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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226649757 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/27/2019 |
| Series: | Cinema and Modernity |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Record Recollections
Records have turned out to be special modes of storing history. On certain records by Mingus, Coltrane, or Billie Holiday, Sun Ra's Heliocentric Worlds, in some piano concertos by Mozart, in many early pieces of rock, later with Dylan, Hendrix, and on many other records are stored certain feelings I had while listening in such a precise way that I am not satisfied to call this simply "memories." ... Those records recorded something when playing; they did not just play back. The record, pick-up, speakers, and receiving ear together with streams of feelings appear to have created a recording device that stores these streams of feelings. ... I mean that records function as storage devices for bodily and perceptual states which register the difference between my present and former lives.
A playback device as a recording apparatus integrated with the human body? The cultural historian Klaus Theweleit may have taken his inspiration from the 1880 essay "Memory and Phonography" by Jean-Marie Guyau, who compared how the vibrations of one's voice are inscribed on a metal plate to corresponding processes in the brain:
It is quite probable that in analogous ways, invisible lines are incessantly carved into the brain cells, which provide a channel for nerve streams. If, after some time, the stream encounters a channel it has already passed through, it will once again proceed along the same path. The cells vibrate in the same way they vibrated the first time; psychologically, these similar vibrations correspond to an emotion or a thought analogous to the forgotten emotion or thought. ... If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory.
Much has changed since the days Theweleit listened to vinyl. There are still speakers (often headphones) and ears; there are still streams of emotions and "bodily and perceptual states." But what is largely missing in this age of Pandora and Spotify is the recording as a physical object.
In his study of the phonograph and popular memory in America, William Howland Kenney notes that, regardless of musical style, recordings have functioned as "mnemonic devices." He describes a remarkable survey conducted in 1921 by Thomas A. Edison Inc. that asked Americans in forty-three states to list their favorite recorded tunes, as well as songs they would wish to see added to the catalog. Respondents not only "preferred'old music well-rendered,' music that 'takes us back to Grandfather days,' tunes that brought 'memories of home,' old tunes that 'take us back to the days of childhood'"; they also reported that replaying recordings was a way of remembering deceased family members. The survey had been created to corroborate findings by psychologists at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who had devised a study using 135 Edison records, classified into categories ranging from basic or complex emotions ("joy," "wistfulness") to more elaborate rubrics, such as "Stimulate and Enrich Your Imagination" or "Tender Memory." Autobiographical memories proved to be most important, for records could even bring departed loved ones back to life.
When the record became a plot device in cinema, it not only exemplified music's mnemonic powers in general but showcased the record's special ability to record and store the past. A paradigmatic case is the recording of "Melancholy Baby" as used in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945). The film tells the story of Chris (Edward G. Robinson), an unhappily married man with artistic aspirations who is infatuated with a younger woman, Kitty (Joan Bennett). "Melancholy Baby" plays as Kitty's lover, Johnny (Dan Duryea), reads the love letter Chris has written her, and when the needle gets stuck in the groove on the line "I'm in love with you," we sense that something is amiss. Chris rents a swank apartment for Kitty, sets up a studio there, and — after Johnny sells two of his paintings, attracting the attention of a prominent dealer — is pleased when Kitty claims his pictures as her own. One night, Chris enters the apartment. Again, the record is playing and sticks on "in love," and he observes from the hallway as Johnny resets the needle and kisses Kitty. Chris retreats to a bar, haunted by their voices and the sound of the faulty record, and when Kitty, in the following scene, laughs at his proposal that they marry, he kills her with an ice pick. Johnny is charged with the murder, tried, and sentenced to death. After Johnny is executed, Chris returns to his apartment, where the song and voices replaying in his head intensify. That we see no flashback, only Chris's face, tormented by guilt, suggests that Lang was confident viewers had "recorded" the earlier scenes and would now play them back before their inner eyes, as Chris apparently is doing.
In the two films discussed below, musical recordings take on even more explicit roles as plot elements that register the impact of cinema on audiovisual memory. These records store the memories of characters and viewers alike by adding a visual dimension of the recording apparatus described by Theweleit. As a material object, a record may partake in the psychophysical process of memory formation. This process involves the matrix from a recording session in Giuseppe Tornatore's The Legend of 1900 (1998) and the faulty groove of a 78 in George Stevens's Penny Serenade (1941). In both films, a very specific record becomes a musical playback/recording device that illustrates the striking merger of human body and mechanical apparatus and thus epitomizes the momentous shift in the culture of memory brought about by cinema.
Musician as Memory Machine
Tornatore adapted The Legend of 1900 (La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano) from Alessandro Baricco's single-player drama Novecento: un monologo. The film tells the story of a fictional pianist (Tim Roth), who is named Novecento ("1900") because he was found that year as an infant on the ocean liner SS Virginian by a member of the engine crew. After his adoptive parent dies in an accident, the newly orphaned Novecento grows up to play the piano in the ship's orchestra. As word of his prodigious talent spreads, he is offered a lucrative recording contract, but he cannot bring himself to set foot on land. When the Virginian, having served as a hospital and cargo ship during World War II, is finally scuttled and sunk offshore, Novecento goes down with the vessel.
The story is told in a series of flashbacks by Max (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a trumpet player who befriended Novecento during the roaring twenties, when the ship was a hub for the rich and famous, journeying to and from Europe, as well as for the poor and hopeful, emigrating to America. A member of the orchestra, Max witnessed Novecento's extraordinary musical skills firsthand, including his spectacular win against the famous ragtime and jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who had come aboard to challenge him to a piano duel. He watched Novecento walk away from a lucrative deal after a recording session on board, and he saw him fall in love with a girl traveling to America but fail to follow her onto land. The film begins shortly after World War II, when a broke Max tries to sell his trumpet at a music shop in New York. Before parting with his instrument, however, he plays a melody, which catches the attention of the shop owner, who recognizes the tune from a broken record matrix found hidden in a recently acquired piano. As Max recounts Novecento's story, flashbacks alternate with attempts to find and rescue his friend from the Virginian, being stripped in the nearby harbor before its final journey. Managing to get on board one last time, he plays the matrix on a portable gramophone. The music lures Novecento out of hiding but fails to bring him to land.
The story of the matrix is an allegory of audiovisual memory at the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction. As the Virginian passes the Statue of Liberty during the opening credit sequence, passengers look ahead to the Manhattan skyline emerging from the mist:
The one who sees America first — there's one on every ship; and don't be thinking it's an accident, or some optical illusion — it's destiny. Those are people who always have that precise instant stamped on their life.
As Max speaks these words, in voiceover, the camera zooms in on a young man's face and his left eye until we see the skyline in his iris (figure 1.1). The shot reflects — literally — the nature of the cinematic apparatus, whose quasiphotographic imprint is, to recall Benjamin, "developed in the darkroom of the lived moment," making us see "images we have never seen before we remember." Tornatore's film extends the idea to the figure of a machinelike musician, whose photographic memory is essentially phonographic.
One night, the eight-year-old Novecento creates a sensation when he is found at the ballroom piano playing an ethereally beautiful piece, entitled "A Mozart Re-Incarnated" in Ennio Morricone's splendid soundtrack. The mythology of musical prodigies rests in part on their superior memory — the ability to listen to music and replay it at once. Tornatore introduces his wunderkind with the metaphor of the sensory imprint. Drawn to the music resounding from the first-class ballroom, the boy looks at the dancers through the semifrosted glass of the ballroom doors while the orchestra's pianist (as the script has it) "creates a sound Novecento appears to have recognized." A reverse-shot of his eyes conveys the nexus of photographic and phonographic memory that can reproduce anything he has heard (figure 1.2).
Novecento's command of diverse styles is shown in a sequence that cuts from him playing a riveting ragtime that sends first-class passengers into a crazed dance, to a Chopinesque etude, à la op. 25, no. 2, that mesmerizes steerage-class travelers on the lower deck. There he continues with a slow blues followed by a zesty tarantella, a genre he easily picks up from an Italian passenger beating the rhythm and simulating a melody. Novecento is not just a musical genius but a motion picture accompanist avant la lettre. In a 1920 manual for film pianists and organists, Edith Lang and George West note that a "good memory is a valuable help to the player," who should not simply "try to memorize certain compositions as a whole" but "especially furnish his storehouse of remembered music with stock phrases and motives, adapted to different moods, so that he can always draw from this library in his head." Since all music can be film music, Legend became an opportunity for Morricone to display his extraordinary craft as a film composer — not just his consummate knowledge of art music and popular music, but his encyclopedic memory of film music itself (as we will see shortly). When Max later asks his friend what goes through his mind when hitting the keys, a shot of his eyes superimposed over the ocean suggests that Novecento may be looking at the sea but is watching what is projected on his mental screen. "He traveled," Max explains, "and each time he ended up someplace different." If music makes Novecento see, what he sees makes him play.
Tornatore develops Novecento's film-musical talents in a number of scenes that reveal cinema's roots in precinematic culture. Responding to Max's question "Where do you get it ... the music?" Novecento improvises four different piano pieces to characterize four different people in the ballroom: theatrical octaves for an aristocratic woman dancing with her young lover; a wistful nocturne for a man haunted by melancholic memories; a titillating tango for "a prostitute ... thinking about becoming a nun"; and a meandering misterioso for a stowaway hiding in the first-class salon. "He knew how to read people," notes Max, "the signs people carry on them, places, sounds, scents, their land, their story, everything written on them. He would read and, with infinite care, he would catalogue, organize, and make order in that immense map that he was drawing in his mind." Morricone may have cherished the opportunity to have his fictional alter ego shift from the dramatic to the lyrical or from illustration to expression, only to end with a perfectly synchronized pantomime of the stowaway scurrying through the room amid hastily alternating chords and pausing for moments of furtive inspection to a slyly descending chromatic melody. These ad-hoc characterizations are an object lesson in early film accompaniment, where the pianist would play the picture by drawing not only on the practices of program-music but also on the stock gestures of nineteenth-century musical theater.
Novecento's parodies of early film music add to his ambivalence toward the emerging culture of mechanical reproduction, playing out in his piano duel with Jelly Roll Morton, who pioneered the publication of notated jazz pieces. When Morton performs three of them, Novecento counters each, first mocking "Big Fat Ham" with a deliberately childish variant of "Silent Night" and then, moved to tears by Morton's famous tango "The Crave," replaying the tune note-for-note but "faster and in a more passionate way." Finally, Novecento parries Morton's famously difficult "The Finger Breaker" with a perpetuum mobile piece played so fast that he can light a cigarette from the burning hot strings — an act of superhuman virtuosity that brings down the house. Yet he is not just a machine, but also a musician with a soul. This is why Tornatore pairs the public spectacle of the piano duel with the intimate recording session of the mysterious matrix, showing Novecento's true aesthetic convictions (see figure 1.3). Here's the description from the screenplay:
Novecento starts improvising at the keyboard while staring ahead as he does habitually.
Suddenly, from one of the portholes, he sees a girl among the many passengers on the ship's deck; she is wiping her face after rinsing herself at one of the water basins. The girl approaches the porthole. She looks at herself in the glass and tidies up her hair. But, because of a strange effect of the light on the glass, she doesn't notice that someone is playing a piano and looking at her insistently on the other side of the window.
There is something magical in the way that girl is examining her eyes and stroking her skinny yet luminous face. Novecento is struck. He keeps looking at her, but without the absent-minded expression as when he is lost in his imaginary journeys. He looks at her as if he is meeting someone that he knows already without remembering who this person is. Gradually the bouncy and well-paced music that he is playing turns into a mysterious and seductive melody, like that face from which he cannot turn his eyes away.
Max and the others don't understand the reason for this transformation, but they are charmed and keep following his hands with astonishment, as if they are wondering where that divine music is coming from. They ignore that Novecento is reading those notes in the eyes of the unknown girl that he is now following as she brings herself to the parapet and, showing only her profile, looks at the horizon. She looks far away with the passion of someone who really knows how to look at the sea, with that ill-concealed trepidation of a daydreamer; this [daydreaming] is exactly what Novecento is doing now, without even realizing it; for the first time he is bringing music out of a feeling that he has never known before.
It is only when this female figure, so full of hope, is about to move that Max notices her, and that Novecento is looking at her. And it is when she is out of sight away from the porthole that Novecento concludes his performance. But he remains immobile, lost in the contemplation of that face which now seems to be forever impressed in his imagination.
The other three clap, moved by the intensity of that melody.
The scene dramatizes the stakes of creating music in the age of technological reproducibility and its impact on audiovisual memory. Note how Novecento's improvisation opens with a rhapsodizing introduction whose toccata-like passagework becomes an instrumental recitative in search of a theme. Just as he discovers the girl, he finds a nocturne-like melody (not unlike Chopin's well-known op. 9, no. 2), which he harmonizes like a pop ballad — a signature of Morricone's style (see figure 1.4). Inspired by the girl, the melody expands with a second iteration that leads to an expressive climax, before drifting away in a short coda.
Noting that "sound film was latent in photography," Walter Benjamin concludes the second section of his artwork essay with a passage he deemed so important that it is italicized variously in the three versions of the essay. I quote it here from the first version because it invokes explicitly the "interpenetration" between reproductions of visual art and the art of film:
The technological reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. With that, technological reproduction had not only reached a standard that permitted it to turn all traditional works of art into its objects, subjecting their effects to profound changes, but had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. Nothing is so illuminating for the study of this standard as the recognition of how its two differing functions — reproduction of the work of art and the art of film — interpenetrate one another.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Film, Music, Memory"
by .
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