Philip Brophy (ed.),
Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music.
Sydney: Australian film, television, and radio school, 2000
ISBN 9 781876 351090
224 pp
A$24.95
(Review copy supplied by AFTRS)
Uploaded 1 November 2000
In 1929, French filmmaker Rene Clair proclaimed the advent of a new era in film art. Wrote Clair, “The talking film is not everything. There is also the sound film…” In making such a bold pronouncement, Clair sought to push sound films to the aesthetic heights achieved by silent cinema,a form thought to have reached a certain artistic “maturity” in its relatively brief period of development.
Some seventy years later, one is tempted to suggest that the study of film sound has finally reached a certain “maturity”, if I may be forgiven this developmental metaphor, in its relatively brief period of development within academic film studies. Ever since the publication of John Belton and Elizabeth Weis’ Film Sound: Theory and Practice (1985), film music and sound design have emerged as especially fertile areas for film theory and criticism. Within the past year, for instance, we have seen the publication of particularly important and valuable studies by James Lastra and Sarah Kozloff. Moreover, the coming year promises further contributions to the field by such scholars as Annahid Kassabian and Arthur Knight. Years ago, when Roy Prendergast declared film music a “neglected art” it may well have been true, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain such a claim today.
For further proof of this critical ferment, one need look no farther than Cinesonic, an annual conference held each year in Melbourne that is specifically devoted to the study of film sound. Organized by Philip Brophy, the event brings together top scholars and practitioners from America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to discuss their craft, share their research, and establish new areas of interest within the field. In addition to the conference itself, the first two Cinesonics have yielded two separate anthologies, each of them edited by Philip Brophy and each of them compiling the papers presented at the conference in book form. The most recent of these volumes was published in May of 2000. By bringing together a diverse array of topics and approaches, it provides further evidence of this subdiscipline’s vitality.
Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music is organized into four parts. The first is a series of interviews with the featured guests of the 1999 conference, sound designers Randy Thom and Francois Musy, and composer David Shea. The second part addresses topics that are somewhat tangential to film studies, but have nonetheless developed a relation to it through issues of reciprocal influence. Among the subjects discussed in this part of the book are jazz, muzak, and music video. The third part of the book deals with film scores, especially the relationship between ideological norms and classical music as it has both influenced and been used in film scoring. The final section speaks to broader issues in film sound design and contains studies of two particularly important sound stylists: Fritz Lang and Orson Welles.
In one sense, the range of topics and approaches represented here is both the strength and weakness of the collection. Kodwo Eshun’s essay on Hype Williams and Missy Elliot’s music videos provides a case in point. Writing more or less as a journalist, Eshun utilizes several neologisms, such as “animatography,” “texturhythms,” and “syncopescape,” in an effort to capture the distinctive qualities of Timbaland’s rhythm tracks and Williams’ liquid and elastic images. On the one hand, one might quibble that Eshun’s vocabulary here lacks the terminological precision that might make it a more valuable contribution to music and music video theory. On the other hand, however, Eshun’s prose rather wonderfully evokes the texture and materiality of the soundtrack that accompanies Williams’ visuals. As such, Eshun’s essay rather neatly overcomes one of the frequent stumbling blocks of film sound theory, namely the challenge of properly describing a phenomenon that is at once inherently visceral and confoundingly ephemeral. Eshun’s essay is a potent reminder of the fact that film sound analysts have nothing quite comparable to the frame enlargement as a means of phenomenologically illustrating and specifying specific points of their argument.
Other essays tread fairly familiar territory among film sound enthusiasts, sometimes with mixed results. Considering the work already done on Orson Welles by Penny Mintz, Rick Altman, and others, I wondered what Francois Thomas could add to the increasingly glutted market of Welles’ biographies and auteurist studies. Yet Thomas’ essay proved to be the most pleasant surprise in the collection. By focusing on the use of postsynchronization in Welles’ later films, Thomas not only illuminates stylistic tendencies evident in the director’s early masterpieces, but also suggests why Welles’ approach to sound represents such an important alternative to Hollywood conventions. The same cannot be said, of John Conomos’ essay on jazz and film noir. Like Thomas, Conomos’ contribution joins an increasingly crowded field on jazz in cinema that includes scholars such as Krin Gabbard, Kathryn Kalinak, Caryl Flinn, and Royal S. Brown. While Conomos reviews the work of these scholars within his essay, his own analysis adds little in the way of original insights. Moreover, in his discussion of David Raksin, Conomos rather curiously omits any reference to George Burt’s rather detailed analysis of the composer’s work in The Art of Film Music, which reproduces entire cues from Raksin’s score for Laura (1944).
Perhaps the two biggest highlights of the collection are the contributions of Claudia Gorbman and Joseph Lanza. Gorbman’s essay, “Drums along the L.A. River: scoring the Indian,” deals with the ways in which Native Americans have been musically coded within the so-called liberal western. Gorbman’s conclusions here are not terribly surprising insofar as she demonstrates that Hollywood films use musical styles and instrumentation that render Native American cultures as Others. These musical devices ultimately serve to contrast the Indians of these films with the white, European males who serve as the films’ heroes. What makes Gorbman’s article so valuable, however, is the richness and depth of the musical analysis she develops to support her case. By comparing and contrasting composers with vastly different styles (Hugo Friedhofer, Leonard Rosenmann, John Barry) working at different points of the western’s evolution, Gorbman rather neatly shows how a broad range of musical devices have served similar ideological purposes throughout the genre’s history.
In contrast to Gorbman, Joseph Lanza shows relatively little interest in ideological issues, this despite the fact that his essay, “My aisles of golden dreams: the beauty of supermarket music,” deals with a subject that seems inextricably bound up with issues of class, consumerism, and taste cultures. Instead, Lanza guilelessly, if somewhat perversely, asks us to consider supermarket music as music rather than as an environmental inducement to impulse buying. In a wide-ranging discussion that follows up many of the concerns explored in his excellent book, Elevator Music, Lanza celebrates the surreal beauty of supermarket music while lamenting the way it has been gradually replaced by more “brand image”-friendly song compilations and designer background music service. Along the way, Lanza considers such topics as the use of Muzak in scenes from movies; the pleasures of synchronicity produced by the serendipitous collision of song lyrics and shopping activities; the relative merits of original songs versus “Beautiful Music” cover versions; and even the use of environmental music to reduce employees’ stress levels and boost their immunology. In sum, Lanza’s essay is a welcome reminder that even as the field of film sound studies moves ever closer to a full “maturity,” nothing can replace the giddy, elemental “childish” pleasures that encouraged us to study film sound and music in the first place.
Jeff Smith