Film Music
Film Music
March 25, 1995
In the beginning, there was Film; silent. There was always music. In major Cinemas, vast rococo palaces, orchestras played commissioned scores carefully coordinated with the action on the screen. More often, the films arrived with a single sheet of printed music offering one-line themes for each sequence as a suggestion to the house pianist. Musical cliches were the name of the game, happy music, sad music, galloping music and, of course, love at first sight music. In 1926 Robert Flaherty returned from two years filming on the island of Samoa with his second major film, MOANA , a lyrical depiction of life before the age of the missionary. His young daughters had learned the songs of the villagers but there was no way to incorporate this music in the film.
By 1929 sound on film had arrived. The process of recording synchronous sound, almost always talk, was so clumsy and involved such cumbersome equipment, that filming retired into studios where the film makers had “control”. The sound was talk, talk, and more talk. The subordinate music was again, mood music.
From the start there were exceptions. 1931 in Hollywood, I’M A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN-GANG directed by Mervyn Le Roy, had no music except in the scenes where the prisoners sang, not even over the last line where Paul Muni disappears into the night saying “I steal!”. In Germany, the same year saw KAMERADSHAFT directed by G.W.Pabst, a dramatized account of a coal mine disaster, realistic, though all the underground scenes were shot in a studio; the French talk French and the Germans talk German... realism, and therefore no music. Much later, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, realism, with music by Alfred Newman, and lots of it.
From 1930 on, all films that played in the newly equipped cinemas, had to have sound; yes, even “documentary” films had to have sound. Going out into the “real” world with all this complicated, delicate equipment was impossible, so our enterprising documentarists discovered the virtues of music and narration. Most of these films made use of “canned” music. I remember going to a company called Correli-Jacobs; (it had a musical sound to it! ) The higher class documentaries assigned as much as 30% of the budget to commission original scores from leading composers, often recorded by major orchestras; Virgil Thompson, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Hans Eisler and Mark Blitzstein among them. By adding a stentorian voice to carry a “message”, they created a particular form where the image became almost incidental to the voice and music, especially when the voice took on a poetic form as in the PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS:
High winds and sun
A country without rivers
And with little rain
Settler; Plow at your peril
Two hundred miles from water
Two hundred miles from town
But the land is new
Many were disappointed
The rains failed
And the sun baked the light soil
spoken by Thomas Chalmers, to Virgil Thomson's stirring music, with images that punch home the message... This is an operatic form combining poetry, moving image (dance) and music. It worked magnificently.
I first saw this film in London in 1936. I was a schoolboy, determined to make documentary films and this was superb! I had read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”. I had seen “I’m a Fugitive from a Chain-Gang”
so I must have known that America had social problems and racial problems but a disaster of this magnitude... I had no idea; so eloquently stated. That evening I happened to be with my brother and we ran into John Grierson, the father of the British Documentary, in a pub. I found myself gushing to him about the impact of THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS, only to be cut short by his somewhat sour comment “that by the end of an era we should be good at doing what we have been doing for so long. In a few weeks you will see the beginning of a new era, synchronous sound, the “talkies” have come to Documentary”. And I did. NIGHT MAIL. It gave us something to think about. They did talk, but awkward talk, stilted, reenacted. It is the music of Benjamin Britten and the lyric voice of W.H.Auden that survives:
This is the night mail
Crossing the border
Bringing the check and
The postal order
Letters for the rich
Letters for the poor
Shop at the corner
And the girl next door...
The silent films of Robert Flaherty often depicted process; building an Igloo, fishing, climbing a tree, hunting; constructing sequences in apparent continuity. Through these modest little stories, beautifully rendered with compassion and visual tension, the viewer came to know the people and something of their culture.
In the era of narration and music, we cameramen, were sent out with what amounted to a shopping list of “shots”. You could divide them into categories; Puffy clouds in a blue sky, electric pylons, wheat harvesters in action, hydro-electric powerplants, smoking factory chimneys... these represented “progress!” rivulets of water in wasted areas, parched desert, dust devils, leaden sky, smokeless factory chimneys... meant poverty, depression, erosion etc. Nothing intrinsically wrong there except that these icons rapidly became cliches.
Then came the era of the “talkies”. Talk, and more talk. Ordinary “real” people were not good at repeating lines for the camera so why not hire actors and make the term “Documentary” a sad joke. It was in this period (1946) that Robert & Francis Flaherty made LOUISIANA STORY. The sponsor of this film was Standard Oil of N.J. and the script, every page of which had to be initialed by Mr. Flaherty in the presence of the Standard Oil lawyer, was about oil drilling rigs coming to the Bayous of Louisiana, as seen through the eyes of a Cajun boy. The agreement specified that there would be dialogue, it was to be a “talky”, there were no two ways about it.
The “actors” were chosen from local people and the dialogue scenes were made with the clumsy equipment available at that time. These scenes are static, awkward, stilted. The rest of the film was shot silent just as Mr. Flaherty had shot his other films. We used relatively light and therefore portable cameras, the Arreflex that had been developed by the Germans to record Hitler's conquest of the world. As soon as we encountered dialogue, the whole feeling of the film changes. We had to use a quiet camera that was synchronous and weighed about 85 pounds, working in conjunction with a large and cumbersome disc recorder with a diamond stylus cutting a groove on 16inch glass discs coated with acetate. With this procedure came the whole rigmarole of clap-sticks, take one, take two, take 23 and the lines got stale and the image paralytic.
I remember Mr. Flaherty’s reaction when he first screened the dialogue rushes “My God Ricky, did I write that shit?” But it was not the writing so much as the excruciating process of sound filming that our characters were subjected to, something that only a trained actor could possibly survive.
Flaherty was acutely aware of the importance of sound. We took our clumsy machine to the marshes to record the alligators, the birds, the natural sounds but it was hopeless. Our sound man Benjie Doniger was better at making alligator sounds than they were!
With only a few lines of gentle narration to introduce the boy, and his mythology, written and spoken by Mr. Flaherty, Virgil Thomson was as free to develop his musical ideas as we were to develop the visual story. I can think of very few instances where this has been true.
Hans Eisler composed a score for THE WHITE FLOOD, a twenty minute film that dealt visually with arctic ice, the balance between ice and water, with few words and an extraordinarily evocative score using timpani peddle drums that changed pitch during the note.
Satijat Ray’s masterpiece, Patha Panchali, where Ravi Shankar’s sitar replaced dialogue at a crucial moment where mere words could only have been banal. A film shot much as Louisiana Story was, with a tiny crew working over a long period of time, in this case, nearly four years.
We spent fourteen months filming in Louisiana, day after day, waiting for the right light, the right mood, searching for textures; constructing a particular, nonexitant, fantasy world made up of shots garnered over months of filming in a vast area. Encumbered by little or no dialogue, a word here, a sound there, the music was free to develop its own sound image.
The music had a life of its own.
March 25, 1995
In the beginning, there was Film; silent. There was always music. In major Cinemas, vast rococo palaces, orchestras played commissioned scores carefully coordinated with the action on the screen. More often, the films arrived with a single sheet of printed music offering one-line themes for each sequence as a suggestion to the house pianist. Musical cliches were the name of the game, happy music, sad music, galloping music and, of course, love at first sight music. In 1926 Robert Flaherty returned from two years filming on the island of Samoa with his second major film, MOANA , a lyrical depiction of life before the age of the missionary. His young daughters had learned the songs of the villagers but there was no way to incorporate this music in the film.
By 1929 sound on film had arrived. The process of recording synchronous sound, almost always talk, was so clumsy and involved such cumbersome equipment, that filming retired into studios where the film makers had “control”. The sound was talk, talk, and more talk. The subordinate music was again, mood music.
From the start there were exceptions. 1931 in Hollywood, I’M A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN-GANG directed by Mervyn Le Roy, had no music except in the scenes where the prisoners sang, not even over the last line where Paul Muni disappears into the night saying “I steal!”. In Germany, the same year saw KAMERADSHAFT directed by G.W.Pabst, a dramatized account of a coal mine disaster, realistic, though all the underground scenes were shot in a studio; the French talk French and the Germans talk German... realism, and therefore no music. Much later, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, realism, with music by Alfred Newman, and lots of it.
From 1930 on, all films that played in the newly equipped cinemas, had to have sound; yes, even “documentary” films had to have sound. Going out into the “real” world with all this complicated, delicate equipment was impossible, so our enterprising documentarists discovered the virtues of music and narration. Most of these films made use of “canned” music. I remember going to a company called Correli-Jacobs; (it had a musical sound to it! ) The higher class documentaries assigned as much as 30% of the budget to commission original scores from leading composers, often recorded by major orchestras; Virgil Thompson, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Hans Eisler and Mark Blitzstein among them. By adding a stentorian voice to carry a “message”, they created a particular form where the image became almost incidental to the voice and music, especially when the voice took on a poetic form as in the PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS:
High winds and sun
A country without rivers
And with little rain
Settler; Plow at your peril
Two hundred miles from water
Two hundred miles from town
But the land is new
Many were disappointed
The rains failed
And the sun baked the light soil
spoken by Thomas Chalmers, to Virgil Thomson's stirring music, with images that punch home the message... This is an operatic form combining poetry, moving image (dance) and music. It worked magnificently.
I first saw this film in London in 1936. I was a schoolboy, determined to make documentary films and this was superb! I had read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”. I had seen “I’m a Fugitive from a Chain-Gang”
so I must have known that America had social problems and racial problems but a disaster of this magnitude... I had no idea; so eloquently stated. That evening I happened to be with my brother and we ran into John Grierson, the father of the British Documentary, in a pub. I found myself gushing to him about the impact of THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS, only to be cut short by his somewhat sour comment “that by the end of an era we should be good at doing what we have been doing for so long. In a few weeks you will see the beginning of a new era, synchronous sound, the “talkies” have come to Documentary”. And I did. NIGHT MAIL. It gave us something to think about. They did talk, but awkward talk, stilted, reenacted. It is the music of Benjamin Britten and the lyric voice of W.H.Auden that survives:
This is the night mail
Crossing the border
Bringing the check and
The postal order
Letters for the rich
Letters for the poor
Shop at the corner
And the girl next door...
The silent films of Robert Flaherty often depicted process; building an Igloo, fishing, climbing a tree, hunting; constructing sequences in apparent continuity. Through these modest little stories, beautifully rendered with compassion and visual tension, the viewer came to know the people and something of their culture.
In the era of narration and music, we cameramen, were sent out with what amounted to a shopping list of “shots”. You could divide them into categories; Puffy clouds in a blue sky, electric pylons, wheat harvesters in action, hydro-electric powerplants, smoking factory chimneys... these represented “progress!” rivulets of water in wasted areas, parched desert, dust devils, leaden sky, smokeless factory chimneys... meant poverty, depression, erosion etc. Nothing intrinsically wrong there except that these icons rapidly became cliches.
Then came the era of the “talkies”. Talk, and more talk. Ordinary “real” people were not good at repeating lines for the camera so why not hire actors and make the term “Documentary” a sad joke. It was in this period (1946) that Robert & Francis Flaherty made LOUISIANA STORY. The sponsor of this film was Standard Oil of N.J. and the script, every page of which had to be initialed by Mr. Flaherty in the presence of the Standard Oil lawyer, was about oil drilling rigs coming to the Bayous of Louisiana, as seen through the eyes of a Cajun boy. The agreement specified that there would be dialogue, it was to be a “talky”, there were no two ways about it.
The “actors” were chosen from local people and the dialogue scenes were made with the clumsy equipment available at that time. These scenes are static, awkward, stilted. The rest of the film was shot silent just as Mr. Flaherty had shot his other films. We used relatively light and therefore portable cameras, the Arreflex that had been developed by the Germans to record Hitler's conquest of the world. As soon as we encountered dialogue, the whole feeling of the film changes. We had to use a quiet camera that was synchronous and weighed about 85 pounds, working in conjunction with a large and cumbersome disc recorder with a diamond stylus cutting a groove on 16inch glass discs coated with acetate. With this procedure came the whole rigmarole of clap-sticks, take one, take two, take 23 and the lines got stale and the image paralytic.
I remember Mr. Flaherty’s reaction when he first screened the dialogue rushes “My God Ricky, did I write that shit?” But it was not the writing so much as the excruciating process of sound filming that our characters were subjected to, something that only a trained actor could possibly survive.
Flaherty was acutely aware of the importance of sound. We took our clumsy machine to the marshes to record the alligators, the birds, the natural sounds but it was hopeless. Our sound man Benjie Doniger was better at making alligator sounds than they were!
With only a few lines of gentle narration to introduce the boy, and his mythology, written and spoken by Mr. Flaherty, Virgil Thomson was as free to develop his musical ideas as we were to develop the visual story. I can think of very few instances where this has been true.
Hans Eisler composed a score for THE WHITE FLOOD, a twenty minute film that dealt visually with arctic ice, the balance between ice and water, with few words and an extraordinarily evocative score using timpani peddle drums that changed pitch during the note.
Satijat Ray’s masterpiece, Patha Panchali, where Ravi Shankar’s sitar replaced dialogue at a crucial moment where mere words could only have been banal. A film shot much as Louisiana Story was, with a tiny crew working over a long period of time, in this case, nearly four years.
We spent fourteen months filming in Louisiana, day after day, waiting for the right light, the right mood, searching for textures; constructing a particular, nonexitant, fantasy world made up of shots garnered over months of filming in a vast area. Encumbered by little or no dialogue, a word here, a sound there, the music was free to develop its own sound image.
The music had a life of its own.