Music and Film
Nov 16th, 2007 by Donagh
Music and movies are so integral to each other that its difficult to know if it’s the director’s sharp visual sense that is making the story unravel so compellingly or if it’s just the music playing in the background that is telling the story.
Its common enough that people become passionate about particular songs once they’ve heard them while also watching a scene showing, for example, a couple of sharp suited Italian-Americans meeting in a bar.
I remember going to Jamón, jamón, in the IFC, as it was at the time, not for the reason you may think, but because the week before I’d seen a trailer for it which used the Tom Waits song Cold Cold Ground. Man, I love that song and when used in the trailer it made the movie look great. But I sat through the whole boring cinematic mess the next week and not a note of it was played.
What made me think of all this was the version of These Days (written by Jackson Brown, but made famous by Nico) recorded recently by St. Vincent or rather Annie Clark. The Nico version entered the annals of cinematic history when it was used by Wes Anderson in The Royal Tenenbaums. The scene is well enough known. Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) is meeting her half-brother Richie after his around the world trip. She steps from the Green line bus and Richie watches her coming towards him. While we know that Margot and Richie have had feelings other than the normal for brother and sister the pathos of the meeting is all there in the song.
I also remember the anecdote about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 which used The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss Jr for the scenes showing the space station floating above the earth. The story goes that the selection of this music was accidental. Film students were working in Kubrick’s house editing the film. A free vinyl record came in the post, one of those free offers with Readers Digest and one of the students decided to put it on the record player while editing. Kubrick was in the editing room, listening to the record while looking at the rushes and thought, heck, I’ll use that in the film instead of the music commissioned.
It seems to annoy people that the choosing of the music they so closely associate with the film could be so arbitrary. I’m not so sure the music fits, as The Blue Danube is kind of tacky for such grandeur and the notion of space objects waltzing through space is vaguely comical.
But it shows that sometimes the music makes the scene. Years ago, in one of those Late Review programs there was a piece on Peter Greenaway. The reporter was arguing that there are a number of staple ingredients in every Greenaway movie. If you add them together you could have your very own Peter Greenaway masterpiece. One vital element was the music of Michael Nyman.
The argument went that you could add Nyman’s music to any footage (they used a piece of film showing a boat going down a small river from the early evening magazine program Nationwide) and it would look like a Peter Greenaway film. It convinced me.
So I thought, would it be possible to mix and match your favourite songs with famous scenes from classic movies to see which ones would work better. I’ve tried playing St. Vincent’s version of These Days to all of the movies above with the sound turned down, just to see happens. Strangely, I think it works best with 2001.
If anyone thinks that certain songs would go well with particular scenes let me know and I’ll try and put them up.
These Days via you aint no picasso.
Update regarding the anecdote about how Kubrick chose the music for 2001. This is from an interview he did about Barry Lyndon:
QU: You have abandoned original film music in your last three films.
Kubrick: Exclude a pop music score from what I am about to say. However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you’re editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene.
This is not at all an uncommon practice. Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary music tracks can become the final score. When I had completed the editing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film. Then, in the normal way, I engaged the services of a distinguished film composer to write the score. Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks (Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian) and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film.
With the premiere looming up, I had no time left even to think about another score being written, and had I not been able to use the music I had already selected for the temporary tracks I don’t know what I would have done. The composer’s agent phoned Robert O’Brien, the then head of MGM, to warn him that if I didn’t use his client’s score the film would not make its premiere date. But in that instance, as in all others, O’Brien trusted my judgment. He is a wonderful man, and one of the very few film bosses able to inspire genuine loyalty and affection from his film-makers.
What did you think of the scores for Amélie and Brokeback mountain?
Oh and about film and music, do you remember the Dogme films by Thomas Vinterberg in the 90s (of which my favourite was Festen). They made the films according to a strict set of rules, one of which was “The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed)”. Or do you recall the scene in The Pianist when Szpilman played for the ss officer. Perhaps oversentimental but I thought it worked well.
A particular bugbear of mine is the overuse of music in modern films, especially pop tracks. It is so often used as a shortcut for character and plot development. I think the pop culture-referencing films of the 90s - Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting etc - kickstarted this annoying trend which is so often used, along with the dreaded montage, as a plaster aid for poor writing and direction.
Tomaltach, I remember the use of the musical saw in the Delicatessen, which worked well. Dogma films were hit and miss. Von Trier’s better films were the non-Dogma ones, although Festen was great. I haven’t seen the Pianist, but I’ve read about that part.
I think I’m a fan of certain songs or music in films, but I take Niall’s point it, has become really overused recently - and certain directors can rely too often on its athmospheric effect. Often films are seen as a way of promoting a killer sound track, but in the hands of a good director with a very specific vision I think it works.
That said, while I usually like Paul Thomas Anderson I hated the Aimee Mann’s song in the middle of Magnolia.
I guess in some cases the annoyance is not so much down to the fact the music fits the footage perfectly, but that it induces an interpretation of the directors vision. For instance in the case of Space Odyssey, the music is almost completely out of whack with the sinister plot that develops - so is this a case that the director wants us to consider, in the light-hearted musical intro, our relative obliviousnesses to our complete ignorance when it comes to knowledge and an understanding of the universe or did it just sound kinda nice.
Assault On Precinct 13:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4y1tnp8gUk
True Romance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ab1l2TwFp8
That said, while I usually like Paul Thomas Anderson I hated the Aimee Mann’s song in the middle of Magnolia.
Jumpin jack on a pogo stick, that is the worst possible example to take. The whole damn film was inspired by Aimee Mann’s music. PTA said: “I sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs. Like one would adapt a book for the screen. I had the concept of adapting Aimee’s songs into a screenplay. ”
You do not mess with the Mann.
Yann Tiersan is cool. But music in Manhattan reigns supreme, surely. Nobody can listen to Gershwin without imagining that skyline anymore, can they?
Very nice post Donagh - and damn you for posting it on a Friday evening just before home time!
I remember watching The Royal Tenebaums in the cinema and going ‘why isnt there music as she gets off the bus, there really should be music as she gets off the bus’ and then These Days started up and I realised that the suckah had played me somethin fierce. His new OST (The Darjeeling Limited) is mostly made up of cues from Satjyit (spell?) Ray and Merchant/Ivory films which surely violates a number of post-to-the-power-of-infinity-modern rules.
In other news, yesterday on the bus ‘Be My Baby’ by The Ronettes came up on my shuffle, and it occurred to me that there really are two kinds of people in this world: those that hear the song and think of Dirty Dancing and its shit plot and and lame teengirl fantasies and tacky opening credits (complete with extra shit font); and those that hear it and instead see Harvey’s head hit the pillow and murmur quietly to themselves that it’s true, you don’t make up for your sins in the church, you do it on the street.
dav, your comment was stuck in moderation because of the links. Sorry about that. I had thought it was perfect when I saw it first, the fact that there was a silence at the beginning was scientifically correct (there is no sound in space) and also suggest the graceful movement of the spaceships etc. Its (over) sweetness does act as a counterpoint for what happens later. However, I’ve just found an interview with Kubrick which explains his choice, which I’ll paste into the end of the post.
The soundtrack to Assault On Precinct 13 is great. I remember listening to it a while ago and thinking that it sounded like Aphex Twin and to think that Carpenter composed it himself.
Pavement Trauma, I’ve listened to Aimee Mann songs a number of times and no where is there a reference to frogs falling from the sky. I knew that the use of that song in the middle of the film was contentious - some love it, others, like me, don’t. Whatyagonna do?
Kevin, presently I’m a bit tired so I had to go to hypemachine to be reminded that Yann wrote those tracks for Amélie. There’s a great track Summer 78, Actually, weirdly, following the link to the post brought me to a post on Stereogum.
The idea behind the post was very similar to what I was trying to do here but they had the technology to do it. Basically they have the final scene from the final scene from the Sapranos up, but they let you post in the url for an mp3 to play the track while watching the final scene. Pelican’s Perch provides the mp3 url for Summer 78 so you can cut and paste it into the sterogum post to see how it works. Actually, looking at it now it only partly works because you can’t hear the dialogue. Good idea though.
But back to my main point Kevin. You’re absolutely right.
jza, thanks. Anderson is still on his arch ‘film as literature’ gig as was Ray and Merchant/Ivory. But Merchant/Ivory? Yuck. Vaseline-lensed, chocolate box cover-type films for nostalgic ex-colonialists.
In other news, yesterday on the bus ‘Be My Baby’ by The Ronettes came up on my shuffle
That’s exactly it: one song, two movies, and the effect is completely different in both. In Dirty Dancing the song appears sentimental, but in Mean Streets, its just mental.