Roger Hillman,
Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology.
Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 2 53 21754 7
219pp
US$19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press)

History on the soundtrack: an archaeology of reception, cultural politics and identity in the New German cinema

About twenty years ago Claude Levi-Strauss claimed that “music is language without meaning” which “no doubt… speaks but this can only be because of its negative relation to language”. (The Naked Man, 1987) Levi-Strauss argued that without language “there would not be music”; we need the pre-existing system of references structured by language in order to derive any meaning from the “absent sense” represented by music. In contrast, Susanne Langer, who devoted a chapter to the significance of music in her Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (1974), breaks down the analogy between music and language. Music may not have literal meaning but it has its own specific system of symbolic representation; it “articulates forms which language cannot set forth“, although “it seems peculiarly hard for our literal minds to grasp the idea that anything can be known which cannot be named.” (author’s emphasis)

These statements about the expressive possibilities and referential field of music mirror the two major interpretative models for film music: on the one hand, music is deemed a secondary system of meaning which needs the referential field of another language system to become meaningful; on the other hand, music is considered an independent semantic field, representing the “emotional experience” in a way “incommensurable with language, and even with presentational symbols like images, gestures, and rites.” (Langer, 1974: 232-3, 218)

The first model is exemplified by classical Hollywood cinema and the concept of “unheard melodies” (Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, 1987): film music has been traditionally regarded as a kind of ‘parenthesis’ of image and narrative, sometimes nice and pleasant to listen to, most often “unheard”, but always insufficiently independent to provide a meaning of its own. Designed to be “unheard”, music has occasionally been elevated to a kind of ‘poetic insert’ “which suggests a likeness to some quality of the diegetic signifier” (32). Music’s discursive status here is one of a “non-diegetic interpreter” which emphasises mood and feeling, anchors the image’s meaning, and intensifies the interpretation of narrative, but which does not have to signify anything by itself in the predominantly visual domain of film.

The second model, explored more recently by both filmmakers and theorists, extends Langer’s symbolic interpretation and grants music a semantic capacity equal to that of the image in the post-modern context. In Royal Brown’s words, what characterises film music in recent decades is the way in which we are “redefining and resiting the very role of music in the imaged universe of the cinema”; “rather than supporting and/ or colouring the visual images and narrative situations, [the music] stands as an image in its own right, helping the audience to read the film’s other images as such rather than as a replacement for or imitation of objective reality.” (1994: 239-240) The role of film music is being constantly redefined under pressure from cross-cultural and cross-media practice in contemporary cultural forms, which tend insistently to blend “the linguistic, visual and aural domains” (Mieke Bal).

Taking its energy from this contextual field, Roger Hillman’s book Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology aims to “constructively unsettle the discipline” (167), challenging both the established patterns of interpretation and the separated fields of study. Although the book’s focal point is the New German Cinema of the 1970s, its wide scope signals an attempt to close some of the gaps in the study of film music and to expand the interpretive frontier by combining textual, ideological and cultural analysis. Hillman’s book appears in a field of study that seems to be blossoming nowadays: following Gorbman’s seminal Unheard Melodies, a series of examinations of the basic aspects of musical soundtracks appeared in the 1990s. Royal Brown’s Overtones and Undertones (1994), George Burt’s The Art of Film Music (1994), Caryl Flinn’s Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (1992) are just a few titles from a lengthy list of studies closely examining the ontology of film music. In the following decade the focus shifted from general discussion to specific genres: the distinctive function of classical music in contrast to popular genres in soundtrack, jazz idiom in/and film, rock culture in/and film, etc. More recently cultural studies has offered another prism through which to view film music: gender, race, ethnicity, cultural, ideological and historical perspectives are reconfiguring many of the traditional concepts of film music.

Within this diverse interdisciplinary scholarship, Hillman’s book is positioned as a “counterexample to almost every aspect of the classical Hollywood paradigm” (1). The title might be read as a paraphrase of Kathryn Kalinak’s Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (1992), but it suggests more than the anti-Hollywood pathos of the New German Cinema. Hillman seeks an ideological contextualisation of film music within the conditions of shifting spectatorship. Discussed through the perspectives of politics, history, identity and cultural memory, the New German Cinema provides a perfect example of the use of classical music in film as a cultural, ideological and historical marker. In other words, Hillman’s book is not so much an interrogation of the interaction between image and music as an inquiry into soundtrack music as ‘generalised cultural memory” (19) and as a “memory bank for finding one’s way about the world” (1). Unsettling the Score constructs an archaeology of the perception of music both within and outside of the film medium.

The discussion centres on a series of case studies exploring the scores of several representative films from the most significant directors of the New German Cinema. Hillman examines Kluge’s Die Patriotin (West Germany 1979), Syberberg’s Hitler: A film from Germany (Weste Germany/UK/France 1977), Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen(West Germany 1980) and surveys Herzog’s eclectic imagery. Visconti’s Senso (Italy 1954) falls outside this tradition, extending the interpretive map and exemplifying the function of German music as a cultural marker in non-German film. While the topic of each chapter is firmly established, the boundaries between them are flexible. The layers of meaning unearthed in the process of analysis cross the space between the chapters and evolve into a series of key ideas developed throughout the whole study: the prominence of music in the narratives of New German Cinema; the ideological implications of German classical music; art and politics in Nazi Germany; the issue of national identity in pre- and post-war Germany; the history of music perception and the construction of film meaning. Each of these questions touches upon Germany’s unique cultural configuration, in which a long philosophical tradition – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Adorno – regarded music as “the ultimate art form through its supposed non-representational quality” (29). What happens when a traditionally hegemonic art form combines with the most powerful visual media of the twentieth century? This question constitutes the background to the discussion, implying the primacy of cultural memory for the directors of the New German Cinema.

In Hillman’s interpretation, the music in New German Cinema retains greater semantic independence than it does for Levi-Strauss. While he avoids the debate on the meaning(lessness) of music and its ability to articulate and represent feelings, ideas, and narrative content as an issue “impossible to resolve’ (9), he insists on the crucial cultural weight music imports into a film text. Music enters the films in question as an already complex message, as a heavily loaded system of cultural significations which bear the long history of its perception. Combined with images, classical tunes multiply the layers of meaning and stretch them much farther than the musical text alone suggests. The examples of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a Haydn melody better known as the “Deutschlandlied” (and the national anthem) most support these observations. Hillman’s discussion gradually extends the musical examples and the historical references of discussion: what happens in the perceptual apparatus of the contemporary viewer/listener when the familiar sounds of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, or Wagner’s Parcifal enter a film text and interact with visuals and diegesis? How does the Nazi appropriation of German classical music interfere with its subsequent reception? Which music most frequently underscores uneasy discussions about twentieth-century German history? Or, in Hillman’s words: “what happens when music, no longer perceived as ‘just’ music, accompanies visuals that are contemporary not with the music as historical source but with its afterlife in reception”? Thus the project’s central preoccupation is “relocating a canonised musical text in the ideological discourse of a new, filmic text, where this discourse is in dialogue with a stage of reception history of the music” (36). From this starting point the status of music as a narrative agent is re-examined within the framework of cultural studies: being a cultural marker in the New German Cinema, the music becomes part of the story itself, of the “reading of the story”, “of the history behind the fictional level of the film.” (21)

In order to “establish a tonal center” to his discussion, Hillman outlines some of the key issues related to the use of music in film in general (Chapter One). Traditionally chosen for mood purposes, the music may be with or without national overtones; it may signify the Other or (Western) cultural memory; it may characterise or stereotype a film character. A rarely considered (but often used) effect, the Chinese box or acoustic mise-en-abîme, is discussed as an example of aural capsule, which condenses broader narrative and cultural meanings. Mentioning multiple examples for and against the cultural reading of film music, Hillman notes that there are films which resist the cultural “filter” of interpretation (the presence of a record of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the Bates mansion in Hitchcock’s Psycho (US 1960) is explored as a purely visual object), while others cannot be understood without considering music as a cultural signifier. For instance, in Hotel Terminus (France/US 1988) Ophüls uses Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata to frame “a highly political story” about the Gestapo Chief in Lyons, Klaus Barbie. We cannot miss the acoustic equivalent of the establishing shot that this music provides, but instead Hillman wants us to focus on Ophüls’s “culturally loaded sound” which “evokes the tension between high culture and barbarism” (23), a central point in his subsequent discussion of the New German Cinema.

The following first brief ‘zooming in’ on German films is also an invitation for a revision of the “culturally loaded sound” they contain (Chapter Two). The exclusive status of music in German culture creates a different sound/image configuration in German film. In contrast to the secondary position of the soundtrack in classic Hollywood film, the directors of the New German Cinema tend to create what Hillman calls a “historical montage” by shifting the balance between image and sound through the “simultaneous presence of different time layers via the soundtrack” (25). While Hollywood tends to use music to illustrate “universal stereotypes”, New German Cinema directors employ it to achieve “a Bakhtinian polyphony of meaning … far beyond the structural dialogue between soundtrack and visuals” (27). Neither counterpoint nor parallelism – the two major techniques developed in classical cinema – can theorise the use of music as cultural marker; it is not the musical ‘text’ alone that enters the film fabric but the “layers of time, relating to the reception of the work”. The primacy of cultural traditions for German cinema is closely related to identity politics: the “nineteenth-century notion of a Kulturnation, a nation defining and representing itself through culture” (29) survived the historical discontinuities of the twentieth century, including the subsequent identity crisis of the 1990s brought about by the political re-unification of Germany. Hillman’s major point here is the process whereby the intrafilmic space is transformed through music: when icons such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or acoustic symbols such as “Deutschlandlied” enter the narrative space, they are able to reformulate the message by inscribing their own reception history into the texture of the film. It is worth noting the link between the prominent use of this kind of music and the historical moment; later, in the1990s and beyond, when the country moved into another historical stage, these musical pieces became almost entirely absent from German films.

While Kluge, Syberberg, and Fassbinder are very different directors in terms of style and themes, they closely resemble one another in their focus on identity and history, their use of German music as common denominator, and their search for Brechtian effects which “activate the mind rather than emotions”. The musical quotations in their films are “floating” signifiers, but they provide “a kind of acoustic suturing”; Lacan’s term here describes the aural simulacrum as a zone of resonance gathering signals across historical epochs and “across the visual/aural divide” (41). Evoking both Plato and the historian Robert Rosenstone, Hillman asks the question which may have given birth to the whole project: what “shakes” the process of spectatorship when the mode of musical representation changes?

Discussing the role of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in film soundtracks as a national and international cultural symbol, document, and historical object, Hillman is most interested in the ambiguities associated with this music (Chapter Three). The famous last movement, the Ode to Joy – a cultural icon with multiple and shifting meanings – becomes plastic material in the hands of different filmmakers. Depending on the context, it carries conflicting cultural messages, notably the tension between the ideal of universal brotherhood it conveys and the cultural memory of its appropriation by the Nazis. In the New German Cinema this piece of music functions as “a secondary artwork within the primary artwork that is the particular film”, as a political symbol referring to different historical moments, and, in a broader sense, as an iteration of the status of this tune “within a culture ranking music aesthetically higher than film” (50). While Syberberg emphasises the parallelism between the cyclic principle of Beethoven’s last movement and the cyclic progression of German history, Kluge is inspired by its liberating pathos. Alternatively, Helke Sander bridges politic and gender in Redupers (West Germany 1977), drawing an analogy between the monumental utopia of the Ode to Joy and the Berlin Wall, another trademark of masculine politics. Tarkovsky’s and Makavejev’s films provide major examples from outside Germany.

In Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (Italy/Soviet Union 1983), the Ninth Symphony is “a fairground reduction of some of the loftiest music written” (59); combined with Verdi’s Requiem, it is a part of the complex aural arc of a film where the music is associated with the notion of the epiphany and of a borderless world rather than a single national identity. Similarly, in Stalker (1979) the Ode to Joy appears as “one of the four musical stations of the Cross in the spiritual odyssey of the film.” In contrast to its nightmarish quotation in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (UK 1971), here Beethoven is “an antidote to the arid technological landscape” (62). Unlike Tarkovsky’s philosophical magnitude, Makavejev’s approach in Man is Not a Bird (Yugoslavia 1965) is one of provocative demystification and irony, aiming to unmask the “socialist Vanity Fair” (59). The Ninth in his hands echoes Sander’s treatment of the music as a monument of authority: instead of being an “icon of European idealism”, it is ritualistically associated with masculine power, institutions, and hierarchies.

The first of the German case studies is Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), an epic project of historical de-mystification and cultural memory reminiscent of tragedy (Chapter Four). A “Wagnerian German requiem”, Syberberg’s film superimposes myth and history to activate both long- and short-term cultural memory. The crucial significance of the soundtrack, “to represent and interrogate the past” (67), was planned at the script stage. For Syberberg, music is an essential narrative building block, providing dramatic hinges in the story. Hillman notes that most critical analyses of this film overlook the crucial musical element, focusing predominantly on the visuals and defining the film as giving “a rather distant visual representation to such things as the ‘structure of feeling’ in which Nazism developed and to which it gave political shape”. They passed over the “acoustic equivalents of re-visioning, a renewed listening of history” (70). Hillman calls these “photosonics”: audio equivalents of the effect of presence/absence in the photographic image, discussed by Roland Barthes in “Rhetoric of the Image”. Barthes is filtered through Martin Jay’s later interpretation to delineate Syberberg’s complex approach to the soundtrack as historical palimpsest: the illogical co-existence of here-now and there-then in every photograph is transposed onto the soundtrack as an acoustic equivalent of the “inevitable aura of lost past” and “the pain associated with mourning that loss” (73). Syberberg is most interested in the archetypal myths which “once fed into a great Romantic tradition and have since been hopelessly compromised” (77). The primary material used to articulate this thesis is Wagner’s Parcifal: “the quest for the Grail becoming synonymous with German Romantic strivings for the transcendental” (75). While popular culture rarely uses Wagner “without some ideological connotations or reference”, Syberberg attempts to de-politicise the composer, to “remove [him] from the embrace of both the Right and the Left” (74). With Liszt, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the director extends further the register of historical connotations and narrative possibilities. Among these composers the irredeemable figure is Haydn: his melody later became the “unhappy anthem, which was carried by Hitler to all European countries, but which was written as a poem of freedom in the revolutionary days of the nineteenth century” (81)… “Haydn…can no longer be just Haydn. …[His] fate is symptomatic of the cultural victims of German political culture, whose rehabilitation was essential but still historically impossible at the time of Syberbergs’s film” (81).

With Kluge’s Die Patriotin (1979) Hillman leaves the territory of ritualistic grand narratives to turn to the alternative histories of the everyday (Chapter Five). “A fantasy-driven essay on German history”, time, and patriotism, this film is dominated by the musical form of fantasy. Hillman’s choice of this particular work by Kluge is determined by his consistent desire to examine the various models of temporality represented through music in the New German Cinema. If Syberberg’s soundtrack focuses on memory, trauma, pain, and the irrationalism of German history, Kluge’s “acoustic surrealism” challenges the balance between sound and image in search of “a more positive version of German history” (96). Hillman discusses Kluge’s playful treatment of the ambiguous “Deutschlandlied”; the dialogue between the visual and the soundtrack provides more evidence of the complex dialectic of history, art production, and shifting receptions. The soundtrack is a key element in achieving Brechtian effects in Die Patriotin: music functions as a “critical commentary” on historical consciousness and the collective unconscious. The list of 40 musical examples provided in this chapter, range from folk songs to Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Sibelius, and Skryabin. This diverse musical material receives virtuosic arrangement, which allows it to interact with heterogeneous visuals (photograph, painting, documentary film clips, etc) and to construct a sonic sub-narrative. For Hillman, Kluge’s project is a remarkable feat:

[I]t is also something of an attempt to rewrite/revisualise history musically, to do more justice to the complexity of history by challenging the dominating role of the word and image. Kluge reinstates the vertical axis of harmony…[ which] coexists with the conventionally narrative axis of melody, corresponding to more linear history, with its horizontal motion. (98-99)

Paradoxically, Skryabin, a Russian composer, is a central figure in the aural meditation on German identity, on “what was and still is ‘German’ and ‘Germany'” (102). Skryabin’s Prelude op.11, no.15 becomes a sensitive seismograph of national hopes and disasters. In contrast, Sibelius points to the film’s central preoccupation with the theme of patriotism, abstracting further its historical ambiguities, and juxtaposing patriotism, nationalism and chauvinism. The acoustic texture of the film is completed when Beethoven’s Ninth is combined with a Brecht text, a search for a universal identity with no negative political connotations. Facing both the past and the future, Kluge’s project is one of de-ideologising a music “that was historically ideologised” and evoking the revolutionary, humanistic and idealistic traditions in German history. The search for “a more positive version of German history”, however, is suspended by an open question: why “the nineteenth-century tradition of a nation of poets and thinkers [Dichter and Denker] failed to equip Germany for the political rigors of twentieth-century history” (96).

The same open question underlies the discussion of Reiner Werner Fassbinder, a “crucial [figure] for the German identity issue” (110), in Chapter Six. The mixture of the genres and forms of mass culture, and “postmodern and/or modern strategies” (110) should not blind us to Fassbinder’s intense focus on “the exclusivity of German preoccupation with the mind at the expense of political maturity throughout history” (112). Hillman is particularly interested in this unbalance in the New German Cinema, noting “the virtual impossibility of bypassing the conceptual, of dealing with ideas arising from one’s national history” (115). Hillman’s primary object of interest here is Lili Marleen (1980) a “metatext about art and (moral/political) responsibility” (135). Seen as “a one song musical” and spectacular “historical melodrama”, this film is, according to most critics, Fassbinder’s most Hollywood-like film. But it is also an illustration of how the conceptual aspires to break through the dramatic surface of the genre. The musical past traced in Lili Marleen is an integral part of Fassbinder’s investigation of his nation’s past and identity. In Fassbinder’s hands the musical quotations are a subversive, eclectic, ironic, “poisonously satirical” (117), and de-romanticising tool.

It is “via the relationship between entertainment music [Unterhaltungmusic or U-music] and serious music [ernste Music or E-music] that the film articulates its central preoccupation with the cultural politics of Nazism” (119). Each time the popular song enters the narrative, the dramatic action is suspended and another stage of the world conflict signalled, exemplifying the intensive use of music as both a narrative tool and an instrument of ideology. The simple song rises to become a symbol of the historical moment, taking on meaning from the social and political context, which illustrates the multiple functions of music as a cultural marker. Lili Marleen was the title song on Hitler’s birthday and also exercised an “emotional captivation” which “immobilised troops in the trenches” (127). The song became an ambiguous and plastic symbol of both division and unity “across enemy lines”, a “favourite with troops from both sides, and ultimately an item on the Nazi banned list” (121).

Like the song, Fassbinder’s film is ambiguous and controversial, often seen as part of “a new discourse (not confined to Germany), which aestheticised fascism and reflected its fascination without criticism” (119). Hillman does not omit the most controversial points in the film: Fassbinder’s chameleonic inversions of the Jewish theme and the transposition of the image of Hitler from the plane of morality to the plane of aesthetics. Hitler is portrayed as “the end point of kitsch, whose representation is no longer possible” (126). Music crucially amplifies the ambiguity of the film; it “defies straightforward approaches to ideology and art, inasmuch as its mysteries transcend national allegiances and extends the fascination of fascism beyond its glitz for a target audience” (127). It is music’s “nomadic ability” (Edward Said) to become part of various social, cultural and rhetorical conditions, which Fassbinder deliberately plays with; he emphasises the “fluid international boundaries of once national(istic) music” and shows that “both sides of the ideological divide collapse in the one musical text” (128). Fassbinder becomes Hillman’s prime example of the two seemingly incompatible characteristics of the music of the New German Cinema: on the one hand, it carries heavy historical and ideological luggage in the film text, which transforms the soundtrack into a site of political and ideological connotations; on the other hand, it escapes national and ideological anchoring, while moving fluidly across the political divide.

With the two final case studies – Werner Herzog and Luchino Visconti – Hillman completes the argument that music is able to move easily from national, to international, to global connotations, even within the same soundtrack (Chapters Seven and Eight). Herzog and Visconti are, in a sense, counterexamples to the general argument up to here. Herzog, the author of probably the “last film of the New German Cinema” (Fitzcarraldo, 1981), is a master of obscuring “political reality…for apolitical purposes” (150). In contrast to Kluge’s, Syberberg’s or Fassbinder’s historical and political dissections, Herzog can be seen as the last Romantic, devoid of neo-nationalism, balancing on the shifting terrain of the “new internationalism” and post-modernism, whose “project is one of liberation, self-deception, hubris or all three combined” (137). Perhaps the “great[est] eclectic” in German cinema, his films are strongly dominated by the visual. He uses the music mainly to advance the dramatic development, to create ironic counterpoints, to “dredge [the images] from the subconscious” (137), rather than to awaken historical memory. Hillman tries to discover a system in Herzog’s aural eclecticism: Aguirre (West Germany 1972) seems “attuned to the music of the spheres simulated by the music of Popol Vuh” (137); in Woyzeck (West Germany 1978) the subjective point of hearing makes cosmic voices vividly audible, while a Vivaldi mandolin concerto ironically foregrounds the lifelessness of the social environment; The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1985) paraphrases the “sacral” in musical terms; Fitzcarraldo is a spectacular crossover of opera, film and mythology; the musical quotations from Verdi, Wagner, and Grieg in Lessons of Darkness (France/UK/Germany 1992) “function as a threnody for the West” (147). While Herzog may allow “an absolute discrepancy between image and sound at a narrative level” (148), “the great eclecticism” of musical choices in his films is part of his post-modern Romanticism and mythmaking strategy.

Similarly, Visconti’s use of Austro-German music in a non-German film, Senso, comes to illustrate the transferability of music as cultural marker. Visconti’s shifting between Verdi and Bruckner follows the finest dramatic movements of the narrative, providing sensitive overtones for the shifting “personal and national allegiances” (154), the fragmentation of a character’s personality, or inserting special sonic moments in the “foregrounding of the subconscious”. Hillman notes that Visconti’s choice of Bruckner has to do with the history of Bruckner’s reception and the cultural connotations of his music in post-war Italy; the focal point in this chapter is to shift the stubborn critical focus on Italian identity and to pronounce the “bifocality” of the film, which “foreground[s] Austrian, alongside Italian, identity” (161). With Herzog’s cultural eclecticism and Visconti’s sophisticated orchestration of culturally diverse music in the soundtrack, Hillman makes his final arguments, emphasising music’s easy de-territorisation. A ‘floating’ signifier in the ever-shifting cultural context of contemporary cinema, its chameleonic qualities seem endless.

Amidst the multiplicity of facts and details of film/music analysis several key ideas crystallise in the final chapter of Unsettling Scores: the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in film music studies; the central place of cultural memory in the perception of film music in a national cinema; the high/low culture debate as a major crossing point in cinematic soundtracks. If Hillman insists on engaging with the “acoustic regime” in film, it is to attune academic studies with contemporary culture’s consistent policy of blending the linguistic, the visual and the aural. In Unsettling scores this blend is exemplified by the use of Beethoven’s Ninth in film: “a key text” in German culture, its final movement, with Schiller’s verses incorporated in the visual domain of German films, illustrates the audiovisual regime in the new media, reviving the “principle of coexpressibility” (Erwin Panofsky).

Hillman’s book aspires to remove the soundtrack from its historically determined secondary position and to make it equal to the visuals – a task that seems up to date in the context of “the digital reconfiguration of interdependent sound and image” (James Tobias). While digital media seeks such a reconfiguration in order to reach international audiences, the New German Cinema achieved it some thirty years ago by using the rich spectre of historical and cultural connotations within the boundaries of a national cinema. Unsettling Scores educates the reader/viewer’s senses in a new way: it redirects attention from the visual to the audiovisual; from the image alone supported by “unheard melodies” to image/music synesthesia. The analysis consistently activates both eye and ear, sight and hearing; and this more sophisticated perceptual apparatus revitalises semi-forgotten, or simply unheard aural details in the films discussed. It is no exaggeration to say that Unsettling Scores ultimately offers not just a new reading of familiar films; in a sense, it discusses different films, ones we failed to apprehend properly because we only saw them without hearing them. Hillman’s knowledge of and love for music profoundly shapes the text of Unsettling Scores, which itself reads like a fluid, polyphonic, and ultimately melodic lamentation of the tragic destiny of a fine art during the catastrophic European history of the twentieth century. Yet the book’s musical qualities do not affect its analytical power and the energy of its argumentation. Although the focal point is German cinema, where the integration of music and film generates a unique cultural, political, ideological and aesthetic blend, Unsettling Scores provides a model for the cultural analysis of film music which can be applied to any other national cinema and even to the trans-nationalism of the contemporary global media.

Violetta Petrova
Victoria University, New Zealand.

Created on: Monday, 13 November 2006