Film Club

For most of us, music has a direct connection to our emotions. And since films are in the business of creating structured emotional experiences, music was part of cinema even before movies had sound.

During the so-called silent era any self-respecting major theatre had a Wurlitzer organ rising out of the floor, or even their own small orchestra, either playing written scores, or more often, classical excerpts or popular tunes of the day selected and fitted to the film by the organist or orchestra leader.

There’s a long tradition of using music to enhance a film, and I’m sure most of us have favourite pieces of film music, where the music, the story, the characters and the images came together to create a piece of magic, that has stayed with us ever since.

But some pieces of music seem to be able to detach themselves from the film and take on a life of their own, even though they were originally written to be part of a whole cinematic experience.

Ennio Morricone’s music for The Mission, along with Maurice Jarre’s music for Doctor Zhivago and John Williams’ music for Star Wars, are prime examples.

And yet there are other wonderful scores that only a musician would notice, and certainly have no life outside the film in which they are embedded.

What’s the difference between these scores? Does it matter that the music to The Mission seems to have a life separate from its connection to the film? Does that somehow mean that it’s not ‘real’ film music?

For me these questions connect to two fundamental ideas about how cinema works.

One is about two different ways of structuring story, and I’ll come to that later.

The other is a larger question about art itself, and that is the question ‘Should the creator’s hand be visible in any artwork?’

Our response to art is like a triangle – there is always a three-way conversation between the creator, the created work, and the audience.

But how equal are the legs of the triangle? Is the primary relationship between the creator and the audience, or the completed work and the audience? How visible is the creator? How visible should the creator be?

Do we want to be aware of watching an actor at work, and admiring their skill, or do we want to be giving ourselves over to the character that they are creating?

And when we watch a film should it seem like a self-contained story that is almost telling itself, or should we be aware of the tools the writer and director are using, and the meaning they are trying to convey? Can the puppeteer make us look at the puppets, not them? Or are you Darren Aronovksy shouting ‘Look at moi, look at moi!’

To be very ‘meta’ here, I want to focus on the relationship between the creator and their work in order to argue the opposite – that the primary relationship should be between the work and the audience.

Once it was thought that the job of a creator was to create a work that reflected the needs and world view of the commissioner, not the artist. The artist’s job was to accept the commission, finish the work, deliver it, collect their pay, and leave through the tradesman’s entrance, thank you.

This was also pretty much Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn’s idea of how the movie business should work.

Then along came another idea, that the real ownership of a work depended on the unique relationship between creator and work – which means that the true owner of a work was and remained the original creator, not the interim physical owner. In cinema this gave rise to arguments about who had final cut, and to prime creators like writers, directors, and actors having a share in the success of a film.

On the whole I think this change is progress. But to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘I would say that, wouldn’t I?’

However, the further consequences of that way of looking at things are, in my mind, mixed. Because it’s only a couple of short steps from the argument that a creator’s ownership of the work rests in their unique relationship with the content and form of the work, to the argument that creators must therefore make themselves visible in their work, and that attempting to hide yourself beneath the surface of the work is tantamount to deception and cowardice.  

To do anything other than stand beside your work is to hide behind your work and fail to take responsibility for how the work reflects your experience, your prejudices, and your worldview. Where once it an observation that an artist was inevitably present in their work, it became their duty to be visibly present in their work.

All art is both of the world and about the world, so this is a tension I can live with.

But I struggle with the next stage of this argument, which at its most extreme asserts that, since the uniqueness of a creator’s work largely lies in the way the work reflects the artist, a creator is only allowed to reflect and explore their direct identity and experience, that to do anything else is to appropriate other people’s owned experience.

In this view, since Morricone’s musical experience was a combination of playing trumpet in a big band, formal education in avant garde composition, and vast experience in producing and arranging pop music, what right does he have to incorporate native musical forms and instruments into his score for THE MISSION?

To be blunt, I think this notion, and its equivalents in writing, directing and acting are a dangerous dead end.

But that’s not what I want to explore. I want to explore the dichotomy between film scores that are designed to be hidden and subliminal, and scores that are designed to draw attention to themselves.

This dichotomy is very closely related to another dichotomy about the way narrative is constructed, and we can see both very clearly in THE MISSION.

To explain what I mean, I need to talk briefly about very early piece of film theory called the Kuleshov effect.

The original footage no longer exists, so we’re going by contemporary and later accounts, which vary somewhat.

Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker and theoretician of the 1910 and 1920s.

He conducted an experiment to do with montage theory (the creation of meaning by juxtaposition) by making a number of different 3 shot sequences, showing them to different audiences, and asking them what they saw and understood. He constructed the sequences by repurposing footage of a wardrobe test of Russian matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine, and intercutting it with various other shots.

The shots he (supposedly) inserted for shot 2 were:

1.      A bowl of soup on a table,

2.      Children playing,

3.      A young woman opening a door and smiling,

4.      The body of an old woman in a coffin.

Each sequence ended up looking like this:

SHOT 1:             Mosjoukine looking at floor, then looks up and stares at the camera impassively.

SHOT 2:             INSERT SHOT from list above – bowl of soup OR children playing etc.

SHOT 3:             [Continuation of SHOT 1] Mosjoukine staring at the camera impassively.

The audience raved about the subtlety of Mosjoukine’s acting (and even by the standards of the day Mosjoukine wasn’t a subtle actor). They lauded:

1.      the hunger he felt looking at the bowl of soup,

2.      the joy he took in his children playing,

3.      the love/lust he displayed in response to his wife/lover opening the door to him,

4.      and the sorrow he felt looking at his dead mother.

But the shots of Mosjoukine were all the same shot. So, what’s happening?

Two things. Firstly the audience joins the shots into a continuous narrative: Mosjoukine looks up, sees [INSERT], cut back to see what he feels about what he sees.

But the actor is not actually showing them any reaction, he is simply waiting for the cameraman to say ‘That’s enough – cut!’ The actor has left an empty space where the audience expects to see his reaction, so each audience member rushes into that emotional gap and lends the actor their own feelings.

This idea that meaning is created by juxtaposition and context – essentially not saying ‘look, here’s a 4’, but rather saying ‘look, here’s a 2, and over here is another 2, what do you think?’ applies to all good filmmaking.

It particularly applies to the subliminal use of music in film.

This experiment was done in the silent era. But what if we added music? Would it be possible to change how the audience interprets the scene by adding music?

Of course we can. As long as the actor gives us a connected blank slate, then we could use music to flip the last sequence to make it seem that the dead woman was a mortal enemy, and what he feels is a kind of cold triumph.

Or we could go one step further in complexity in the third sequence by implying, firstly, that the beautiful young woman opening the door is not to be trusted, and then, secondly, that Mosjoukine is either aware of this, but hiding it, or the opposite – that he is naively unaware that she is not to be trusted.

Music used in this way is designed to be subliminal. The composer’s hand needs to be invisible so that we can attach the meaning implied by the music to the character’s thoughts and feelings.

This kind of music often appears very simple – there’s no melody to catch your ear, just a couple of held chords. It’s doing all its work with placement, change, harmony (or disharmony), tone and timbre. What matters is where the sound starts, where it changes, and what the sound itself makes you feel.

In this case the music is all about the character’s feelings and thoughts and it’s often associated with a kind of storytelling that is concerned with a single person’s journey – what is usually called The Hero’s Journey – made famous by Joseph Campbell and his acolytes.

But a film like THE MISSION comes from a different tradition. Like all Robert Bolt scripts (and he wrote Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, among others), they come from an older tradition of storytelling – what you might call ‘The Relentless March of History’ school of storytelling, that derives from Aristotle via Lajos Egri.

The core difference is between stories that are structured around the journey of a single character, through which moral and philosophical questions can be explored; and stories that are structured directly around philosophical and moral questions, using character archetypes to represent different sides of the arguments.

This is not a strictly binary division – most films sit somewhere along a continuum, though usually more at one end or the other. So, THE MISSION does include a stripped back hero’s journey in the character of Mendoza, played by Robert De Niro, but it is much more the second kind of film, and the music reflects that.

In a hero’s journey movie, the music either tends to represent the hidden inner thoughts and feelings of the characters – especially the central character - or represent what we are being asked to feel - the triumphant moment, the sad moment and so on.

In an ‘ideas movie’ the music tends to represent the different aspects of the arguments.

There is generally much less music in the second kind of film – after all, how much of the film can be taken up with philosophical and moral arguments? – but the music is much more noticeable, because it’s actually trying to say something. It’s not trying to subliminally represent the constantly changing thoughts and feelings of the characters, or to trigger our own emotional responses; it’s trying to explicitly represent ideas.

But how can music, clearly the most abstract of all art forms, represent anything except itself?

Here’s one framework through which we can look at the music in THE MISSION.

We’re all familiar with the geometric idea that three-dimensional space can be represented by charts drawn on three axes – the X, the Y and the Z. The music in THE MISSION also works on three axes, but they’re not physical axes.

The first axis is between heaven and earth.

The second axis is between two cultures: the indigenous native culture – the dwellers in the world – and the invading technologically dominant European culture.

And the third axis is between the individual and the communal.

All of these dichotomies are quite explicit in the script, as well as being implicit in the action.

As just one example, the film quite explicitly asks the question ‘What should the church do when it discovers paradise on earth?’

And I think there are many clues that we should regard the Falls themselves as representing the journey between earth and heaven.

Finally the film quite explicitly demands of Mendoza that he subjugate his individual conscience and will to the communal conscience and will of the church, and then has him reverse that decision to the native community.

The music in THE MISSION is underlining the various philosophical and moral arguments by its placement on these three axes, and its movement from one position to another.

Sometimes, for instance, the music is purely native, and sometimes purely European. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between. Or sets them against each other.

Often it starts in one place, and moves to another, as the centre of the argument shifts.

For example, Gabriel’s theme is initially played as a solo on the oboe – an individual playing a very European instrument – then later is played on pan flutes – a very native instrument – but within a larger piece of communal music.

The music has shifted on two of the axes: European to native; and individual to communal.

These shifts happen all through the film in many different combinations and directions, and I encourage you to take note as you watch.

As well, because music is both scarcer and more noticeable in an ideas movie, its absence comes to mean something too. Like the use of negative space in visual art, absence of music can mean as much as the music does.

One very noticeable example in THE MISSION is the presence of music when Father Gabriel is first climbing the falls, and then the complete absence once he is alone in the jungle at the top of the falls.

CAVEATS

Now, before we watch the film, I have a few caveats.

The writer and/or director made some very strange choices about the use of language and accents. All Europeans in the story, whatever language they would actually speak in the story, speak English, in a random variety of accents. All natives speak their own language, which are never subtitled, even when there are Europeans present who understand them.

This is connected to the next problem (for me). The natives (technically the Guarana people, although they are played by a different Columbian tribe) are generally not well represented in this film – they are largely tokens. None of them are properly realised characters.

This is partly because this kind of filmmaking turns all characters into archetypes and characters, but it’s also partly because the argument that Robert Bolt is making in the script doesn’t give them any agency in the story, or really take into account what agency they do have.

The question of the film is not about how they should behave, it’s about how the European invaders should behave. Which has the unfortunate byproduct of turning the natives into archetypal ‘victim/noble savages’ in the storytelling.

Finally, the script sanitises the history of the Jesuits in South America considerably in order to clarify its arguments.

I would like to think that we would do better on all three fronts these days.

But I also remind myself that future generations are likely to look back on anything we made and find equivalent faults – which makes me more forgiving of those flaws – we all live and learn, and I think we should extend to others the understanding that we would like to have extended to us.

Which, in a way, is what the film is about.