for the manufacture of scores, thanks to co-operative partnerships
between film producers, theatres, and music publishers.
Alongside compiled scores, original scores also increased in number in the 1920s, often
with remarkable results. A significant American example is Mortimer Wilson's music for
Raoul Walsh's 1924 The Thief of Bagdad: richly worked out in terms of both thematic
structure and orchestration, its lavish design is fitting for so opulent a film and presages
the achievements of Erich Korngold and the great composers of Hollywood scores in the
sound period. But the most impressive centres of original work were not in New York or
Hollywood, but in France, Germany, and Russia, where the fascination of artists and
intellectuals with the new medium led to unique collaborations.An important precedent
had been set in Europe much earlier, with Camille Saint-Saëns's score for the 1908film
d'art, L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise. As one might expect given the composer's many
years of experience and mastery of his craft, this score displays impressive thematic unity
and harmonic design, and is as polished as his many previous essays in ballet, pantomime,
and tone poem. Yet because it serves the film so well, the score has come to share the fate
of his other incidental pieces: mentioned in surveys but rarely studied, regarded more as a
fascinating transitional effort than as a convincing work of art.Of the many innovative
scores by composers who gravitated toward film in the 1920s, three in particular deserve
mention, each successful in attaining different goals.
1.
Eric Satie's score for Entr'acte ( 1924) shines as an antinarrative, proto-minimalist
gem; like Clair's film, it is designed both to dazzle and to disorient the audience, partly by
parodying the medium's customary product, partly by following a subtle formal logic
beneath a deceptively random surface.
2.
The Huppertz score for Metropolis ( 1927), commissioned for the Berlin premiére,
is one of the most peculiar examples known to survive of music following Wagner's
leitmotiv system, within an elaborate symphonic framework. Apparently following Lang's
original tripartite structure for the film, Huppertz divides his score into three independent
'movements' with the unusual names of 'Auftakt'. 'Zwischenspiel', and 'Furioso'. Like the
film, the music intermixes elements of nineteenthcentury melodrama and twentieth-
century modernism, and that is an essential part of its fascination: it strives
o
reinforce Lang's messages, and, while showing similarities to the American compilations
discussed above, employs a far more complex and varied musical vocabulary.
3.
Dmitri Shostakovich's score for Kozintsev and Trau berg 's New Babylon ( 1929)
ranks among the greatest examples of film music by a leading avant-garde composer of
any generation. Like the film, and somewhat like Satie's score for Entr'acte, the music is
in large part satirical, and depends for its effects on the distortion of well-known tunes,
especially the 'Marseillaise', as well as the use of French-style 'wrong-note' harmonies and
persistent motor rhythms -- all designed to offer both counterpoint and continuity to the
film's energetic montage. But the score (now available in a complete recording by the
Berlin Radio Symphony) also makes strong ideological points and attains tragic stature.
One great example occurs at the end of part vi, for scenes of the despair, desperate
resistance, and massacre of the Communards. While an old revolutionary pauses to play a
piano abandoned on the barricades, and while his comrades listen, visibly moved, the
orchestra pauses too, for the pit pianist's poignant fragment of 'source music'
( Tchaikovsky's Chanson triste); this trails off, and when the final battle begins, the
orchestra commences a prolonged agitato, which finally resolves into a thumpingly banal
waltz. Thus Shostakovich emphasizes the brutality of the French bourgeoisie, who are
seen applauding at Versailles, as if presiding over the scenes of carnage. No less pointed
is the music for the film's end, though it aims in an opposite direction: here Shostakovich
combines a noble horn theme for the Communards with the melody of the Internationale
in rough, dissonant counterpoint. The double purpose is to honour the martyrdom of the
film's heroes, and, more generally, to convey hope without clichéd sentiment. In a final
symbolic gesture, he ends the score virtually in mid-phrase, a fitting match to the film's
open-ended final three shots of the words 'Vive' | 'la' | 'Commune', seen scrawled as jagged
graffiti pointing dynamically past the edges of the frame.
Each of these three scores offers a unique solution to the challenging compositional
problems posed by an unusual film. Together, they crown the silent film's 'golden age',
and show that the medium had found ways to tap music's expressive potential to the
highest degree.
SILENT FILMS AND MUSIC TODAY
Even as Shostakovich completed his score, silent films were rapidly becoming obsolete. It
did not take long for many of the practices and materials of the period to be forgotten or
lost, but there have been efforts ever since to revive them. Cinematheques and other
venues where silent films continued to be screened went on providing piano
accompaniments, but often in a mode that was neither musically inspiring nor historically
accurate. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1967, however,
Arthur Kleiner maintained the tradition of using original accompaniments, availing
himself of the Museum's collection of rare scores; where scores were lacking, he and his
colleagues created scores of their own, which were reproduced in multiple copies and
rented out with the films.
In recent years scholarly work (particularly in the USA and Germany) has greatly
increased our knowledge of silent film music; archives and festivals (notably Pordenone
in Italy and Avignon in France) have provided new venues for the showing of silent films
with proper attention to the music; and conductors such as Gillian Anderson and Carl
Davis have created or re-created orchestral scores for major silent classics. This initially
specialist activity has spilled over into the commercial arena. In the early 1980s two
competing revivals of Abel Gance's Napoléon vied for public attention in a number of
major cities -- one, based on the restoration of the film by Kevin Brownlow and David
Gill, with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis, and the other with a score
compiled and conducted by Carmine Coppola. Even wider diffusion has been given to
silent film music with the issue of videocassettes and laser discs of a wide range of silent
films, from Keystone Cops to Metropolis, all with musical accompaniment.
Both because of and despite these advances, however, the current state of music for silent
films is unsettled, with no consensus as to what the music should be like or how it should
be presented. (There was a lack of consensus during the silent period, too, but the
spectrum was not as broad as it is today.) Discounting the option of screening a film in
silence, an approach now generally held to be undesirable except in the very rare cases of
films designed to be shown that way, we can distinguish three basic modes of presentation
currently in use: (1) film screened in an auditorium with live accompaniment; (2) film,
video, or laser disc given a synchronized musical sound-track and screened in an
auditorium; (3) video or laser disc versions screened on television at home. Obviously, the
second and third modes, while more prevalent and feasible than the first, take us
increasingly further from the practices of the period. To show a silent film or its video
copy with a synchronized score on a sound-track is to alter fundamentally the nature of
the theatrical experience; indeed, once recorded, the music hardly seems 'theatrical' at all.
As for home viewing, whatever its advantages it forgoes theatricality to the point that any
type of continuous music, and especially thunderous orchestras and organs, can weigh
heavily on the viewer.
As for the scores themselves, they too can be divided into three basic types: (1) a score
that dates from the silent era, whether compiled or original (Anderson has made this type
of score her speciality); (2) a score newly created (and/or improvised) but intended to
sound like 'period' music -- the approach usually taken by Kleiner, by the organist
Gaylord Carter, and more recently by Carl Davis; (3) a new score which is deliberately
anachronistic in style, such as those created by Moroder for Metropolis in 1983, and by
Duhamel and Jansen for Intolerance in 1986. Thus, altogether there now exist nine
possible combinations of music and silent cinema (three modes of presentation, three
types of score), and all of them have yielded results both subtle and obtrusive, both
satisfying and offensive.
Particularly interesting in this respect are the cases where different versions have recently
been prepared of the same film. For Intolerance, for example, there now exist four
different versions. There is Anderson's, which is based on the Breil score and has been
performed in conjunction with a restoration of the film (by MOMA and the Library of
Congress) in a version as close as possible to that seen at the 1916 New York premiére.
There is a Brownlow-Gill restoration with Davis score, which has been screened both live