Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War 9781138238015, 9781315298450

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Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War

In the wake of the Second World War, the arts and culture of Europe became a site where the devastating events of the twentieth century were remembered and understood. Exploring one of the most integral elements of the cinematic experience—music—the essays in this volume consider the numerous ways in which post-war European cinema dealt with memory, trauma, and nostalgia, showing how the music of these films shaped the representation of the past. The contributors consider films from the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands, providing a diverse and well-rounded understanding of film music in the context of historical memory. Memory is often underrepresented within scholarly musical studies, with most of these applications found in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music cognition, and psychology and music therapy. Likewise, trauma has mainly been studied in relation to music in only a few historical contexts, whereas nostalgia has attracted even less academic attention. In three parts, this volume addresses each area of study as it relates to the music of European cinema from 1945 to 1989, applying an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how films use music to negotiate the precarious relationships we maintain with the past. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War offers compelling arguments as to what makes music such a powerful medium for memory, trauma, and nostalgia. Michael Baumgartner is Associate Professor of Musicology at Cleveland State University. Ewelina Boczkowska is Associate Professor of Musicology at Youngstown State University.

Music and Sound on the International Screen

Series Editors: Michael Baumgartner, Cleveland State University, and Ewelina Boczkowska, Youngstown State University

Around the world, music and sound play an essential role in the experience of cinema and other screen media, yet research on music in screen media has been largely centered on the United States. Music and Sound on the International Screen expands the horizons of film music scholarship by publishing cutting-edge monographs and edited collections on topics in music, sound, and screen media beyond Hollywood. Written by established and emerging international scholars, the books in this series encourage vigorous and sustained discourse around the historical, social, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of music in the context of the moving image. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska

Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War Edited by Michael Baumgartner Cleveland State University, USA and Ewelina Boczkowska Youngstown State University, USA

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-23801-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-29845-0 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by codeMantra

To my father, Aleksander Boczkowski (1947–2017), whom I miss beyond words. — E. B. To my aunt and godmother, Margrit Diggelmann (1928–2017), who introduced me to the arts. — M. B.

Contents

Introduction

1

M I C H A E L B AU M G A RT N E R A N D E W E L I N A B O C Z KOW S K A

PART I

Collective Memory and (Trans-)Nation

23

1 A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level: Music as a Sonic Lieu de Mémoire of Dutch Cultural Identity on Film

25

EMILE WENNEKES

2 Which People’s Music? Witnessing the Popular in the Musicscape of Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (1949, Bitter Rice)

45

M AU R I Z I O C O R B E L L A

3 Phantoms of Italian Opera—Cultural Memory in Italian and (West) German Films

70

RO G E R H I L L M A N

4 A Bridge Too Far? Music in the British War Film, 1945–80

86

M E RV Y N C O O K E

PART II

Trauma and Survival

109

5 Hidden in Plain View: The Music of Holocaust Survival in Poland’s First Post-war Feature Film

111

BA R BA R A M I L EWSK I

viii Contents

6 Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepit’ko’s Voskhozhdenie (1977, The Ascent)

138

M A R I A CI ZM IC

7 Fugue States: Music, Memory, and Trauma in Alain Resnais’s Early 1960s Films

159

M I C H A E L B AU M G A RT N E R A N D O R L E N E D E N I C E M C M A H O N

8 Re-Sounding Trauma: Sonic Flashbacks in the Films of Jan Troell

184

A L E X I S L U KO

PART III

Nostalgia, and the Impossible Returns Home

207

9 Decomposing Heroism: Rolf Wilhelm’s Music for Radetzkymarsch (1965)

209

JA N I NA M Ü L L E R A N D TOBI A S PL E BUCH

10 The Music of Sacrificial Acts: Displacement, Redemption, Beethoven, and Verdi in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983)

235

T O B I A S P O N TA R A

11 “Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”: Chopin Nostalgia in Polish Cinema, 1944–91

253

E W E L I N A B O C Z KOW S K A

12 Returning Home: Critical Nostalgia and French Cinematic Illusion in the Post-war Musical Films of René Clair and Jean Renoir

276

H A N NA H LEW IS

Contributors Index

299 303

Introduction* Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska

This essay collection, which offers the first in-depth study of music in ­European cinema between 1945 and 1989, investigates how films negotiate through music and sound the precarious relationships of individuals, nations, or transnational communities to their past.1 Several of the films are set during the Second World War or address an attempt to come to terms with its aftermath. Revisionist accounts of history as well as post-war ideological divisions are woven into the plotlines and mediated via film soundtracks. Dissonance, fragmentation, repetition and disintegration, radical sparseness, and reliance on pre-­existing music are some of the sonic markers of cinematic expressions of memory, loss and violence, and longing in these films. As the individual authors all argue compellingly, music is a powerful medium for memory, trauma, and nostalgia in post-war European films.

Research on the Interrelationship between Music, Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia Research in music that incorporates memory studies is generally underrepresented within all scholarly musical disciplines.2 Most work in this direction has been completed in ethnomusicology,3 popular music studies,4 music perception and cognition,5 and in psychology and music therapy,6 presumably all thanks to the close connection between these disciplines and the social sciences. Trauma specifically has primarily been featured in investigations on music and survival in wartime Iraq and the music and politics of post9/11.7 There are notably two extensive studies in historical musicology on music and trauma: a monograph by Maria Cizmic on the music of Arvo Pärt and ­Henryk Górecki (among others) in relation to individual and collective traumas in East European history, and a monograph by Amy Lynn Wlodarski on imaginative witness in Holocaust representation in music. Nostalgia and music have attracted even less scholarly attention.8 This collection, therefore, builds upon research in other disciplines and applies an interdisciplinary

* Our sincere gratitude goes to Maria Cizmic and Tobias Pontara for reading earlier versions of this introduction and providing valuable comments and suggestions.

2  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska approach to the study of music in film. After a brief introduction to memory studies and the application of memory to film studies, a chapter survey illustrates how music communicates instances of collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia as the core cinematic device in post-war European cinema.

A Survey of Milestones in Memory Studies Since the 1970s, the scholarly output in memory studies has vastly intensified with occasional peaks after 1989 and in the early 2000s. In the wake of this new concentration on memory research in history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and other disciplines, several scholars coined the phenomenon a “mnemonic overkill,” an “obsession with memory,” “memory fever,” “mania,” “crisis,” “cult,” “boom,” and “craze.”9 The end of communism and the beginning of the new millennium posed suitable, timely moments to reminisce the bloody European history of the twentieth century that caused—among other violent, atrocious occurrences—two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, totalitarian systems in Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Spain (later also in Portugal, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia), decolonization, the division of Europe into West and East, and the wars in the Balkans. A brief history of memory studies in the twentieth century must begin in the 1920s with Sigmund Freud in Austria and Maurice Halbwachs in France, who studied independently from each other and in different disciplines how the act of remembering works in individuals (Freud) and groups of individuals (Halbwachs). After having witnessed in his patients what he called “war neuroses”—caused by First World War barbarism—Freud focused increasingly on one aspect of memory studies: trauma. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud observed the compulsive remembering of a repressed experience by traumatized patients. The pain caused by repeatedly bringing hidden memories—in flashbacks or dreams—into the conscious was necessary to overcoming trauma. Freud extrapolated that these repeated, compulsive “pleasure-pain feelings,” which patients experience during their act of remembering, manifested a struggle between the sexual drive and its counterforce, the death drive. Freud later expanded his understanding of the “psychic apparatus” from the individual psyche to the dimension of the collective mind.10 During the time that Freud incorporated trauma into his psychoanalytical theory, Halbwachs introduced the term “collective memory.”11 For him, memory is transmitted as a shared experience by a group, which retains these memories (Barash 52). Such communal entities or “collective frameworks,” Halbwachs observes, “are the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society” (40). On a scale of (trans-)national remembrance, collective memory is understood as providing historical events with an emotional topography that invites us to internalize these occurrences

Introduction  3 as part of our own private dramas—a recurrent theme throughout many of the films discussed in this book. Halbwachs’s groundbreaking sociological concept has not been received without criticism, however. Paul Ricoeur (120–24) and Jeffrey K. Olick (335–36), for example, note that the theory of “collective memory” puts the emphasis too much on “collective determinism, which leaves little place for even a limited form of individual spontaneity and autonomy” (Barash 33). Remembering is less a “unanimous endeavor” than “a form of intersubjective knowledge endowed with symbolic content” (Cappelletto 8). Recent researchers sought therefore to describe the phenomenon in more refined terms such as “communicative and cultural memory” (Assmann), “collected” and “collective memory” (Olick), “common” and “shared memory” (Margalit), or “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg). As a representative of the pessimistic Zeitgeist at the turn of the millennium, Andreas Huyssen, who studies public spaces as palimpsests of a collective imaginary, sustains a critical position, specifically in terms of increased skepticism toward the validity of Halbwachs’s concept for the twenty-first century. He postulates that memory affects our contemporary experience of time as a “present past” because of a desire to find anchor in a reality characterized by a growing temporal instability and fracturing of lived space caused by the politics of globalization. In the last quarter of the century, historian Pierre Nora began advocating in his multi-volume collection Les lieux de mémoire12 for a heuristic interpretation beyond eyewitness accounts as the principal testaments of collective memory. With his seminal concept of lieux de mémoire (memory sites), he expands on Halbwachs’s theory by relocating the emphasis on places and objects as sites of memory. Nora describes these lieux de mémoire as fixed locations of collective memorial practice in France (Nora, “Between History and Memory” 10). Inherent in his argument is the fear of forgetting that generates the desire of constructing national monuments and myths. Lieux de mémoire compensate for the loss of milieux de mémoire (environments of memory). Memory manifests itself therefore in erected sites such as monuments and museums. These places have appropriated historical and symbolic meaning during the time of their existence and symbolize complex sites of memory, at times also as “ideals,” such as for example “The Louvre,” the “residence of kings that became a temple of the arts” (Nora, Realms of Memory xvii)—the case studies could have easily included music “ideals” such as La Marseillaise or the political allegories of the tragédies en musique, and so on. Music woven into the cinematic fabric can provide yet another symbolic instance of a lieu de mémoire, as studied in this collection. As a continuation of Freud’s investigations on the effects of “traumatic neurosis,” trauma studies gained increased importance with the beginning of Holocaust studies in the 1960s and beyond. Holocaust studies emerged from witness and survivor testimonies and explore memory in terms of pain, suffering, despair, fear, repression, terror, bereavement, and forgiveness as experienced by survivors.13 The Holocaust was the site sui generis of intense

4  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska traumatic memory and led to a situation in which the personal experience of trauma was catapulted into the public, historical arena, past its original individual, silent suffering, as nations and groups of people sought to come to terms with a history of appalling, unspeakable perpetrated violence. Kai Erikson defines trauma—as opposed to stress—as a “violent event that injures in one sharp stab” as well as “a prolonged period of terror or brutality” and “a continuing pattern of abuse” (185). Trauma “has the quality of converting that one sharp stab … into an enduring state of mind.” The aporia of being between the “repeated suffering of the event” and the process of “continual leaving” the site, where the traumatic event occurred, represents itself as the perceptible etiological marker of trauma as described by literary scholar Cathy Caruth (“From Trauma and Experience” 204). The “being inside the event” is the cruel reality that prevents the traumatized person from being an authentic witness, for the victim follows an inevitable trajectory that culminates in the “collapse of witnessing” (Laub 80–81) or in an annihilation of witnessing. The re-experiencing of the event is “the impossibility of knowing [w]hat first constituted it” (Caruth, “From Trauma and Experience” 204). As Caruth argues, traumatized persons must therefore depart from the isolation that the atrocious occurrence imposed upon them and share their experience with other individuals (204). A traumatic event cannot only happen to an individual but also to a whole social group. Erikson discerns that trauma has a “social dimension” (185) by giving “victims the feeling that they have been set apart and made special” (186) through shared experience of an intense event. Such an “estrangement” creates a social climate that helps to form like-minded communities. The trauma then “is the fabric that holds together the members of these mnemonic communities… Its members are bound together by their incapacity to absorb a traumatic past and the desire to re-live it in common” (Cappelletto 5). The fourth major area of memory studies addresses the phenomenon of nostalgia. In her seminal study, Svetlana Boym interprets landmarks of the everyday in several cities of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union through the lens of collective nostalgia. She defines nostalgia as “longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” (xiii). She further observes that nostalgia stands as “a sentiment of loss and displacement” and stresses the notion that these sentiments are “a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Nostalgia conflates yearning for a specific space and a different time with the objective to “obliterate history” and to transfigure historical events “into private or collective mythology” by revisiting “time as space” and by “refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xv). For Boym, nostalgia is ultimately an “abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming” and “an ethical and aesthetic failure” (xiv). She distinguishes two types of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia— linked to the dimension of place—emphasizes “nóstos [home] and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (xviii). Associated with the preservation of rituals and “fixed” emblems of the past, it characterizes the

Introduction  5 realm of national memory, which gravitates toward embellished, restorative narratives with the objective of sanctioning one’s collective identity from the murky vestiges of shared history. Reflective nostalgia, which relates to the dimension of time, embodies “algia, the longing itself” that “delays the homecoming” (xviii). It stresses that nostalgia is ultimately a regressive sentiment that delves in “unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that have become obsolete” (xvi) long before they were ever realized. Reflective nostalgia belongs to the collective memory that originates in the assembly of everyday stories told by individuals and personal relationships that take shape at the peripheries of the “grand” historical and political narratives.

Research on the Interrelationship between Memory and Cinema Collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia have served as the methodological cornerstones to a growing number of recent publications in film studies.14 Film, as time art, has the unique capability of expressing such complex issues as remembering, amnesia, trauma, and nostalgia—whether they are experienced by an individual or a collective—in an artistic, innovative, and poetic manner. For Pam Cook, nostalgia is one of the major driving forces for filmmaking per se and the impetus for the pleasure of viewing films.15 Trauma and cinema are closely linked to films dealing with the Holocaust and the social and political past and present of Eastern Europe.16 The impact of 9/11 on the media and film industry’s development of “trauma culture” is the subject of E. Ann Kaplan’s monograph. Other studies examine cinema and trauma in the contextual parameters from post-Yugoslav cinema and experimental film practice to memory of violence in the post-war films of Jean Renoir.17 The groundbreaking memory concepts of Halbwachs and Nora—­complemented with new research by such successors as Jan and Aleida Assmann and Huyssen—serve as methodological approaches to several books on memory18 and the archive19 in cinema. Special importance can be granted to Ewa Mazierska’s exploration of the “mutual relationships” between history and memory, both individual and collective, in films representing acts of terrorism and genocide through the lens of “ordinary” protagonists who remember them (17). The importance of music as the facilitating, evoking, and in some cases enhancing agent, which enables the link between cinema and memory in all its facets, has been vastly ignored. The objective of this collection is therefore to explore how and why music is a leading cinematic device20 in prompting and evoking nostalgic sentiments and traumatic terror, and in enabling the instauration of an archive from cultural memories. This approach invites the identification of several approaches to music, including a strong reliance on pre-existing compositions, a preference of specific musical genres, a self-­ reflexive use of music, an awareness to interconnect music with other media

6  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska such as opera, literature, and visual arts, as well as a concern of historical representation communicated through film scores.

Collective Memory and (Trans-)Nation Music in European cinema is explored in this collection according to the three large fields in memory studies as delineated above: collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia. The first part of the book addresses collective memory, understood however much broader than delineated in Halbwachs’s research. The authors of the first four chapters analyze music within Dutch, Italian, British, and German cinema as a signifier of what Sharon Macdonald calls “memorylands.” Music in these films is embedded into the cinematic fabric like monuments commemorating the heritage of the four countries in question. Music becomes the vessel that links the films to their respective cultural heritage and concerns itself with the issue, “whether significance is attached to collective remembering …, whether longer or shorter time periods are activated in local commemorative life or how personal and collective memories are brought together” (Macdonald 3). Music in these films also displays the significant cultural variations that exist within European history and contemporary Europe. The films discussed in these chapters show how filmmakers from different European countries shape local customs and recreate national historical consciousness through music. Emile Wennekes, for example, explores how music in Dutch cinema enhances the depiction of the topographical singularity of the country. In Bert Haanstra’s comedy Fanfare (1958), the quintessentially Dutch village band ( fanfare) can be interpreted as one of the lieux de mémoire that defines Dutch culture. It is part of the same time-honored heritage as quaint villages, narrow water canals, etc. The villagers in Fanfare are not only linked by their eccentric fanaticism for band music but they also constitute another typical Dutch attribution: communities surrounded by water. Music-making in a brass band and actively participating in the life of its society is closely related to a collective memory experience. The fanfare can be “regarded as a kind of glue, holding [Dutch] identity together over time” (Macdonald 11). Maurizio Corbella investigates the mechanism by which a film’s music-­ scape functions as a cultural archive of a nation’s musical practices and the underlying ideologies and discourses caused and implied by these practices on the example of Giuseppe De Santis’s formative, neorealist film Riso amaro (1947, Bitter rice). The film features three distinct musical types: American boogie-woogie representing popular music, the songs of the weeders exemplifying the Italian folk idiom, and Goffredo Petrassi’s symphonic score. Corbella examines the fluid and oftentimes contradictory sociopolitical connotations of each musical type. For example, the folk songs embody the expression of class struggle underlining the political consciousness of the female workers in opposition to the mass-produced, sexually charged boogie-woogie from capitalist America promising liberation from their hardship. Petrassi’s score, by

Introduction  7 contrast, is used predominantly toward the end to refocus persuasively and censoriously the spectator’s perspective as a punitive means on the voyeuristic and erotic aspects of the diegetic songs and dances. Roger Hillman examines the cultural memory and intermediality of opera in cinema with a focus on cultural mediation of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas in a selection of Italian and (West) German films. He argues that “music as an art form has always transcended national borders” (70). In the three discussed films—Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (1979, The moon), Werner Herzog’s ­Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Alexander Kluge’s Die Macht der Gefühle (1983, The power of emotion)—Verdi’s music is not only part of Italy’s cultural memory and national identity but also of Germany’s. In a transnational opera project, the New German Cinema filmmaker Kluge avoids incorporating excerpts from Richard Wagner’s operas into Die Macht der Gefühle and replaces the epitome of national-socialist music with Verdi, who was associated in the nineteenth century with another ideological and political objective: the unification of Italy. For Kluge, Verdi’s music is not politically tainted by national-socialist ideology and enables therefore an impartial repositioning of understanding German history from the nineteenth century to the time the film was made. Mervin Cooke associates the popularity of the patriotic march idiom in British war films with the “glorious” defense of Britain during the Second World War. He demonstrates by analyzing a large sample of British Second World War films from 1945 to 1980 how music devoted to the martial idiom romanticizes the “portrayal of resilience in the face of impossible odds” (86). Many of these scores are modelled after Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches. The symphonic march tradition of Elgar, and later William Walton, evoke patriotism, loyalty, and duty to King/Queen and Country as these marches are closely associated with coronations and other royal celebrations. Hence, the music in these war films embodies what Boym defines as “restorative nostalgia.” The marches in connection with the Second World War topic reaffirm such British virtues as “chivalrous stoicism…, understated humor in adversity, amateurish improvisation, and pride in the indomitability of the underdog” (86), which are all deeply ingrained into the collective memory of Britain’s identity and have become an essential part of a shared history. The music discussed in these four chapters is closely related to places. The fanfare brass band in Wennekes’s contribution is firmly anchored in the Dutch rural countryside ruled by water. The folk songs of the weeders in Corbella’s chapter invoke the vast rice fields of Northern Italy’s Po Valley, whereas the symphonic marches featured in British Second World War films evoke Westminster Abbey and other sites of royal festivities. By featuring Verdi’s music in La luna and despite his militant left-wing agenda, Bertolucci reaffirms that Italian filmmakers incorporate the music of the Italian master into their often socio-critical films in an uncritical and idealized manner and re-­invoke thus in the country’s collective memory the notion that Verdi continues to stand for the unification of Italy. Hence, Rome—the capital and political center of the country—constitutes the main site in La luna’s compelling

8  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska narrative. Kluge, on the other hand, lifts the Verdian music from its country of origin and incorporates the uprooted musical idiom of the south into his critical and inquisitorial narrative of recent German history. Verdi induces here a clean slate in opposition to Germany’s own master of opera, Wagner, whose music cannot be purged from its ideological reappropriation by the National-­Socialists. From these four chapters crystalizes the notion that music in the discussed films embodies a sonic lieu de mémoire, which has become over a longer period of time a “symbolic element of the memorial heritage” (Nora, Realms of Memory xvii) of The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Italy, and ­Germany. Music reaches beyond being a mere association with place; it stands as a recognizable, critical monument commemorating the singularities of a country-specific heritage.

Trauma and Survival Music and sound, in more general terms, are both powerful cinematic devices to express traumatic events or to re-invoke traumatic episodes. Four chapters devoted to stories of traumatic survival, personal catastrophes, and collective losses in larger historical perspectives examine how feelings of grief and trauma are depicted in European cinema. It is hardly surprising that trauma is the main preoccupation of the filmmakers, as the aftermath of the horrendous crime of the Holocaust and the heinous atrocities of the Second World War continued to resonate strongly in post-war European societies, albeit not always directly discussed in wider public conversations. Individual stories of Holocaust and Second World War survivors as representations of the traumatic collective memory of the Soviet Union, Poland, and France are at the center of Larisa Shepit’ko’s Voskhozhdenie (1977, The ascent), Leonard Buczkowski’s Zakazane piosenki (1947, Forbidden songs), and Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963, Muriel, or the time of return). Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell makes the individual survival of trauma one of his central preoccupations. Barbara Milewski makes an unexpected discovery of an ethnographic record from a Polish Jewish survivor in the song “Warszawo ma” (O, Warsaw mine) in Poland’s first post-war feature film Zakazane piosenki. The plotline of the film involves flashbacks of popular “street songs” heard in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. “Warszawo ma,” alongside Chopin’s art song “Leci lis ́cie” (Leaves are falling), are unlike other music in the film. The song “Warszawo ma,” which is about former Warsaw that is lost to Jews inside the Ghetto, was conceived and written specifically for a scene depicting the life-threatening experience of a Polish Jew whose hiding place was compromised; but the song accomplishes more than a mere narrative purpose. Milewski uncovers therein the deep-seeded traumatic experience of the songwriter Ludwig Starski, a well-known figure of the inter-war decades who survived against all odds the Nazi terror. Zakazane piosenki thus stands as “an important commemorative symbol of national survival, an iconic record of Polish wartime history” (112), representing Polish and Polish Jewish war traumas. These representations

Introduction  9 fared different responses from the censors. The Soviet censors cut out “Leci lis ́cie,” Chopin’s languid ballad of national resistance, from the 1948 version of the film. “Warszawo ma,” however, has remained in the film and is a testament to Starski’s story of survival concealed within the filmic narrative. Alexis Luko shows how Jan Troell experimented with extensive sonically grounded, cinematic flashbacks to convey traumatic experiences in his early feature films. Survival in the sense of overcoming strenuous personal perils is central to Nybyggarna (1972, The new land) and Här har du ditt liv (1966, Here’s your life). The emotional and often also physical injuries suffered in extreme circumstances leave the protagonists of these films responding to trauma in different fashions, from feeling overwhelmed with guilt to outright denying that a traumatic event ever occurred. In Nybyggarna, a film about the hardships of Swedish farmers in nineteenth-century Minnesota, the intermediate plot of failed pursuit for gold in California intensely relies on sonic flashbacks. Troell anchors this intermediary story visually in a close-up of a bleeding ear. From this shot, seemingly unconnected images and unrelated sounds unfold. Luko details how the filmmaker constructs flashbacks with the aid of various sonic markers. Their repetition and alignment with specific images slowly begin to acquire meaning and connect the disorienting personal and shared experiences of trauma to reveal the painful losses that torment the guilt-ridden survivor. In Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961, Last year at Marienbad) and Muriel, the French director is drawn to the psychology of surviving victims of rape and torture. Resnais experiments with a heavily dissociative audiovisual style through repetition on the soundtrack of athematic, contemporary art music fragments, use of long silent stretches, an abundance of superficial dialogue in Muriel and frequent, enigmatic voiceover comments in Marienbad. By applying Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “sheets of past,” Michael Baumgartner and Orlene McMahon connect Resnais’s highly original approach to the protagonists’ psychological detachment from their individual traumatic experiences. In both films, Resnais employs music as means to access the workings of the mind in terms of memory. In Marienbad, the athematic organ music “trigger[s] the traumatic aspect of the recollection—the reality of what really happened last year” (168), while in Muriel Hans Werner Henze’s contemporary music brings to light the protagonists’ repressed memories of violent acts. Maria Cizmic establishes in her chapter that music in Voskhozhdenie bears witness to traumatic events as they unfold and, in contrast to the above-­d iscussed films, without the recourse to flashbacks. The director Larisa Shepit’ko lo­ azi-friendly cates her story of two Soviet soldiers-turned-partisans and a N collaborator firmly in the film’s present—the “Great Patriotic War” somewhere in the wintery, bitter-cold countryside of Belorussia. At key moments, she employs close-up shots to represent the interior states of the three men. Composer Alfred Schnittke scores each of these instances with large orchestral, microtonal music to convey the characters’ emotional exhaustion and moral disorientation. Schnittke’s dense sonic texture tempers with the film’s

10  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska linear temporality to create out-of-body experiences of traumatic events in real and imagined life-and-death situations. According to Cizmic, Schnittke’s music aims to create an empathetic audience response to the protagonists and their very different moral paths. Music’s enabling of empathetic audience responses to the protagonists’ losses and hardships is recurrent across several chapters. One of film music’s primary functions traditionally has been to expose the emotional dimension of the film story worlds, if not to “signify emotion itself” (Gorbman 73). The films concerned with traumatic experiences push this notion further when the soundtracks require film spectators to identify and feel with the characters on screen. Hence, the viewer must enter into an empathetic relation with the characters, which resembles a phenomenon that Cizmic has recently begun to theorize elsewhere in relation to Arvo Pärt’s concert music used in a filmic context.21 The potential of film music to foster empathy is closely aligned with such cinematic techniques as the lingering close-up shot, which repositions music within/into a meta-diegetic space.22 In Nybyggarna, for example, the extreme close-up shot of a bleeding ear frames the lengthy flashback sequence, in which sounds freed from chronological time exist as mnemonic traces of a present trauma. In Zakazane piosenki, the use of soft lighting and a close-up shot assist in initiating an empathetic reaction toward the Jewish man, who is listening to the song “Warszawo ma” surreptitiously from his hiding place. Among film examples of the music’s potential to channel empathetic audience responses to cinematic traumas, Resnais’s films are an exception. The fragmented, highly modernist scores, which sonically recreate the past traumas, prevent identification with the psychological wounds of his protagonists and instead create emotional distance from their unbearable pain. Traumatic testimonies and music stand in a complex relation to truth and historical representation. In Zakazane piosenki, the intimate knowledge of ­Ludwig Starski’s biography makes clear how the song “Warszawo ma” negotiates the fraught terrain between individual trauma and public terror. Written by Starski to a pre-existing tune expressly for the film, the song thus is an artistic construct rooted in intense personal loss and survival, one that bridges Starski’s private trauma with other Holocaust survival testimonies. In the case of Voskhozhdenie, Cizmic elucidates that Schnittke’s score undermines the official Soviet narrative of the events during the Great Patriotic War. With the support of the music as a signifier of the vagrant human nature under great stress, Schnittke’s music stands in the film as the site of a nuanced critique against the officially sanctioned Soviet representation of Second World War events as publicly disseminated during the Stagnation. In turn, the music in the films of Resnais and Troell plays a crucial role in mediating representations of individual psychological pain. Therein, sonic fragmentation embodies the numbing, disruptive effects of trauma and the painstaking, reparative work of uncovering repressed memories in order to understand what one knows or thinks to know to be the truth. Regarding the core question of remembering as a trauma victim, Shoshana Felman

Introduction  11 observes, “In the testimony, language is in process … it does not possess itself as a conclusion…. As a performative speech act, testimony … addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance….” (5). The musical scores in Nybyggarna or Marienbad complement precisely what words cannot express by guiding the spectator in deciphering the testimonies of the survivors, interpreting the witness statements of these very survivors, and ultimately in pursuing truth, which is in the words of Felman “in crisis” (5–6). In each of the discussed films, personal testimonies and larger historical developments are intimately interconnected through music as a signifier of bearing witness to individual suffering caused by traumatic events.

Nostalgia, and the Impossible Returns Home The third part of the book focuses on music as one of the key cinematic devices expressing “nostalgia.” Nostalgia takes on different meanings across the last four chapters. Tobias Pontara examines the instances of severe nostalgia that arise from intensely felt existential alienation in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983, Nostalgia). Pontara interprets nostalgia as being both an acute yearning for human interconnectedness and an incurable affliction. As in the cases of Shepit’ko’s Voskhozhdenie, Resnais’s Muriel, Troell’s Nybyggarna, and Michael Kehlmann’s Radetzkymarsch (1965), Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia has very little music and characterizes itself primarily through long stretches without dialogue on the soundtrack. Tarkovsky inserts only a few memorable, short excerpts of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Verdi’s Requiem, the Russian folk song Oi Vi Kumusciki, and a short passage of Chinese folk music. In particular, Verdi and Beethoven represent in Nostalghia “two contrasting reactions to the intense suffering associated with deep nostalgia” (247) of the two protagonists, a dejected Russian musicologist visiting Tuscany and Rome and an eccentric outcast living at the fringes of a Tuscan village. The outcast eventually stages his own suicide by publicly setting his body on fire on the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” while the Russian musicologist, to the accompaniment of Verdi’s Requiem, wades with a candle in hand through the drained water basin of St. Catherine in Bagno Vignoni (Tuscany). Beethoven and Verdi both signal a lost yearning in a society disassociated from profound human feelings. Ewelina Boczkowska as well as Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch treat nostalgia in their respective chapters as “a historical emotion” (Boym xvi). The political and cultural manifestations of nostalgia that follow times of crises and upheavals often motivate the rediscovery of long-lost heritage or of familiar communities. Steeped with longing, such rediscoveries can be painfully self-reflective and emotionally bonding (termed by Boym as “reflective nostalgia,” xviii), or on the opposite end, dangerously illusory and single-minded in their (re-)visions of past events that purposely patch up any memory gaps (called “restorative nostalgia” by Boym, xviii). In recent Polish history, Fryderyk Chopin was chosen to play this role by invoking “reflective nostalgia”

12  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska to bolster an uplifting national identity after such political crises and human catastrophes as the German occupation and the Holocaust, and the subsequent takeover by the Soviet Union, particularly during the Stalinist period. Directors Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski, Tadeusz Makarczyński, and Aleksander Ford illustrate in their films of these periods how Chopin figures into nostalgia’s restorative impulse that leads to reconstructions of national historical narratives. Shortly after the war, the cinematic Chopin was transfigured from a symbol of societal trauma into an epitome of social progress. This portrayal remained generally intact up to 1989. Immediately after communism ended, interest in the cinematic Chopin spiked. Arguably, the Chopin films of the early 1990s by Andrzej Żuławski and Zbig Rybczyński continued to showcase the workings of restorative nostalgia, albeit the latest reconfiguration of Chopin as sickly, morbid, and unheroic was now symptomatic of a collective longing to heal past traumas. Müller and Plebuch offer a contrasting case of revisionist reconfigurations of music associated with national ideology. Their chapter shows how Kehlmann’s critical television production Radetzkymarsch, which is adapted from Joseph Roth’s celebrated 1932 novel, takes a firm anti-nostalgic stand toward Austria’s imperial past in the film score by Rolf Wilhelm. Roth recounts the family saga of the Trottas set against the backdrop of the Danube Monarchy’s decline. He titled his novel after Johann Strauss Sr.’s well-known march— the unofficial anthem and penetrative emblem of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire—as a deliberate signifier for the inevitable trajectory of the Dual Monarchy toward its imminent dissolution. The television film with its destabilizing score invert the conventions of German and Austrian 1950s monarchy films—such as the Empress Sissi series—which construct Austria’s imperial past as an idyllic and apolitical epoch, to subvert this idealized depiction of homeland at every turn. Müller and Plebuch argue that Strauss’s Radetzky March and Wilhelm’s reworking function as a kind of anti-sublime, musical ­a lter-ego of the troubled protagonist, for the gradually more deformed Ra-­ detzky March problematizes Austrian nostalgia and national identity. Hannah Lewis discusses the returns of René Clair and Jean Renoir to France after their exile in Hollywood and both directors’ choices of making musical films upon their returns. Nostalgia is understood here as a reflection upon and restoration of the unrealized dreams of the past. Clair stages such unrealized dreams in Les belles de nuit (1952, Beauties of the night) with meta-diegetic dream flashbacks by a composer and piano teacher, who imagines himself seducing beautiful women in several past eras iconic to French history. Renoir delights in images of “Frenchness”—the cancan and Montmartre serving as backdrops to the Belle Époque France—in French Cancan (1954), in which a destitute impresario restores his influence by reviving the outmoded social dance of the 1830s on the Moulin Rouge’s stage. In both films, music fulfills a “dual-purpose role as both evoker of nostalgia and tool for critique” (277) of both the cinematic illusion and the post-war audiences’ propensity for escapism.

Introduction  13 In all four chapters, nostalgic evocations mark points of impossible returns. Nostalgia is interpreted as a reflective turn inward in Nostalghia, an unsentimental distrust in Radetzkymarsch, a restorative impulse in films such as Ford’s Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (1951, The youth of Chopin), and a self-reflective critique in Clair’s Les belles de nuit and Renoir’s French Cancan and possibly also in Żuławski’s La note bleue (1991, The blue note). These four chapters explore the wide range in which music articulates cinematic expressions of nostalgia. While music works in ways that are unique to each individual set of films, four distinct communalities emerge from the four chapters. First, familiar works of the Western art music canon or readily recognizable Western musical genres are present. This observation manifests itself evidently in Kehlmann’s Radetzkymarsch, which lends its title from ­Johann Strauss Sr.’s iconic march (Op. 228), or in films using Chopin’s music, predominantly mazurkas and polonaises. Clair’s musical film Les belles de nuit is replete with the lilting theme of a valse and Renoir’s with the dazzling performance of French cancan—especially Jacques Offenbach’s iconic and risqué “Galop infernal.” In Nostalghia, the all-consuming feelings of loss and displacement drive the acts of self-sacrifice to deliberately selected musical scores, the so to speak greatest hits of the Western canon: Domenico, the Italian “madman,” stages his grand sacrificial performance in Rome to “Ode to Joy,” while A ­ ndrei, the Russian intellectual during his self-imposed exile in Tuscany, dies unexpectedly while realizing Domenico’s promise of saving humanity to what else but Verdi’s Requiem. The Requiem does not only correspond to Andrei’s death but also signifies the demise of nostalgic longing in general and presumably of humanity altogether. Second, the films in question reinforce the a priori symbolic value attached to a specific composer, composition, or musical genre that correlates them to a specific nation or evokes a certain set of cultural associations. Boczkowska argues that Chopin holds cultural significance as a symbol of Polish national resistance under the Nazi occupation—a cultural significance which the post-war communist regime sought to reappropriate into its own national propagandistic program to gain widespread support for the new socialist government. Müller and Plebuch trace cultural value attached to Strauss’s Radetzky March across different media: the novel, the television production, and the film score. Kehlmann’s anti-nostalgic approach in Radetzkymarsch is evident in Rolf ­Wilhelm’s approach of deconstructing Strauss’s march and Chopin’s Funeral March with a musical concept of banalization, mirroring the approach of another Austrian composer—one living truly toward the end of the Monarchy: Gustav Mahler. In addition, Wilhelm treats the short, fleetingly recurring Strauss fragments in the manner of a post-war twentieth-century composer by developing the musical material from a somewhat stable texture and form into a state of complete disintegration. Third, repetition and disruption are also important components of these films’ soundtracks as means of creating nostalgic yearning. Repetition may involve the recurrence of the same thematic material within a specific film: the

14  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska presence of several cancan tunes in French Cancan is an example. A recurrent trope across a number of films is music acting as a signifier for the moment that characters escape into nostalgic pasts. The Moulin Rouge impresario flees into an imaginary journey to a better past when hearing the chanson “La complainte de la Butte” (The lament of the (Montmartre) hill).23 Andrei in Nostalghia retreats into his childhood by imagining hearing a Russian folk tune. Disruptions—such as loud jackhammers interrupting the sung waltzes of the past in Les belles de nuit or the gradually deformed motifs in Radetzkymarsch— are strategies with which the filmmakers expose nostalgia as fabricated truths and precarious “romances with one’s own fantas[ies]” (Boym xiii). Lastly, embedded stories of individual nostalgia in the films provide opportunities for the directors to reflect on their personal situations or historical moments. Lewis articulates this aspect in relation to Renoir and Clair’s returns to France when she argues that their individual critiques of cinematic illusion originate in their shared yearning to reconnect with French audiences after their successful careers in the 1930s and forced exile to Hollywood in the 1940s. Boczkowska discusses how socialist propaganda directors such as Ford and émigré directors Żuławski and Rybczyński reflect nostalgically through another Polish émigré, Chopin, on their respective moments in history, their lost home country and country of exile. Finally, Tarkovsky increasingly gravitated in the last years of his life toward such Western countries as Sweden and Italy. Andrei, the main character in Nostalghia, uncannily resembles ­Tarkovsky in his role as exiled artist longing for Russia, which is permanently lost to him. The nostalgic inclinations of all these directors and their sensibility toward the cultural environment of their lost home land—and also, perhaps, their new, foreign home—are strongly expressed in the music they chose for their respective films, from the quintessentially Parisian cancan and its association with the Belle Époque period to the Polish Chopin (himself longing for a lost home through his music), to the Radetzky March signaling the seemingly “glorious,” imperial Austrian past, and to the more universal Beethoven representing humanity.

Film Music, European Memory Complex, and Heuristics of Multivocality Up to the 1990s, memory studies were primarily focused on the grand narrative of singular nations as means to reinforce legends of heroic pasts. Holocaust remembrance subsequently redirected memory studies in Europe toward a transnational phenomenon. The integrating moment of this expanded aspect of memory studies as a “specific European form of relating to the past” is no longer based on just a few common factors to commemorate the past (Feindt et al. 20), but has diversified into a wide range of forms of commemoration and resembles what Sharon Macdonald calls the “European memory complex.” According to Macdonald, a memory complex constitutes “an assemblage of practices, affects and physical things, which includes such parts as

Introduction  15 memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts” (6), and of course also music and film. A second useful concept to analyze European cultural artefacts and works of art, and popular culture within a transnational context is Gregor Feindt et al.’s idea of a “heuristics of multivocality,” which celebrates the diversity of voices and the heterogeneity of modes of memories within a European context. The concept of “heuristics of multivocality” illustrates how each interpretation stands in reciprocal influence in relation to other interpretations. In addition, “heuristics of multivocality” tells us that memories always refer to earlier memories. The interpretation of memory leads then back to ever earlier layers of meaning, which vestiges of memories could be understood as nostalgic.24 In other words, the past constitutes itself by the sole fact that we refer to it. The authors of this collection are well aware of this methodological impasse. They all analyze the discussed films and their music within a transnational context and with broader approaches to memory studies by applying methodological frameworks similar to Feindt et al.’s concept of “heuristics of multivocality” and Macdonald’s concept of “European memory complex.” Corbella constructs the idea of an imaginary musical archive that simultaneously contains contemporary American popular music (at the time of the making of Riso amaro), Italian traditional work songs, and symphonic Western art music. Hillman discusses how German directors Kluge and Herzog reflected upon nineteenth-century Italian opera in their 1980s films. Pontara discovers a particularly multifaceted “European memory complex” in Nostalghia, where Beethoven, Verdi, and a Russian folk song are intimately linked to an Italian outcast and Russian intellectual speculating about the end of humanity and how such an outcome can be redeemed by the music of Verdi and Beethoven. The authors discussing films dealing with memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust inevitably link Nazi Germany to Great Britain (Cooke), Poland (Milewski), the Soviet Union (Cizmic), and France (Baumgartner and McMahon). Luko and Lewis discuss Europe (more accurately Sweden and France) in relation to the immigration country of the United States. The protagonists in both chapters retain their affinity to the music of their home countries: rigid, antiquated Protestant music in the case of the Swedish émigrés and Parisian cancan, chanson and valse in the case of Renoir and Clair. Cizmic as well as Baumgartner and McMahon specify that Shepit’ko and Resnais commissioned the music for their films dealing with the German occupation—Voskhozhdenie and Muriel—from contemporary art music composers of German extractions: Alfred Schnittke and Hans Werner Henze. In these films, the two composers expand the otherwise limited memory complex from one nation to a wider, transnational inventory of memories. The Radetzky March in Müller and Plebuch’s contribution is quintessentially an example of reading Strauss’s march in Kehlmann’s television production through the lens of “heuristics of multivocality,” for this march—as an insignia of the Austrian-Hungarian imperial might—symbolizes Austria’s hegemonic position in the nineteenth century in relation to major parts of Eastern

16  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska Europe and the Balkans. Boczkowska presents presumably the strongest case of how music—Chopin in this case—can be interpreted through the concept of a trans-European memory complex. Poland’s collective memory, hinged on Chopin’s music, takes center stage against the Soviet Union and Germany as the intruder nations threatening the patriotic image of the “national hero,” and France and the United States as the emigration countries assisting in reaffirming the right for sovereign Polish national identity in such exiled citizens as Chopin himself and the filmmakers Ce ̨kalski, Żuławski, and Rybczyński. The individual chapters stand as a set in a dialogue with each other and constitute together a common discourse around the central premise that music is uniquely situated—as the arguably most suited cinematic device—to invoke, mediate, sonically recreate, and trigger collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia across multiple schools and traditions of cinema during different historical periods, within a transnational context that characterizes a multitude of post-war European cultures.

Acknowledgments This collection was generously supported by release time and a Cliffe College of Creative Arts and Communication’s Faculty Innovation Grant from Youngstown State University and a Faculty Scholarship Initiative Award from Cleveland State University. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Mary Murray McDonald and Abigail McLaughlin, as well as to Elise Demeter, Larisse Mondok, Edward Sallustio, and Xan Schwartz for reading various drafts of the chapters included in this essay collection.

Notes 1 Miguel Mera and David Burnand’s edited collection European Film Music (Ashgate Publishing, 2006) marked an important first milestone in European film music research. 2 In historical musicology on music and memory, see for example: Anna Maria Busse Berger’s Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. University of California Press, 2005, and Neil Gregor’s “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War.” Music and Letters, vol. 96, no. 1, 2015, pp. 55–76. 3 See for example: Raúl R. Romero. Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes. Oxford University Press, 2001; Rachel Harris. Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang. Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 2004; Dale A. Olsen. The Chrysanthemum and the Song: Music, Memory, and Identity in the South American Japanese Diaspora. University Press of Florida, 2004; Earle H. Waugh. Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters. University of South Carolina Press, 2005; Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Patricia J. Saunders, and Stephen Stuempfle, editors. Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean. Ian Randle Pub., 2007; Alexander Sebastian Dent. River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil. Duke University Press, 2009; Sarah Daynes. Time and Memory in Reggae Music: The Politics of Hope. Manchester University Press, 2010; and Ulrik Volgsten and Oscar Pripp. “Music, Memory and Affect Attunement: Connecting Kurdish

Introduction  17 Diaspora in Stockholm.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, vol. 8, no. 2, 2016, pp. 144–64. 4 See for example: Geoffrey O’Brien. Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life. Counterpoint, 2004; Andy Bennett and Ian Rogers. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; and Sara Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard, and Les Roberts, editors. Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places. Routledge, 2015. 5 Bob Snyder. Music and Memory: An Introduction. MIT Press, 2000. 6 See for example: Frederick S. Barrett, et al. “Music-Evoked Nostalgia: Affect, Memory, and Personality.” Emotion, vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 390–403; Samantha A. Deffler, and Andrea R. Halpern. “Contextual Information and Memory for Unfamiliar Tunes in Older and Younger Adults.” Psycholog y and Aging, vol. 26, no. 4, 2011, pp. 900–04; Lawrence D. Blum. “Music, Memory, and Relatedness.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 121–31; Jung Kwak, Katharine O’Connell Valuch, and Michael Brondino. “Randomized Crossover Study of Music & Memory Intervention with Nursing Home Residents with Dementia.” The Gerontologist, vol. 56, suppl. 3, 2016, p. 205; Sandra Garrido and Jane W. Davidson. Music, Nostalgia and Memory: Historical and Psychological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2019. 7 Brian Flota and Joseph P. Fisher, editors. The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror. Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Routledge, 2016; and Martin Daughtry. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford University Press, 2015. 8 See in ethnomusicology: Daniel B. Sharp. Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil. Wesleyan University Press, 2014; and Jonathan Holt Shannon. Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean. Indiana University Press, 2015; in psychology and music therapy: Frederick S. Barrett, and Petr Janata. “Neural Responses to Nostalgia-­ evoking Music Modeled by Elements of Dynamic Musical Structure and Individual Differences in Affective Traits.” Neuropsychologia, vol. 91, October 2016, pp. 234–46; and Emelia Michels-Ratliff, and Michael Ennis. “This Is Your Song: Using Participants’ Music Selections to Evoke Nostalgia and Autobiographical Memories Efficiently.” Psychomusicolog y: Music, Mind, and Brain, vol. 26, no. 4, 2016, pp. 379–84; in historical musicology: Matthew Riley. Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2007; and in film music studies: Craig Jones. “‘Acolytes of History’?: Jazz Music and Nostalgia in Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 25–53; and Kris Van Heuckelom, and Iwona Gus ́c ́. “Songs of Home (and Away): Ethnically-coded Diegetic Music and Multidirectional Nostalgia in Fiction Films about Polish Migrants.” Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2016. https://necsus-ejms.org/songshome-away-ethnically-coded-diegetic-music-multidirectional-­nostalgiafiction-films-polish-migrants/. Accessed 5 September 2018. 9 Andreas Huyssen introduced the expressions “memory fever” (“Present Pasts” 435), “memory mania” (Present Pasts 30), and “obsession with memory” (Twilight Memories 6). He describes this scholarly urge for understanding memory less as a “fin de siècle syndrome” and more as a “sign of the crisis of that structure of temporality that marked the age of modernity with its celebration of the new as utopian, as radically and irreducibly other” (Twilight Memories 6). Richard Terdiman perceives a “memory crisis,” Arnd Bauerkämper “mnemonic overkill” (12), Filippo Focardi a “memory cult” (7), and David Berliner a “memory craze” (199; 203).

18  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska 10 Freud postulates that the “history of civilization is the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, between the life and death drives” (Kirsner 59). 11 Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925. Halbwachs continued to develop the concept in La mémoire collective, which was published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1950, five years after his death as a prisoner at Buchenwald. 12 Les lieux de mémoire was published by Gallimard in the series Bibliothèque illustrée as Tome 1: La République (1984) in one volume, and Tome 2: La Nation (1986) as well as Tome 3: Les France (1992), each in three volumes. 13 See for example: Jenny Edkins. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2003. 14 See for example: Paul Grainge, editor. Memory and Popular Film. Manchester University Press, 2003; Inez Hedges. World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; and Russell J.A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, editors. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. 15 See also Christine Sprengler. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. Berghahn Books, 2009. 16 See for example: Janet Walker. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. University of California Press, 2005; Giacomo Lichtner. Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. Vallentine Mitchell, 2008; Marek Haltof. Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory. Berghahn, 2010; Małgorzata Pakier. The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema after 1989. Peter Lang, 2013; Gerd Bayer, and Oleksandr Kobrynskyy, editors. Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation. Wallflower Press, 2015; Richard Ned-Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, editors. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Duke University Press, 2006; and Debarati Sanyal. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. Fordham University Press, 2015. 17 See Jelača Dijana. Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Dirk de Bruyn. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014; and Colin Davis. Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence. Routledge Advances in Film Studies. Routledge, 2012. 18 See for example: Dayna Oscherwitz. Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010; Isabelle ­McNeill. Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era. Edinburgh University Press, 2010; and Russell J. A. Kilbourn. Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema. Routledge Advances in Film Studies, vol. 6. Routledge, 2010. 19 See for example: Domietta Torlasco. The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2013; and Francesco Federici, and Cosetta G. Saba, editors. Cinema and Art as Archive: Form, Medium, Memory. Mimesis International, 2014. 20 Device is here understood as used in the teaching of David Bordwell. 21 “Cinematic Trauma, Empathy, and the Music of Arvo Pärt.” Lecture presented at the Dana School of Music, Youngstown State University, 9 October 2017; and “The Empathy Trope.” Paper presented at Music and the Moving Image XI Conference, New York University, Steinhardt Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, 29 May 2016. 22 See the scholarly discussion on Claudia Gorbman’s distinction of the three narrative levels of film music, diegetic, non-diegetic, and meta-diegetic: Robynn Stilwell. “The Fantastical Gap between the Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” Beyond

Introduction  19 the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, edited by Daniel Ira Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 184–202; David Neumeyer. “Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model”; Jeff Smith. “Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 26–39 and pp. 1–25, respectively; Ben Winters. “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music & Letters, vol. 91, no. 2, 2010, pp. 224–43; Guido Heldt. Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps across the Border. Intellect, 2013; Anahid Kassabian. “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?” The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 89–106; Tobias Pontara. “Interpretation and Underscoring: Modest Constructivism and the Issue of Nondiegetic versus Intradiegetic Music in Film.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 9, no. 2, 2016, pp. 39–57; and ­Giorgio Biancorosso. Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2016. 23 This is not an original chanson but one composed by Georges van Parys especially for French Cancan. It imitates the style of a nineteenth-century Parisian café concert song. The nostalgia that is invoked here is therefore doubly removed and ultimately artificially manufactured. 24 The analysis of memory is understood here as a removal of layers of meaning, whereas the authentic, concealed meaning of an experience can be brought back to light (Feindt et al. 29).

Works Cited Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and ­A nsgar Nünning, in collaboration with Sara Young, Walter De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 109–18. Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. Collective Memory and the Historical Past. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Bauerkämper, Arnd. Das umstrittene Gedächtnis: Die Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus, Faschismus und Krieg in Europa seit 1945. Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012. Berliner, David. “The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 1, 2005, pp. 197–211. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Cappelletto, Francesca, editor. Memory and World War II: An Ethnographic Approach. Berg, 2005. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. “From Trauma and Experience.” Theories of Memory: A Reader, edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, pp. 199–205. Cizmic, Maria. Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. Oxford University Press, 2012. Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. Routledge, 2005. Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 183–99.

20  Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska Feindt, Gregor, Felix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev, editors. Europäische Erinnerung als verflochtene Erinnerung: Vielstimmige und vielschichtige Vergangenheitsdeutungen jenseits der Nation. Formen der Erinnerung, vol. 55. V&R Unipress, 2014. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, editors. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, 1992. Focardi, Filippo, and Bruno Groppo, editors. L’Europa e le sue memorie: Politiche e culture del ricordo dopo il 1989. Libri di Viella, vol. 164. Viella, 2013. Freud, Sigmund. “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1933). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 22, Hogarth Press, 1964, pp. 1–182. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indiana University Press, 1987. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. The Heritage of Sociology, 1952. The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. Routledge, 1995. ———. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 430–36. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kirsner, Douglas. “The Question of a Weltanschauung: Freud, Stoicism and Religion.” Trauma, History, Philosophy (with Feature Essays by Agnes Heller and Györg y Márkus), edited by Matthew Sharpe, Murray Noonan, and Jason Freddi, ­Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 56–75. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004. Macdonald, Sharon. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. Routledge, 2013. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Harvard University Press, 2002. Mazierska, Ewa. European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics. Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Nora, Pierre. “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Memory and Counter-Memory, special issue of Representations, no. 26, spring 1989, pp. 7–24. ———. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume i: Conflicts and Divisions. English language edition edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, European Perspectives, Columbia University Press, 1996. Olick, Jeffrey K. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory, vol. 17, no. 3, November 1999, pp. 333–48. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and ­David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Introduction  21 Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Cornell University Press, 1993. Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Films Cited Die Macht der Gefühle (The power of emotion). Directed by Alexander Kluge, music by Giuseppe Verdi (amongst others), Kairos-Film and Zweites Deutsches ­Fernsehen (ZDF), 1983. Fanfare. Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Cinematográfica Filmex S.A. and Sapphire Filmproduktiemaatschappij, 1958. Fitzcarraldo. Directed by Werner Herzog, music by Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Popol Vuh, et al., Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Project Filmproduktion, Filmverlag der Autoren, et al., 1982. French Cancan. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Georges Van Parys, Franco London Films and Jolly Film, 1954. Här har du ditt liv (Here is your life). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Erik ­Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. La luna (The moon). Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Ennio Morricone, Fiction Cinematografica S.p.a. and Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last year at Marienbad). Directed by Alain Resnais, music by Francis Seyrig, Cocinor, Terra Film, Cormoran Films, et al., 1961. La note bleue (The blue note). Directed by Andrzej Żuławski, Erato Films, G. Films, Oliane Productions and Gemini Filmproduktion GmbH, 1991. Les belles de nuit (Beauties of the night). Directed by René Clair, music by Georges Van Parys, Franco London Films and Rizzoli Films, 1952. Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (The youth of Chopin). Directed by Aleksander Ford, music by Fryderyk Chopin and Kazimierz Serocki, Filmoteka Narodowa, SF “Kadr,” SF “Perspektywa,” SF “Oko,” SF “Tor” and SF “Zebra,” 1951. Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the time of return). Directed by Alain Resnais, music by Hans Werner Henze, Argos Films, Alpha Productions, Éclair, et al., 1963. Nostalghia (Nostalgia). Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, music by Ludwig van ­Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi (amongst others), Rai 2, Sovinfilm and Opera Film Produzione, 1983. Nybyggarna (The new land). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Bengt Ernryd, Lars August Lundh, Georg Oddner and Nils Parling, Svensk Filmindustri, 1972. Radetzkymarsch. Television production. Directed by Michael Kehlmann, music by Rolf Wilhelm, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), 1965. Riso amaro (Bitter rice). Directed by Giuseppe de Santis, music by Goffredo Petrassi and Armando Trovajoli (amongst others), Lux Film, 1949. Voskhozhdenie (The ascent). Directed by Larisa Shepit’ko, music by Alfred ­Schnittke, Mosfilm, 1977. Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden songs). Directed by Leonard Buczkowski, music by Roman Palester, P.P. Film Polski, 1947 and revised 1948.

Part I

Collective Memory and (Trans-)Nation

1 A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level Music as a Sonic Lieu de Mémoire of Dutch Cultural Identity on Film Emile Wennekes Water: A National Epic1 “God created the earth, but the Dutch created The Netherlands.” This famous, old saying refers to the many massive building projects that have been realized in a country, which—for the most part—is beneath sea level. Claiming land from rivers and the sea, building dikes for safety against the high tides, and providing new space by landfill for the densely populated nation: these are only the most extreme examples that have inspired the ludicrous argument that The Netherlands were in fact man-made as opposed to having been divinely designed or having gradually evolved in terms of their topography. The Netherlands have also been termed “a colossal Work in Progress” (van der Woud 178). Gaining sovereignty over water has always been poignantly crucial to the Dutch—from the early economic benefits due to the accessibility of preindustrial locations via its waterways. All this progress, however, came at a cost of destabilizing the “original” topography and folklore, and, in that sense, at a cost of putting an archetypical “identity” under threat as well. Fishermen were pushed out of businesses, and families were forced to leave the territories, which they had lived in for generations. New industries, housing, and recreational facilities were artificially erected. This thriving construction boom was especially evident during the massive Zuiderzee reclaiming project and the final closing of the North Sea dike in May 1932, a project that was heralded as an “emblematically Dutch national epic” (Waugh 25). This continuous relationship with water in its broadest sense has indeed been an essential topic in Dutch cinema ever since its inception in the first decades of the twentieth century. As will be discussed in detail below, the popularity of the topical water theme lasted well into the post-war period.2 Not only were the colossal ecological transformations caused by closing out the North Sea presented in both documentaries and in feature films, but the social and economic consequences affected by these transformations were often narrated from a nostalgic perspective. Meters of film footage featured the great effort it had taken past generations to conquer the sea for better, even “utopian” prospects while these images glorified rural tradition and local habits, which were in reality on the verge of vanishing.

26  Emile Wennekes These shifting socio-ecological frameworks prompted an alternative reading of “Dutchness,” mediated through provocative cinematic narratives and fostered by imaginative film music. The remodeled narratives supplement two of the three characteristics that have previously been identified through an indepth analysis of the so-called “Jordaanfilms”—films of the 1930s set in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Amsterdam. National identity was defined in these films as “a sense of duty and devotion to duty that is expressed on the level of personal, social and economic relations” as well as “a desire for a good and simple life within one’s own social peer group” (Pafort-Overduin 363). Elsewhere, Dutch identity is related to the concept of eigenheid, a term that “refers to the different ways in which people define their own being against or in relation to that of others” (Mathijs 5). In the introduction to The Cinema of The Low Countries, Ernest Mathijs states, “What is interesting in Low Countries cinema [the three countries currently known as The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg] is that this not only shows itself in the interaction among characters but also between characters and landscape, cities, ideologies and any other cultural discourse” (5). It is this aspect of shifting identities in times of large-scale ecological transformations that will be addressed in this chapter. On the one hand, Dutch national identity is closely related to The Netherlands’s unique geographical location largely beneath sea level. On the other hand, the ubiquitous presence of water has been presented in Dutch cinema as expressions of nostalgia, tradition, and identity, and as an evolving understanding of these values. In the films dealing with the quintessential Dutch topic of water, music mediates alternative readings of Dutchness and, in turn, participates within the larger ecological conversation. Nation and identity are closely correlated to the idea of collective memory, a concept that has been comprehensively theorized by the eminent French historian Pierre Nora. In the preface to the three-volume English edition of his Realms of Memory, Nora defines his term of lieu de mémoire (memory site): “A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community…” (xvii). Nora’s theoretical model of defining the idea of historical memory provides a suitable point of departure for this study to help understand the role that music plays as precisely one of these lieux de mémoire in the Dutch films discussed below, which depict rural populations living in communities surrounded by water. The music of these films—as a sonic lieu de mémoire—­ contributes a “seagull’s” eye view on Dutch heritage, tradition, nostalgia, and identity that address the issues of (re-)mapping customs and merits, values, and habits of individuals by taking a position on the topic of a changing environment and by (co-)narrating the struggle of local communities coping with industrial modernization. The music in two of the most significant early Dutch films addressing these issues, Gerard Rutten’s Dood Water (1934, Dead water) and Joris Ivens’s Nieuwe Gronden (1933, New earth), will be discussed in this chapter in more detail.

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  27 For the major part of this chapter, however, I will discuss the music in a film that continues the topical tradition of these two early sound films, but in a very different way. Bert Haanstra’s seminal and extremely popular film comedy Fanfare (1958) highlights the topic of a changing environment by idealizing, or perhaps “musealizing” a way of life in a traditional Dutch, water-drenched environment that, at the time, was no longer representative. Such rural communities had already become a rarity as a fully industrialized, urbanized, and modernized society had emerged in the post-war years. Fanfare emphasizes the traditional, romanticized Dutch life, exemplified by its socially embedded, musical activities. The film correlates the endeavor of music-making as part of the prototypical Dutch variation of the brass band, the fanfare, to the life in a tranquil community surrounded by water. This is presumably intended as a representative of an idealized, not yet ecologically threatened and traditional image—a lieu de mémoire of nostalgia—for the spirit or collective memory of the whole nation.

Cinematic Water Narratives The first Dutch studio for sound film production—Electra N.V.—opened its doors in February 1931. It nevertheless took three more years before the first Dutch full-length feature films were premiered, among these the epic Willem van Oranje (1934, William of Orange), the farce De Jantjes (1934, The sailors), and the drama Op Hoop van Zegen (1934, Fishing boat “Hope for the best”). The titles of these pictures were indicative of their plots. The subjects are self-­ referential: they either pay homage to an illustrious past, revisiting moments of the nation or expressing a Dutch topicality in their ambivalent relationship to the sea. Their plots follow the axiom of “the sea giveth, the sea taketh away,” or “the fish is paid at a high cost,” meaning at the cost of many human life. Other narratives such as Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (1931, Rose from Cikembang), Pareh: Het lied van de rijst (1936, Pareh, the song of rice), and Terang Boelan (1937, Moonlight, English release title: Full Moon) are situated in the colonies, the Dutch (East) Indies, or in that romanticized quarter of Amsterdam, the Jordaan, where its working-class inhabitants have famed hearts of gold. While the narratives of most of these films take place in times past or exotic locations, others address the more contemporary issue of documenting the profound changes made to a countryside, which was by then idealized. The first Dutch sound feature film already honored a comparable theme. In the epic Terra Nova (1932, New ground), the director Gerard Rutten (1902–82) thematized the land-reclaiming project of the Zuiderzee at the time the massive project was underway. While this picture was never released, Rutten revisits the topic of rural, sea nostalgia two years later in his fictional feature film Dood Water. The film is a tragedy about the social and economic consequences of diking off the Zuiderzee to gain new grounds to be used for agricultural purposes. This awareness of cultural heritage that Rutten displays in Dood Water is a prominent feature, revealing that the director was presumably well ahead of his time. The first 12 minutes depict in a documentary style the

28  Emile Wennekes completion of the Zuiderzee project. During this prologue, the soundtrack consists only of music, which was composed by Walter Gronostay (1906–37) and performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under the direction of the renowned ­Willem Mengelberg. The music recalls the baroque oratorio genre, specifically Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata and passion style. A large orchestra accompanies a solo tenor, who narrates the story of the Zuiderzee project, and a choir that responds to the tenor’s narrative in the manner of a choir in a Greek tragedy. Short tenor arias and recitatives in a neo-Bachian style and large ­Lutheran-like chorales bestow the documentary images of the Zuiderzee project with a quasi-religious message. The rest of the film, however, depicts with a socio-critical subtext the hardship of the fishermen’s lives in a quasi-­silent film manner, accompanied by music and occasional voiceover comments of individuals as representatives of the seaside community. The narrative framework of depicting large-scale ecological changes made to the Dutch landscape can be identified not only in the first generation of Dutch fictional feature films, which ended with the German occupation in 1940, but also in almost all film genres that were produced at the time in The Netherlands, especially in newsreels and documentaries. As can be exemplified by the leading documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898–1989), who kept a close track of the massive transformations caused by reclaiming land from the sea ever since these construction projects had begun. His two documentary projects on this topic are Zuiderzeewerken (1930–33, Zuiderzee works) and Nieuwe Gronden. The two films document the last construction stages of the Zuiderzee land-reclaiming project. After Ivens shot Zuiderzeewerken without sound, in the tradition of the indirect mode of address (Nichols 48), he uses in Nieuwe Gronden for the first two reels of footage from Zuiderzeewerken and for the third reel newly shot material and pre-existing newsreel footage. Nieuwe Gronden was released as a completely new film, profoundly transformed through sound, now addressing the audience not only visually but also aurally.3 The soundtrack of Nieuwe Gronden consists of long passages with only music, which are alternated with ambient sound or brief moments of voiceover comments by Ivens himself. Particularly the moments with music, composed by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who reused material taken from his Suites for Orchestra No. 3, Op. 26 “Kuhle Wampe” and No. 4, Op. 30 “Die Jugend hat das Wort,” are noteworthy.4 Ivens himself states in Cinema Quarterly that the score constitutes “a dynamic factor in the completed film” (qtd. in Waugh 34). Short character pieces are juxtaposed against images of workers constructing a dike. These character pieces are “not limited to reproducing the ‘mood of the scene, a mood of gloom and great effort’ [Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films 26]—the workers are shown bearing a huge steel conduit—but instead the underlying triumph of solidarity” (Schweinhardt and Gall 173). Specifically, the addition of sound and the incorporation of music transformed fundamentally the original narrative at the end of the film. This expository “remake” of Zuiderzeewerken no longer celebrates an idyll of wellchoreographed work labor and heroic boulder displacement, but it unmasks

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  29 the dike project as a sinister exploitation, criticizing the misuse of the newly gained agricultural land for speculation purposes to increase the price of grain that resulted in large-scale unemployment. In this final part, Ivens’s voiceover comments take on a rather aggressive, accusative tone. The agitprop style is reinforced by Eisler’s Ballade van de Zakkendragers/Ballade von den Säckschmeißern (Ballad of the bag carriers, with lyrics by Julian Arendt and Ernst Busch), which Eisler composed three years earlier (Schweinhardt and Gall 162). Indebted to the Brechtian alienation effect, the text reads, “In this land of fertile promise they ask for / Workmen to throw the wheat into the sea.” Through the addition to this ballade of images with bags of grain dumped into the sea, Thomas Waugh accordingly concludes that “[t]he epic combat is reformulated: the struggle against nature in Zuiderzee[werken] becomes the class struggle of New Earth” (31). Ivens was not the only filmmaker who was inspired by the colossal dike constructions and draining works and the subsequent transformation of both landscape and society (Stufkens 138–39). Willy Mullens (1880–1952) followed these developments closely, releasing a new documentary every year, relevant to the next stage of the Zuiderzee project (De Zuiderzeewerken, 1930 and 1931 respectively, Zuyderzee works, followed by Van Zuiderzee tot IJsselmeer en Waddenzee, 1932, From Zuiderzee to IJsselmeer and Waddenzee). From the first critical notes on the loss of employment and the socio-economic consequences of the water works in D. J. van der Ven’s Zuiderzee-Film (1928), to Ernst Winar’s De Laatste Dagen van een Eiland (1938, The last days of the isle of Marken), even to Louis van Gasteren’s post-war documentary Nieuw Dorp op Nieuw Land (1960, New village on new land), the Zuiderzee land-reclaiming project was a dominant theme in Dutch cinema, subsequently castigated by the following generations of Dutch filmmakers.

Haanstra Mirrors Holland The topic of an ecological look at the changing Dutch landscape continued to be popular in post-war Dutch cinema. Bert Haanstra’s (1916–97) work is in line with this topical tradition, yet with an amused eye for the beauty of industrial construction and communities in transformation. Even though his work was readily dismissed by some critics as less politically involved, Haanstra gained international acclaim with the documentary Spiegel van Holland (1950, Mirror of Holland), a film that was awarded the Grand Prix du court métrage at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. He was also the first Dutch director to win an Academy Award with his documentary Glas (1959, Glass). Haanstra’s work essentially captures the identity of a post-Second World War Dutch society, its land and seascape, its inhabitants and their folklore. Allusion to a national Dutch identity is essential to many of Haanstra’s pictures. In a vital part of his documentary oeuvre, he provides his audience with near-anthropological impressions of a society in a picturesque landscape of idyllic Dutch identity. He depicts this idyllic identity most often in

30  Emile Wennekes its daily association with water, be it in leisure, be it in a serious struggle between life and death. 5 Although there is hardly any adequate literature discussing the music in Haanstra’s films, the director has been praised as an “exceptional musical filmmaker” (HM in Score 144), especially when it comes to his superb sensibility for rhythm in terms of movement and montage, repetition and timing.6 Glas is known for its delicate treatment of music and moving image. Scenes appear to be edited to the pace of the music by Pim Jacobs’s jazz quintet. But the opposite is true: the music was composed after the film had been edited. In other documentaries, the movement of the water and its waves inspire a rhythmical pace, visual as well as musical, and the reflection of light on the flowing water surface allows rather naturally for a musical counterpart. In Panta Rhei (1952, Everything streams), which is delicately scored by Max Vredenburg (1904–76) for a chamber ensemble, a harp arpeggio echoes the sun’s reflection on the water, whereas the “near pointillistic recordings of nature” (HM in Score 144) are idiomatically underscored by solo flute and bassoon lines. Here, the music does not “diminish” the impression of reality—to refer to a well-known discussion regarding the use of music within documentary film (Rogers 3)—but increases the perception of the presented images. Timelapsed close-ups of opening flowers are accompanied by a lively oboe motive and a close-up of flowing water with a dense harpsichord ostinato. The unpretentious and organic unity between the music and moving image results in a subtle, yet natural audiovisual interplay, conveying the storyline through images of nature events and a modernist chamber music composition. After several documentaries, Haanstra made his debut as a feature film director in 1958 with Fanfare.7 This full-length feature comedy is generally understood as the new beginning of post-war Dutch feature film production, after years during which undeniably weak, amateurish scripts all failed to attract either a large audience or to find critical acclaim, or even both. In terms of its music, Fanfare is one of Haanstra’s most intriguing films. Fanfare shows a community’s daily alliance with water, but incorporated is also a second, unique phenomenon of the Low Countries, the fanfare band. The musical score was composed by Jan Mul (1911–71) and performed by members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Almost a quarter of a century following its first collaboration with the feature film industry in Dood Water,8 the nation’s leading ensemble agreed to participate again in a film project. The Concertgebouw Orchestra provides the extra-diegetic score, whereas the local, authentic Giethoornse Fanfare performs the diegetic music.

Fanfare: Brass Bands in the “Venice of the North” The screenplay of Fanfare was a collaborative effort by Haanstra together with the film critic and author Jan Blokker (1927–2010). The idea to write jointly a comedy was sparked by Jacques Tati’s Les Vacances de Monsieur ­Hulot (Mr.  ­Hulot’s holiday), which they watched together at the Cannes Film

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  31 9

Festival in 1953. This unexpected influence by a French comedic film may indicate that, although Fanfare is in many respects an undeniably canonical Dutch film, it nonetheless is not without foreign stimuli. Haanstra and Blokker thoroughly discussed the screenplay with the successful British comedy scriptwriter Alexander “Sandy” Mackendrick. Fanfare therefore exhibits distant resemblances to the British Ealing comedies. Some even classify Fanfare as tributary to these comedies (Schoots, Bert Haanstra 120–21). In line with these observations, Fanfare is a hilarious story situated in a small-town setting within a strikingly beautiful location, while the film is, at the same time, photographed in a realistic, documentary style. The folkloristic realism is underlined by the fact that the protagonists are dressed in traditional costumes—including the ubiquitous wooden shoes—and communicate with each other in the local dialect, which is in stark contrast to the outsiders with whom they interact in formal Dutch. Haanstra’s biographer Hans Schoots writes that nothing world-shocking occurs in Fanfare, “and that’s the beauty of it” (Bert Haanstra 114). Within a jocular narrative, Fanfare displays a Dutch cracker-barrel community, deeply involved with water in the fictitious small town of Lagerwiede. Just like every self-respecting village in The Netherlands, Lagerwiede has its own fanfare band, which socially brings together amateur musicians from all walks of local life and from all social classes. The Dutch fanfare has frequently been described as “the symphony orchestra of ordinary people.” Although the fanfare band has no woodwind section as such, it deviates slightly from a typical brass band due to the incorporation of the entire saxophone family and percussion instruments. It features trumpets rather than cornets. Bugles—especially the solo-flugelhorn—have a prominent position in the orchestral timbre of the fanfares’ characteristic sound. The fanfare orchestra—one may call it a lieu de mémoire representing a long tradition—is significantly typical for The Netherlands and to a lesser extent for Belgium or Northern France. Thousands of these characteristic ensembles still exist. Wind instruments are relatively inexpensive to obtain in comparison to string instruments and are also considered easier to master. The “man in the street” can therefore afford them with relative ease, albeit that fanfare societies, or the local authorities—for that matter—are typically the owners of the instruments. Accordingly, in Fanfare, the mayor authoritatively locks away the instruments to strategically fight against the schism in his deeply divided town. The water in Fanfare is part and parcel to the community’s history and identity. Water is taken for granted, uniting and simultaneously determining social life. In the opening shots of the film, the fictitious composer Altena as the film’s narrator discloses, “One thing we have here in over-flowing quantities…: water! There’s so much of it that there’s no room for streets.” The shot accompanying Altena’s voiceover shows a bucket full of water being emptied into a canal. From the very beginning onwards, the film contains an abundant amount of atmospheric sequences like this opening episode, displaying

32  Emile Wennekes marine animals, boats, bridges, canals, moors and marshes and a repetitious tumbling of persons, animals, and objects into water. Fanfare was filmed in the real town of Giethoorn, situated in the province of Overijssel, in the North Eastern part of Holland. The town has been on occasion nicknamed the “Venice of the North” or “Dutch Venice.” ­Giethoorn—as the “real” lieu de mémoire—has experienced a harsh past, continuously struggling against the elements, especially fighting the permanent threat of flooding. In the remote past, when the harvesting of the peaty soil caused a landscape of numerous moors, the farmhouses were consequentially built on little islands which can only be reached by boat or a bridge. Until today, small canals have been the main thoroughfares for all transportation. Since time immemorial, the baker and the butcher, the farmer, the milkman, and the grocer all have used petite flat-bottom boats—punts—for the delivery of their commodities.

Two Rivaling Bands in Fanfare Fanfare’s narrative, which is dominated by music-making and water, can be subdivided into four parts. The exposition reveals that social life in the pastoral town of Lagerwiede, which is surrounded by fringes of reeds, is very much centered around its fanfare orchestra with the name Kunst en Vriendschap (Art and Friendship). Lagerwiede’s music ensemble is about to compete in a local, yet prestigious musical contest organized by a neighboring town. Rehearsals for the contest disclose how two members of the fanfare—rival ­innkeepers—get into a flaming row. One of the two—horn player Krijns— has a demanding solo in the contest composition. He consistently fails to get his solo right, much to the amusement of the other members, most notably sousaphone (bombardon) player Geursen, the rival pub proprietor. The plot thickens when Geursen boards his boat to apologize to Krijns, but Krijns’s dog goes after Geursen’s cow Clara, which is being transported on the boat for its daily milking and grazing routine. Clara causes a mess in Krijns’s idyllic waterside café by breaking dishes and parasols and knocking over tables and chairs. This unfortunate encounter is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Krijns quits the ensemble as does a line-up of his sympathizers, consequently dividing the fanfare orchestra into two separate, almost equally sized ensembles.10 To attain a majority of 13 players, members of both bands first flirt with the grocer and triangle player, then threaten and ultimately blackmail him to make him join their respective ensemble. Only the majority has the right to represent the village music guild at the contest and will therefore be equipped with instruments, which belong to the guild. Each rivaling band commissions a composition from the local composer Altena to represent Lagerwiede individually in the upcoming contest. Both ensembles hilariously try to hamper the other from competing by stealing instruments and music stands. At one point, the fanfare’s banner is nicked back and forth while the two rival ensembles journey to the town where the

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  33 contest takes place. Everyone is fundamentally frustrated up to the moment when both ensembles get on stage and commence their respective signature tunes. At the climax of the plot, everyone expects a cacophony à la Ives, as both pieces are performed simultaneously. Nevertheless, by the graces of the calm composer, the two compositions fortuitously form a sonorous synthesis. The now happy and reunited fanfare wins the competition hands down. The village people go on to live “happily ever after,” one would think. However, as a coda to the film, when Geursen’s daughter gets married and the reunited fanfare performs to add luster to the event, Geursen derides again his blundering rival, whereupon Krijns once more leaves the band annoyed.

Jan Mul’s Multilayered Score for Fanfare Jan Mul scored nine films for Haanstra.11 He began his musical studies as a student of Sem Dresden at the Amsterdam Conservatory. In addition to Dresden, Mul was deeply influenced from an early age on by church organist and composer Hendrik Andriessen,12 who renewed Catholic liturgical music in The Netherlands. Mul’s compositional style testifies to an affluent affinity with French music, more specifically with the light-footed, yet graceful and witty idiom of Francis Poulenc and other members of Les Six. Wouter Paap describes Mul’s music in an article of the early 1950s as an amalgamate of “meditation, humor, concentration and entertainment.” These components were taken together in such a way that “the future would definitively promise many a surprise” (Paap 136). The film score for Fanfare can be considered one of the most striking of these unexpected surprises. Even though a film score is first and foremost functional, the music consolidates here the above-listed components by Paap of “humor, concentration and entertainment.” With these three collective ingredients, Mul created a multilayered film score, which enhances, supports, and accommodates the film’s narrative by perfectly supplementing the images and other aural components such as the dialogues, voiceover comments, and ambient noises. The three musical components, which Haanstra and Mul have conceived of, are the diegetic fanfare music, the non-diegetic music performed by members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the quotations of several Dutch nursery rhymes. These three distinct musical strains convey Dutch musical tradition in many facets, the fanfares as a quintessential emblem of country life—a true Dutch lieu de mémoire—the Concertgebouw Orchestra as urban sophistication and the nursery rhymes as part of the country’s collective memory and therefore another lieu de mémoire.

The Diegetic Fanfare Music Mul equips each fraction of the band with its own signature tune in anticipation of a finale, in which the two tunes are synthesized into one harmonious

34  Emile Wennekes sounding composition. The two compositions that Altena writes for the two rival groups of the divided orchestra differ significantly in atmosphere and style. While Altena offers to Geursen’s fraction a solemn piece in a slow pace, Krijns’s musicians are presented with a heroic march. The two different pieces ultimately work wonderfully well when performed together as a double-orchestra march, structured in the traditional marching band form of A-B-A-Trio-A-B-A.13 Mul’s alter ego in the film, Altena, is the omniscient puppeteer of the narrative events, not only as the creator of the musical material for the two parties but also in his anthropological understanding of the village’s cultural identity. Mainly sitting on the front lawn of his picturesque country house and reading a book, he is a character in the film, who stands above the feud of Krijn and Geursen’s camps. He primarily listens and calmly provides well-balanced thoughts to the villagers who interact with him. In addition, he supplies relaxed voiceover comments with explanatory flavor: “You can hear clearly from across the water…. Listen, the band is rehearsing….” (00:03:43). The real composer, Mul, is also an omniscient puppeteer by not only adding musical commentary to Fanfare but also by participating in the film’s action itself by providing verbal commentary via his alter ego, Altena. The film begins with motives from Mul’s Fanfare in E-flat Major, performed—­ presumably extra-diegetically—by the Giethoornse Fanfare during the opening credits. The opening shot after the credits reveals a girl leaning against a haystack in a summary field, playing a bucolic melody on a French horn, which is only accompanied by merrily chirping birds (00:01:17). Her pastoral playing is only interrupted by a mooing cow, mysteriously floating down a meadow. Only later do we realize that the cows floating up and down the meadow are in reality on punts on a canal. As more brass instruments extra-­ diegetically join the girl in this three-four-time tune, the brass waltz transfigures the cows into participants of a veritable mini-ballet due to the punt’s floating movement. This ingenious opening is followed by idyllic images of the village, overdubbed by Altena’s already-cited voiceover comments on the subject of water. These opening musical motives from Mul’s Fanfare in E-flat Major also suggest that they might originate from the hall, where the musicians are rehearsing. As if the camera has ears, the music increases in volume when the door of the café is opened (00:05:50). Aurally as well as visually, we witness the band rehearsing. The camera pans along the different musicians—old and young, starters and experienced old hands. A general comment after a viewing at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 reads that “never before did we see so many ugly people assembled in one picture” (No author, Filmtotaal). The instruments that these amateur musicians play are each aurally highlighted as soon as a specific player and his instrument is shown in a close-up shot. During these rehearsals, we hear snippets of the newly commissioned contest composition, essential

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  35 parts of the double-orchestra march that will come together at the film’s climax as the completed Fanfare in E-flat Major. Snippets of the composition are already audible in an imaginative, witty scene during the separate journey of the two ensembles to the contest location (01:13:41). Krijns’s band voyages by boat and Geursen’s musicians drive in a lorry for agricultural produces. The viewer witnesses the journey to the contest as a parallel montage. As we see the boat slowly and peacefully floating down a canal, we hear the musicians in the boat frenetically rehearsing the uplifting march. A cut to the speeding lorry reveals Geursen’s band, rehearsing fiercely their solemn piece. At one point, the two traveling groups meet at a canal bridge (Figure 1.1). While Krijns’s rehearsing band is peacefully floating by under the bridge, Geursen—who is stranded due to the open bridge— is crossly looking at Krijns’s musicians, who merrily continue playing their march. Later, riding down on an unpaved path, the harsh vibration of the truck turns the sound of the rehearsing ensemble into sheer cacophony. In an amalgamation of genius cinematic and musical synthesis, Haanstra and Mul introduce on this wild journey to the contest location through fragmented musical snippets of Altena’s march, presented in consecutive order, the music that soon at the contest will become, simultaneously performed, one harmonious and complete composition.

Figure 1.1  K  rijns’s band uses the advantage of an open bridge and sails on, while Geursen’s musicians are impeded from continuing traveling in their lorry.

36  Emile Wennekes

Extra-diegetic Music Performed by Members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra Mul has conceived the underscore music, performed by members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra with prominence of the wind section, of either new material or material based on the diegetic Fanfare in E-flat Major. The orchestral underscore cues based on the Fanfare in E-flat Major incorporate segments from either the A- or B-section of the double-orchestra march. Mul varies the material of the march for these non-diegetic cues, for example as variations in minor keys. The non-diegetic orchestral cues, based on new material, generally consist of short and subtle interruptions that softly underscore dialogues, suture shot changes, mask rough cuts, support the continuity, and mark synch points. One of these synch points—accentuated by a short, suddenly broken-off musical chord—happens, when the newly hired conductor of Krijns band falls through the collapsing conductor’s podium—a make-shift, old, wooden crate in reality—precisely at the moment he raises his baton to begin the march (00:44:13). In some instances, the underscore music is organically integrated into the ambient sounds, despite its extra-diegetic character. As an ambient, yet modestly conceived soundtrack, the underscore music completes the diegetic outdoor acoustics. At the end of the film, both music and ambient acoustics complement each other. After the punt with the freshly married couple of Geursen’s daughter and her police officer groom floats by, the final, non-­ diegetic music enters with a graceful, concluding nursery rhyme, primarily performed by woodwinds (01:22:12). With the beginning of the final cadential figure, the viewer sees ducks swimming down the canal behind the punt with the newly married couple. The cadential figure, repeated by several solo woodwinds such as a clarinet, piccolo flute and flute, is regularly interrupted by a duck quacking, conveniently at the end of each rendition. The extra-diegetic music also adds a flavor of comic commentary to the storyline. What we hear adds farcical connotation to what we see. For example, a light-hearted, polka-influenced tune, performed by a chamber ensemble, accompanies a short episode with the fiancée of the police officer and the newly hired conductor of Krijns’s band (00:58:14). The fiancée tries to hang up a freshly washed linen bed sheet onto a clothes line. The conductor sees her struggling and runs up to help. The village cop coincidentally strolls by and sees in backlight through the hung up, white sheet the shadows of his fiancée and the conductor (Figure 1.2). He misunderstands the conductor’s animated gestures as an attempt of earnest flirtations with his female counterpart. The police officer furiously approaches her and accuses her of having kissed the conductor. The sprightly polka tune with a featured solo bassoon—a veritable sonic lieu de mémoire—connotes an idyllic atmosphere and invokes nostalgia for a bygone, bucolic life in the country. The music though starkly collides with the narrative, depicting a brief, but intense episode of jealousy. The carefree

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  37

Figure 1.2  POV shot from the village police officer, who believes his fiancée is involved with the newly hired conductor.

polka, lightly and imaginatively orchestrated with woodwinds, enhances the comic effect of the silly misunderstanding between the two fiancés. Finally, in a few occasions, the music ingeniously blurs the line between the diegetic and non-diegetic realm and enhances visual on-screen and offscreen elements. Music from a radio and tape recorder occasionally tricks both the viewer and the protagonists alike. During a shot of diving ducks outside of Krijns’s seaside café, while Krijns is preparing the tables for the arriving daytime tourists, the viewer hears light, jaunty piano solo music with a female voiceover, providing instructions for gymnastic exercises (00:42:47). It appears as if the music is most likely extra-diegetic. A friend of Krijns’s enters the café’s outside terrace, looks at a loudspeaker, which is presumably the source of the piano music and female gym instructor, and unplugs the cord, whereby the music instantly stops. After all, the music was indeed diegetic. In another scene, Geursen and the local police officer walk through the village with the task to find the stolen instruments by Krijns’s musicians (00:44:53). They believe to hear Krijns secretly rehearsing with his fraction of the band. Indeed, an inserted shot confirms that the band rehearses in a chicken shack. Geursen and the village cop are astutely following the source of the brass sound and arrive at a farmhouse, where the conspicuous sound is presumably coming from. They enter the house and find an older member of Krijns’s band listening to a tape recording of a previous rehearsal. After the old man looks at the two intruders and stoically approves—“Good sound, isn’t it? Came to listen, did you”—Geursen furiously pulls the plug, while the sound winds down

38  Emile Wennekes as if air escapes a balloon. Next, during a shot of a barn we hear the same march again. The viewer is not entirely sure whether she or he hears again a tape recording or a real performance of the fanfare. Only the next shot reveals that we indeed hear the real band rehearsing in the chicken shack.

Dutch Nursery Rhymes as Quotations To emphasize the indigenous atmosphere, Mul incorporated several wellknown Dutch nursery rhymes into his score. These sonic lieux de mémoire humorously underscore the rural scenery and comment the on-screen events in a close-knit dialogue with the tightly synchronized images by means of the filmic editing technique in well-envisioned shot changes. The incidental nursery rhymes in Fanfare are employed for connotative and referential narrative cueing. For example, the already-discussed, final music makes use of remarkably deviant material. Here, we hear the melody of the nursery rhyme Alle Eendjes Zwemmen in het Water (All the little duckies are swimming in the water), arranged with lush use of tremoli. Mul quotes this most likely late ­eighteenth-century nursery rhyme—written by a now anonymous ­composer—as a meaningful, multidimensional allusion. The lyrics do, of course, literally refer to the many ducks that are pictured throughout the film in activities such as swimming, diving, and most often honking and quacking. On a subtler level, the quotation resonates as a sonic lieu de mémoire to the community of Lagerwiede sui generis, to its age-old history and traditions. Shots of the front of the town hall disclose the village’s coat of arms with three ducks swimming in a pond—at least in scanty lines, which are indicative of the escutcheon waves. In addition, when the village people quarrel, Haanstra frequently cuts to loud quacking ducks via metaphorical “music-image rhymes.” Haanstra “glues” shots to the music that metaphorically “rhyme,” or provide a double entendre with a subtext such as humans quarreling equals animal noise. He employed this editing technique with unparalleled virtuosity. When each of the two camps attempts to secure the instruments for its own half-band, the scene climaxes with a hide-and-seek game on punts in the marshes (00:53:10). Hidden behind fringes of reeds, so as not to give themselves away, the different participants of this aquatic charade communicate with each other from out of their punts via onomatopoeic quacking. The scene ends with a misunderstanding. Greusen, who sees the front of a punt appearing behind the reeds, thinks that this is a punt with Krijns’s musicians. He attacks the boat and by doing so he accidentally pushes the village’s mayor into the water, who was quietly fishing in the marshes. Alle Eendjes zwemmen in het Water is not the only folksong that is incorporated into the film. After Krijns’s band members have quickly hidden their instruments in the chicken shack, Geursen and the village cop confront the rival musicians, now without their instruments, but piously singing a song a cappella, as if they were members of the village’s choral society (00:47:15; ­Figure 1.3). The band disguised as choristers diegetically performs the traditional children’s song In een Groen, Groen Knolleland (In a green, green cabbage field).14

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  39

Figure 1.3  K rijns’s band members, disguised as choristers, rehearse In een Groen, Groen Knolleland.

The song’s gist reads as follows: in a green, green cabbage field, there were two jaunty hares. One played the flute, the other beat the drum. Suddenly, a  hunter appears and shoots one of the two hares down. Haanstra relates these lyrics in a precisely edited aural and visual match to the screen events (Stroobant 14). For example, the jaunty hares metaphorically refer to Geursen and the village cop surprised to see the band suddenly performing as a choir. When the song refers to the flute, Krijns’s son gets all the visual attention, accentuated through a close-up shot and brief aural elevation of the boy’s singing voice. In the band, he is the one playing the soprano saxophone, an instrument, which is remotely similar to a flute—at least in terms of the high register. When the next line mentions the drum, we see the band’s percussionist swinging his drum stick. Now enters the hunter. This allusion could be interpreted as a wink to the village cop, who discovers the fanfare’s hidden flag and instruments, and hands the banner over to Geursen acting as the official spokesman at this point in the film, as his fraction of the fanfare has the higher number of musicians.

Coda Haanstra’s Fanfare preserved a Dutch folklore on the verge of its dissolution for generations to come. By topically featuring musical performance and referring to traditional folksongs, the soundtrack acts as a metaphor for a last gasp of friendly, yet zealously competing small town communities. Connotatively underscored images of water, music-image rhymes and ample references to water in dialogue and song lyrics underline the high degree of the

40  Emile Wennekes characteristics, which can be typically considered Dutch. At least, the music supports the image of a now mostly extinct or “musealized” Dutch cultural identity. The village community’s “desire for a good and simple life within one’s own social peer group” (Pafort-Overduin 363) was portrayed in Fanfare with a great sense of empathy. The film music is not subordinate; rather it coordinates the images and becomes a vital component of the narrative. In a tourist magazine, published three years prior to the film’s premiere, a reference was made to the location of the real Lagerwiede—Giethoorn— which is placed in a web of canals, overarched by ancient, little bridges. Yet, as a serious concern about the future of this village, the article openly doubted whether this pastoral scenery “will stay like this for much longer, that is really the question” (Schoots, Van Fanfare tot Spetters 127). The ironic circumstance arose that the immense popularity of Fanfare—in The Netherlands, 700,000 spectators saw the film in the first month after its release, and by 2004 some two and a half million people had seen it (Albers, Baeke and Zeeman 100)— prompted the preservation of the typical, water-dominated village of Giethoorn, as since then its habitants have consequently and consciously succeeded to preserve—as a living facsimile—the village’s look as depicted in the film. In this strategic and tireless effort of conservation, heritage, and remembrance, the film music of Fanfare has not been forgotten. At nearly every new jubilee (40- and 50-year celebration of the film, the centennial of the ­Giethoornse Fanfare, erections of new heritage statues, and so forth), Jan Mul’s Fanfare in E-flat Major was never far afield. Fanfare captured a Holland that no longer exists, but Haanstra’s film and Mul’s music have positioned Giethoorn in the center of an astute awareness of Dutch heritage as a sounding lieu de mémoire of nostalgia ever since. The Dutch love-hate relationship with their surrounding waters continues to form a rich source for scriptwriters. The end of 2016 saw the launch of a new television drama series entitled Als de Dijken Breken (When the dikes break). The series’s fictional plot narrates a contemporary flooding disaster. About the real flooding disaster, that of 1953—the biggest natural disaster in recent Dutch history that claimed close to 2,000 victims in The Netherlands alone—many documentaries and a feature film15 were made, including the footage shot at the time by Haanstra himself. As the camera continues to register all the ecological changes and the eternal beauty of the water, the fact remains that the theme of water has not ceased to be a central topic in Dutch cinema in the ongoing national project of The Netherlands. Music as a catchy carrier of specific Dutch identity has always been a featured device of this cinematic tradition.

Notes 1 All translations from Dutch to English are my own. 2 This subject matter enjoyed such preeminence in Dutch filmmaking that even The Times realized: “No (film) festival can be regarded complete until the Dutch have said something about land reclamation” (25 September 1962; qtd. in Hogenkamp 211).

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  41 3 See about the film: Kees Bakker. “New Earth.” The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, edited by Ian Aitken, second edition, Routledge, 2013, pp. 683–84 and Hans Schoots. Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens. Translated by David Colmer, Amsterdam University Press, 2000, pp. 87–88. See about Eisler’s music in Nieuwe Gronden: Albrecht Betz. Hanns Eisler Political Musician. Translated by Bill Hopkins, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 124–26. 4 See in terms of Eisler’s choice of music: Schweinhardt and Gall 176. The two Suites are based on the music of two films Eisler completed before Nieuwe Gronden. These films are Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (1932, Kuhle Wampe or Who owns the world?; with a screenplay by Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwalt) and Joris Ivens’s Pesn o Gerojach/Komsomol (1932, Song of heroes/Youth speaks). See regarding the music of these two films: Nora M. Alter. “The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe.” Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture, edited by Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, Berghahn, 2004, pp. 79–90; Georg Maas. “Hanns Eislers Musik zu dem Film Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt.” “Es liegt in der Luft was Idiotisches…,” Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung 15/16, edited by Helmut Rösing, Coda, 1995, pp. 139–56; Wolfgang Thiel. “Zwischen ‘Hochofen-Musik’ und Orchesterklängen: Hanns Eislers Arbeit als Komponist und ‘Musikreporter’ für Joris Ivens’s Film Pesn o Gerojach/Heldenlied/Die Jugend hat das Wort/Komsomol von 1932.” Hanns Eisler: Angewandte Musik, Musik-Konzepte: Sonderband, edited by Ulrich Tadday, text + kritik, 2012, pp. 82–99; and Günther Agde. “Ein Komponist macht Geräusche: Eine Spezialarbeit Hanns Eislers für den Dokumentarfilm Komsomol von loris Jvens (1932).” Hanns Eisler: Angewandte Musik, edited by Tadday, pp. 100–13. 5 Representative films are: Dijkbouw (1952, The dike builders), Panta Rhei (1952, Everything streams), Watersnoodramp (1953, Flooding disaster), …en de zee was niet meer (1955, …And the sea was no more), Delta Phase I (1962, Delta plan, first phase), De lage landen (1961, The low countries), Alleman (1963, The human Dutch), Stem van het Water (1966, The voice of the water), Bruggen in Holland (1968, Bridges in Holland) and lastly, Nederland (1983, The Netherlands). 6 Haanstra consistently collaborated with just a few composers, once with ­Robert Heppener (1925–2009) in De Stem van het Water, but most notably with Max Vredenburg. (1904–76), Jan Mul (1911–71), and after 1970 with Otto Ketting (1935–2012) as well as with his own son, Jurre (b. 1952). 7 Fanfare, which lasts around 83 minutes, was shot as a black-and-white, 35-mm film with mono soundtrack. 8 The first actual encounter with the film industry consists of three short orchestral performances shot at the studio of Films Sonores Tobis, in the vicinity of Paris. See Emile Wennnekes. “Mengelberg Conducts Oberon: The Conductor as Actor, Anno 1931.” Music in Art, vol. 34, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. 317–35. 9 Haanstra eventually collaborated in the early 1970s on a Monsieur Hulot film as co-writer with Tati and Jacques Lagrange, namely on Tati’s last completed feature film Trafic (1971, Traffic). 10 The topic of separating oneself from a social community in order to find a new entity is also considered to be typically Dutch. This narrative has resulted in an unparalleled number of Protestant denominations, political parties and lifestyles, the separations being initially caused by slight differences in principle or interpretation (of the Bible, the constitution, etc.). 11 Apart of Fanfare, Mul wrote the music for the two already mentioned water-­ themed films (…en de zee was niet meer and Delta Phase I ). In addition, he scored three of Haanstra’s films, which were commissioned by the Royal Dutch Shell company (The Changing of the Earth, 1953; The Wildcat, 1953; and

42  Emile Wennekes

12 13 14

15

The Oilfield, 1954). Mul also provided the scores for the documentaries Rembrandt, Schilder van de Mens (1957; Rembrandt: painter of man) and Over Glas gesproken (1958; Speaking about glass) as well as for the narrative feature De Zaak M.P. (1962, The Manneken Pis Case). Hendrik Andriessen was the brother of pianist and composer Willem Andriessen and the father of the composers Jurriaan and Louis Andriessen. After the film’s release, the Fanfare in E-flat Major became a popular band piece in an arrangement by Piet van Mever (1889–1985), at the time a pre eminent composer of band music in The Netherlands. The song was first published in 1866 in a volume entitled De Zingende Kinder-­ wereld voor School en Huisgezin (The singing children’s world: for school and family). The lyrics are a freely translated adaptation by Jan Goeverneur of a poem by German poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben. The poem was set to music by the Dutch composer Johannes Worp (1821–91). The Storm (2009; directed by Ben Sombogaart; music by Fons Merkies).

Works Cited Albers, Rommy, Jan Baeke, and Rob Zeeman, editors. Film in Nederland. Ludion/ Filmmuseum, 2004. Dibbets, Karel. Sprekende films: De opkomst van de geluidsfilm in Nederland 1928–1933. Cramwinckel, 1993. HM. “Bert Haanstra—Portret.” Score 144, 12 April 2008, www.score-­magazine. nl/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=528. Accessed 31 January 2018. Hogenkamp, Bert. De Documentaire Film 1945–1965: De bloei van een filmgenre in ­Nederland. Uitgeverij 010, 2003. Mathijs, Ernest, editor. The Cinema of the Low Countries. Wallflower Press, 2004. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2001. No author. “Fanfare (1958).” Filmtotaal, Dutch Film Database, http://nfdb.­ filmtotaal.nl/nederlandse_film.php?id=214. Accessed 31 January 2018. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume i: Conflicts and Divisions. English language edition edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, European Perspectives, ­Columbia University Press, 1996. Paap, Wouter. “Nederlandse componisten van deze tijd: xvi. Jan Mul.” Mens en Melodie: Algemeen Maandblad voor Muziek, vol. 6, no. 5, 1951, pp. 132–36. Pafort-Overduin, Clara. “Hollandse Films met een Hollands Hart: Nationale Identiteit en de Joordaanfilms 1934–1936.” Dissertation, Utrecht University, 2012. Rogers, Holly, editor. Music and Sound in Documentary Film. Routledge, 2015. Schweinhardt, Peter, and Johannes C. Gall. “Composing for Film: Hanns Eisler’s Lifelong Film Music Project.” Translated by Oliver Dahin, The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, edited by David Neumeyer, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 131–87. Schoots, Hans. Bert Haanstra: Filmer van Nederland. Mets & Schilt, 2009. Stroobant, Rico. “Dubbelmars Fanfare in Es: Motivische Ontwikkeling in Bert Haanstra’s Fanfare (1958).” Unpublished term paper for the graduate seminar “Music and the Moving Image,” Utrecht University, 2013. Stufkens, André. Joris Ivens Wereldcineast. Europese Stichting Joris Ivens, 2008.

A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level  43 Waugh, Thomas. “Zuiderzee and Nieuwe Gronden/New Earth: Joris Ivens, The ­Netherlands, 1930–33 and 1933.” The Cinema of the Low Countries, edited by Ernest Mathijs, Wallflower Press, 2004, pp. 25–34. Woud, Auke van der. “Town and Country: Work in Progress.” Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: Accounting for the Past, vol. 5, edited by Douwe Fokkema and Frans Grijzenhout, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 175–96. Films Cited Alleman (The human Dutch). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Otto Ketting and Pim Jacobs Quartet, Bert Haanstra Films, 1963. Als de Dijken Breken (When the dikes break). Directed by Hans Herbots, music by Mike Willaert, Evangelische Omroep (EO), Eén, JOCO Media and Menuet Producties, 2016. Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (Rose from Cikembang). Directed by The Teng Chun, Cino Motion Pictures, 1931. Bruggen in Holland (Bridges in Holland). Directed by Bert Haanstra, Bert Haanstra Films, 1968. De Jantjes (The sailors). Directed by Jaap Speyer, music by Rido, John Brookhouse McCarthy, and Margie Morris, Hollandia and Loet C. Barnstijn Film, 1934. De Laatste Dagen van een Eiland (The last days of the isle of Marken). Directed by Ernst Winar, Filmbureau Niestadt, 1938. De lage landen (The low countries). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Robert Heppener, Bert Haanstra Films, 1961. De Stem van het Water (The voice of the water). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Robert Heppener, Bert Haanstra Films, 1966. De Zaak M.P. (The Manneken Pis Case). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Bert Haanstra Films, 1962. De Zuiderzeewerken (Zuyderzee works). Directed by Willy Mullens, Haghe Films, 1930–31. Delta Phase I (Delta plan, first phase). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, 1962. Dijkbouw (The dike builders). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Max Vredenburg, Forum Filmproducties for Shell, 1952. Dood Water (Dead water). Directed by Gerard Rutten, music by Walter Gronostay, Nederlandsche Filmgemeenschap, 1934. …en de zee was niet meer (…And the sea was no more). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Ministerie van OC en W, 1955. Fanfare. Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Cinematográfica Filmex S.A. and Sapphire Filmproduktiemaatschappij, 1958. DVD: Bert Haanstra Compleet, 10-DVD box set, Just Entertainment, 2007. Glas (Glass). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by pianist Pim Jacobs, George K. Arthur – Go Pictures and Netherlands Government, 1959. ­ erkerk, Holland: Natuur in de Delta (Holland: nature in the delta). Directed by Mark V music by Bob Zimmerman, Ems Films, 2015. Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or Who owns the world?). Directed by Slatan Dudow, screenplay by Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwalt, music by Hanns Eisler, Prometheus-Film-Verleih und Vertriebs-GmbH and Praesens-Film, 1932.

44  Emile Wennekes Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot’s holiday). Directed by Jacques Tati, music by Alain Romans, Discina Film, Cady Films, and Specta Films, 1953. Nederland (The Netherlands). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jurre ­Haanstra, Bert Haanstra Films for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1983. Nieuw Dorp op Nieuw Land (New town on new land). Directed by Louis van ­Gasteren, 1960. Nieuwe Gronden (New earth). Directed by Joris Ivens, music by Hanns Eisler, ­capi-Holland and Tobis Studio, 1933. Op Hoop van Zegen (Fishing Boat “Hope for the Best”). Directed by Alex Benno, music by Daaf Monnickendam and Cor Lemaire, M.H.D. Film, 1934. Over Glas gesproken (Speaking about glass). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Koninklijke Nederlandsche Glasfabriek te Leerdam and Vereenigde Glasfabrieken te Schiedam, 1958. Panta Rhei (Everything streams). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Max ­Vredenburg, Forum Film, 1952. Pareh: het lied van de rijst (Pareh: the song of rice). Directed by Mannus Franken and Albert Balink, music edited by Paul Schram, Java Pacific Film, 1936. Pesn o Gerojach/Komsomol (Song of heroes, Youth speaks). Directed by Joris Ivens, music by Hanns Eisler, Mesjrabpom film, 1932. Rembrandt, Schilder van de Mens (Rembrandt: Painter of Man). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Bert Haanstra Films and Ministerie van OC en W, 1957. Spiegel van Holland (Mirror of Holland). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Max Vredenburg, Forum Film and Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst (RVD), 1950. Stem van het Water (1966, The water’s voice). Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Robert Heppener, Bert Haanstra Films, 1966. Terang Boelan (Moonlight, English release title: Full Moon). Directed by Albert Balink, music by Ismail Marzuki, Algemeen Nederlandsch Indisch Filmsyndicaat (ANIF), 1937. Terra Nova (New ground). Directed by Gerard Rutten, music by Hans BrandtsBuys, 1932. The Changing of the Earth. Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Film Centre London and Shell, 1953. The Oilfield. Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Film Centre London and Shell, 1954. The Wildcat. Directed by Bert Haanstra, music by Jan Mul, Film Centre London and Shell, 1953. Trafic. Directed by Jacques Tati, music by Charles Dumont, Les Films Corona, Les Films Gibé and Selenia Cinematografica, 1971. Van Zuiderzee tot IJsselmeer en Waddenzee (From Zuiderzee to IJsselmeer and ­Waddenzee). Directed by Willy Mullens, 1932. Watersnoodramp (Flooding disaster). Directed by Bert Haanstra, 1953. Willem van Oranje (William of Orange). Directed by G. Jan Teunissen, music by Bernard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer, Comite van Initiatief voor de vervaar-­ diging van de Willem van Oranje film, 1934. Zuiderzee-Film. Directed by D. J. van der Ven, 1928. Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee works). Directed by Joris Ivens, capi-Holland and Cinéphonic, 1930.

2 Which People’s Music? Witnessing the Popular in the Musicscape of Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (1949, Bitter Rice) Maurizio Corbella The Italian elections of 18 April 1948 saw the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party achieve a striking victory over the Fronte Democratico Popolare, a temporary alliance of the Communist party PCI and the Socialist party PSI, the two major left-wing forces in the country. This outcome, plotted by the interference of the United States intelligence services during the campaign (­Ginsborg 115), enabled the DC for the first time to form a government without any external support from the Left. This new government put an end to the spirit of the National Liberation Committee that had united socialists, communists, liberals, and Catholics against Nazi-Fascism during the Resistance and had subsequently led to the Constituent Assembly (1946–48). The election exacerbated latent tensions that culminated in the attempted murder of the PCI head Palmiro Togliatti on 14 July 1948. A wave of riots followed, and Italy found itself on the brink of an armed revolution (Ginsborg 126–28). The genesis of Giuseppe De Santis’s second feature-length film Riso amaro (1949, Bitter rice) was directly affected by this political turmoil. The screenwriting process unfolded during the election campaign, reflecting the team’s enthusiastic anticipation that the country might finally embark on a new socialist course. The shooting, on the other hand, took place during the turbulent summer of 1948, but the film was not released until 1949, after the production company Lux Film had attempted to freeze the project fearing that the film would be too “red” for the new, very altered political situation (Lizzani 89, Castelli et al. 102). The film’s mixed reception after the release mirrors its difficult genesis. While it provoked criticism across the political spectrum, especially among left-wing reviewers,1 the film was met with massive box-office success in ­Italy and abroad, exceeding “in three months … the three years’ earnings of Open City” (Lane 245) and receiving an Academy Award nomination for “Best Writing—Motion Picture Story” in 1950. Such was its success that Riso amaro has been said to be the only neorealist film to have had an actual impact on the general movie-going public in Italy.2 The film tapped into crucial changes, which took place in Italian popular culture at the time, by boldly intertwining sensitive socio-political themes such as the impact of capitalism with renewed interest in individualism, sensuality,

46  Maurizio Corbella youth culture, and stardom. Key to these changes was the central role given to the transformation in the status of women, who had gained voting rights only as recently as 1946. The choice to set the story among a community of female seasonal rice weeders (mondine) arguably made Riso amaro “the first Italian film in which the woman is presented as a collective subject of social conflicts and events” (Lizzani 92).3 Conversely, the film also marked “a new Italian take on American sex appeal” (Gundle, “Beauty, National Identity” 369), thanks to the launch of an international diva in the figure of 18-year-old Silvana Mangano (1930–89). Peter Bondanella noted that a critical paradox lies in the very premises of this film. While the film condemns “the corruptive influences of American popular culture upon working-class values,” its style is highly affected by “the impact of American cinema and its typical genres” (Bondanella 82). Carlo Lizzani, one of the screenwriters and among the most thoughtful contributors to the critical debate surrounding the film, insisted on a reading that—while acknowledging some of Riso amaro’s aesthetic flaws—extolled the film’s commitment to problematize neorealism’s pivotal theoretical notions of “document,” “fiction,” and “the popular” (50–51). Likewise, for Paola Valentini, Riso amaro transcended the rules of (neo)realistic documentation. As a popular entertainment in its own right, the film “became a catalyzer of the popular spectacle of the time: photo-romance and records, radio, and cinema” (­Valentini 100). The simultaneous positioning of this film both at the core of and at odds with popular culture is the starting point of my analysis of its soundtrack. Previous studies generally acknowledged the soundtrack’s heterogeneousness in that it juxtaposes two distinct types of diegetic popular music (for the moment it suffices to label them “folk” and “pop”) with a symphonic score composed by Goffredo Petrassi. Petrassi was one of the prominent figures of musical modernism in Italy at the time, and Riso amaro was his first experience of scoring a feature-length film. This is among the reasons why Italian scholarship has so far focused mainly on assessing his “poly-stylistic” (Cano 102), “cautiously innovative” (Bassetti 325) contribution as a composer. According to Sergio Miceli, “the position of [scored] music [in this film] was undoubtedly very problematic since it had to find a place between folkloric prosaicness and epical tones, that is, between realism and transfiguration” (245–46). I argue that focusing solely on the composer’s contribution (either to praise or critique the music) limits our comprehension of the film’s musical agency both from a production and a reception standpoint. First, I shall illustrate that the responsibility for the film’s soundtrack went beyond the composer. Second, I shall consider that, when watching and hearing the film, the audience was and still is more likely to experience its music as an integrated, if composite, whole. The term “musicscape” in my title attempts to capture this specific angle when approaching the film soundtrack. I label “musicscape” the portion of a soundtrack in a film occupied by music. A musicscape negotiates the dramatic interplay of musical styles, genres, and expressive registers

Which People’s Music?  47 against the backdrop of a film’s narrative. Aspects of a musicscape can be related to the filmmakers’ (screenwriters, director, editors, composer, etc.) original intentions, part of which can be tracked down in the film’s production files (screenplays, storyboards, scrapbooks, music drafts and sketches, etc.). The study of such archival traces of a musicscape enables scholars to address hermeneutically the uses of music in film and helps them to elaborate on the discrepancies that may surface between a composer’s and a director’s dramaturgic conception. At the same time, a film is also a cultural-historical object that can be studied as a repository of musical stances, which partly eschew the creators’ original intentions. In correlation to Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between “voluntary testimonies, meant for posterity, and those witnesses in spite of themselves, the target of indiscretion and the historian’s appetite” (170), a film can become a witness to the music of its time. A film may intentionally or unintentionally reveal fields of tension between the cultural values, hierarchies, and divides (“high” vs. “low,” “art” vs. “entertainment,” and so forth), which are attached to the music in a given geo-historical context. In short, not only do films communicate through music but they also tell us something about the music they feature. Due to its inherent witnessing quality, I will approach Riso amaro as a musicological subject. Though I shall first analyze each musical component of Riso amaro separately, my interest lies in their interactions, clashes, and ambivalent coexistence. I will especially show how Riso amaro’s musicscape allows for divergent conceptions of the popular to coexist and collide without one prevailing over the others. Richard Dyer was among the first scholars to concern himself with Riso amaro’s soundtrack as a contradictory non-hierarchic whole. In his illuminating analysis he argued that, while the opposition between folk and pop “constitutes a dialectic of true and false consciousness” (Dyer 33), Petrassi’s “cerebrally exciting, but not emotionally engaging” score compels us to ponder “the political significance of the story rather than inviting identification with the characters” (35). In agreeing with Dyer, I take his argument further, investigating the musical qualities of Riso amaro in a way, which—reaching beyond the film itself—challenges our understanding of music history in postwar Italy. Historians have treated neorealism as a visual archive of a uniquely traumatic moment in Italian and European history. My focus on the cinematic musicscape aims to extend a similar historiographical reasoning to the role of musical testimony, which remains largely under-investigated. My questions are as follows: in what sense does neorealism function as an archive of musical practices (and their related ideologies and discourses)? Second, how does film music nuance our comprehension of the national, cultural, and political history tackled in neorealist films? This chapter provides a first round of answers to these questions by contending that Riso amaro’s musicscape bears witness to the state of popular music in post-Second World War Italy, and that its inner inconsistencies serve to provide an insight into the complex historical notion of popular culture and music in Italy at the time.

48  Maurizio Corbella

Musical Stratification: Folk, Jazz, and Symphonic Modernism I constantly combine high and low culture, folk songs and Petrassi’s music, a miscarriage in the rice fields and the boogie-woogie. Hybridization of genres is, in my opinion, the key to my cinema. (De Santis, qtd. in Castelli et al. 101) Riso amaro’s “melodramatic” (Bondanella 83) storyline revolves around the interactions of four characters against the backdrop of a collective narrative. A small-time thief named Walter (Vittorio Gassmann) hides with his partner Francesca (Doris Dowley) at Turin’s railway station among a crowd of mondine, who are heading to the rice fields in the Po Valley area near Vercelli, Piedmont. The couple runs into Silvana (Silvana Mangano), a “boogie-­ woogie-loving, gum-chewing mondina” (Iannone). In their attempt to escape the police officers who are chasing them, Walter and Francesca split up. The woman boards the train with Silvana, who introduces her to the weeders’ way of life. Francesca does not have a work permit and struggles with other illegals to find a place in the fields. Silvana is suspicious of Francesca and intrigued by the flashy necklace the woman hides. The two women meet a soldier awaiting discharge, Marco (Raf Vallone), who courts Silvana, while Francesca is attracted to him. Meanwhile, Walter arrives at the fields. Francesca’s necklace has turned out to be fake, so Walter decides to recoup by planning to steal the rice harvest and sell it on the black market. Excited by the criminal lifestyle of the man, Silvana becomes attracted to Walter, who flatters her by presenting her with the fake necklace, which she believes to be real. Silvana helps Walter steal the rice during the celebrations of the workers’ final day of the harvest (ironically, she has just been awarded the beauty title of Miss Mondina), but Francesca and Marco manage to intervene and stop the couple. Francesca and Silvana face each other—guns in their hands—when Silvana realizes that she has been manipulated by Walter. She turns the weapon on him and fatally shoots him. Overcome by guilt, she commits suicide. Riso amaro presents us with three discrete musical components: two of these are used as source music—namely a selection of the work songs of the mondine and various big band jazz numbers, which Silvana dances to or listens to on a portable gramophone—while the third consists of Petrassi’s score. The most obvious element of discrepancy between these three elements concerns their authorship. Petrassi was only responsible for his own score. The traditional songs of the mondine were recorded on location and post-synchronized in the studio. The swing numbers, on the other hand, were reportedly composed by the uncredited Armando Trovajoli (Cano 101), who at that time was a jazz pianist and arranger with no experience in film scoring, but who was later to become one of the most productive and internationally renowned Italian film composers.4

Which People’s Music?  49 It is useful to observe the distribution of each of the three components over the film’s timeline. 5 The film is divided into two halves pivoting around the climactic ball scene, in which the individual stories of the four main characters intertwine and change the course of the main plot.6 The distribution of the musical cues reflects this partition (Table 2.1). The jazz cues are prevalent in the first half (ca. 13 minutes total) and are concentrated in three sequences: Mangano and Gassman’s first dance scene at the train station (00:05:29–00:07:24); an iconic listening session in which Silvana and Francesca lie half-naked in their chemises on the bed in the dormitory (00:32:23–00:33:58); and the main ball scene (00:45:13–00:49:42). In the second half, jazz appears to have exhausted its dramaturgical function, and returns only once, overlapping with folk music (01:01:50–01:03:10). The folk songs, on the other hand, are more evenly distributed throughout the first half (total around 10 and a half minutes), and include choral scenes, in which the voices of the mondine are heard as part of the soundscape in crowd shots, and one scene, in which a call-and-response song is integrated into the narrative by involving the two main female characters as solo singers (00:23:56–00:25:44).7 Although folk songs are generally less prominent in the second half, another narratively crucial call-and-response song creates a symmetrical counterpoint to the first (01:11:32–01:13:10). Thanks to this song, the overall balance within the structure of the movie is emphasized. As for the symphonic score, an evident asymmetry emerges in its distribution, in that less than 9 minutes are heard in the first half, while over 25 minutes are concentrated in the second half. Aside from the opening credits, the first symphonic cue is not heard until half an hour into the film (00:29:05–00:32:23). Moreover, the archival musical sources I consulted demonstrate that three orchestral cues composed by Petrassi for the first half were not used in the film.8 The two source music components are tied to clearly identifiable elements of the story—folk songs representing the field workers’ mode of expression, and jazz standing for Silvana’s yearning for rebellion—while the score acts as an external commentary and provides a melodramatic element. Going beyond a simplistic identification between music and classes of characters or narrative functions, I would suggest that divergent readings are made possible as a result of the reciprocal interaction, distribution, and dramatic weight of each musical element. Each aspect of the musicscape exerts a sort of “power of attraction” for the viewers, challenging them to actively question whether to identify themselves with or distance themselves from the characters and their stories. Several scholars have discussed Riso amaro in terms of the film encouraging simultaneous readings.9 Moreover, this argument has been corroborated by numerous testaments by the director and his collaborators. As Valentini sums up, “those who have interpreted [De Santis’s] work have long learned to be familiar with … a cinema which, besides embracing the modes of popular

“N. 8” & “N. 9”

1:00:00

0:10:00

Other

Jazz cues (Trovajoli)

Folk songs

Symphonic score (Petrassi)

Key

“N. 7”

1st dance

0:05:00

2nd half 0:55:00

“Titoli”

1st half

“N. 10”

1:05:00

0:15:00 0:25:00

0:30:00

0:35:00

1:15:00

1:20:00

miscarriage “N. 15” “N. 11” & “N. 13” & “N. 14” “N. 12” rape

1:10:00

“N. 1” [discarded] 1:30:00

ball scene

0:45:00

1:35:00

“N. 5”

“N. 3” & “N.4” [discarded]

0:40:00

1:40:00

“N. 6”

0:50:00

country “N. 17” “N. 18” “N. 19” “N. 20” “N. 21” “N. 23” band suicide

1:25:00

“N. 2/2bis” listening to “Alla mattina “Mamma mia gramophone alle ore cinque” dammi cento lire” sung duel

0:20:00

Table 2.1  Distribution of the musical cues in Riso amaro’s timeline

Which People’s Music?  51 storytelling, … posits itself as the subject of representation” (100). According to Stefano Masi, the reason for De Santis’s conscious superimposition of interpretive layers, “each concealing the one underneath” (41), can be tracked down to his Marxist notion of film as a political agent in society, entailing a “very cautious textual logic, a plan to fulfill a diversity of needs and uses” (41). At once enthralled by the poetic realism of French filmmakers like Jean Renoir, by the communicative impact of classic Hollywood cinema, and by the militancy of 1930s Soviet cinema, De Santis intentionally sought to appeal to three “codes of the imaginary” (48), which I name the (1) folk, (2) the mass-popular, and (3) the critical.10 The first reading layer (folk) uses archetypal patterns such as the hero/ villain scheme, whereas the second reading layer (mass-popular) “wholly fulfills itself on the level of the spectacular physicality of images and the violence of sound” (Masi 48). If the first layer concerns atavistic passions, the second points toward modern forms of entertainment, based on action and special effects. There is an implicit hierarchy of values in this distinction between the folk and the mass-popular, which again stems from De Santis’s Marxist, ­quasi-Adornian background. De Santis conceives of folk culture as authentic and mass culture as surrogate and substantially deceiving. He is aware, though, that he himself—working as a filmmaker in the entertainment ­industry—is part of the same bourgeois mass-media system he criticizes. This is why a third overarching reading layer is necessary, with the aim of criticizing the other two underlying strata and speaking to an audience, “who has enough sensibility to be touched by the philosophical problem of what reality is” (Masi 49). In a loosely Brechtian sense, the neorealist filmmaker is committed to disclosing the problematic status of the film as a mass-cultural artifact. At first sight, the three musical components I outline in Table 2.1 appear to echo the reading layers theorized by Masi: (1) folk music identifies the “authentic” traditional image of the rice weeders; (2) jazz is an expression of the “surrogate” mass-produced entertainment industry for which Silvana falls; and (3) Petrassi’s score corresponds to an external attitude that characterizes the film as an intellectual manipulation of reality. Two considerations, however, problematize the parallels between the music and the reading layers, or better put, unveil a further interpretive dimension in the film. First, the reciprocal distribution of each musical element in different sections of the film affects the overall audiovisual understanding of the other two. For example, the spectacular element that begins with the first dance scene and culminates in the ball at the end of the first half also impacts the treatment of the folk songs in-between in a way for which I introduce the term “spectacularization of the folk.” Similarly, the prominence of the score in the second half of the film “filters” our understanding of the other musical layers. Although it is plausible that Petrassi’s intention was to critically tackle the narrative “in relation to the social values carried by folk and jazz” (Dyer 35), I suggest that his music adds a moralistic, patronizing view of the popular to the Marxist undertone of the story.

52  Maurizio Corbella

“... che in America voglio andar”: The Spectacularization of Folk Songs In one of the several recollections, De Santis gave of the anecdote that sparked the original idea for Riso amaro, he spoke in terms of an aural epiphany: One night in 1946, I was at the Central Station in Milan, waiting for my train to Rome. I was wandering around to kill time, when suddenly in the darkness (it was a dark station at the time, Italy was devastated and without electricity) I began to hear someone singing, mumbling, and chatting. I got closer and discovered two trains of mondine, who were hanging around, eating, joking, and laughing while waiting to leave. I was so fascinated (besides, it’s always pleasant to be the only man amid so many women) that I stayed all night with them until they left. I missed my train to Rome, but in compensation Riso amaro was born. (De Santis and Cimmino) The suggestion of an acoustic space filled with singing female voices was recognized by ethnomusicologists in the following decades as among the most distinguishing traits of the mondine’s singing practice (Castelli et al. 129–30). What our ears would probably fail to appreciate today, however, is the erotic undertone that such a soundscape would have evoked at the time, as implied in the filmmaker’s own reminiscences. After all, the idea of sensuality underwent a profound transformation in Italy in those years. Among the key factors that played a role in this change was the “invasion” of American popular music, which deeply affected the erotic connotations that folk music had exerted until that time, an aspect that is documented in Riso amaro, almost as if it was happening in real time. The visual iconography of the mondine had enjoyed a rich history of gender construction prior to the film’s release. It was the fascist regime that promoted an exuberant sexualized narrative of the female rice weeders suitable for manly canons while heavily restricting the women’s rights of expression and self-organization of their working environment (Imbergamo 90–108). Yet, a decisive gap existed between the verbal and the visual descriptors used during the regime years. While written reports about the life in the rice fields often indulged in sexist erotic fantasies, the iconography of magazines, newsreels and documentaries carefully stuck to a chaste, idealized image of the working woman (Imbergamo 96). Post-war discourse on the mondine remained indebted to this fascist rhetoric, albeit adjusted to a “leftist stereotype” (Imbergamo 153), until Riso amaro came out with its groundbreaking visual appeal. In Barbara Imbergamo’s words, the film represented a watershed in the iconographic construction of the rice weeders, not only for the impact it exerted on the national imagination—from then on rice workers were envisaged and represented with the looks of Silvana ­Mangano—but also for the way it was processed and re-elaborated by the Left. (154)

Which People’s Music?  53 The polarization of the folk singing as the expression of a political conscience and the boogie-woogie dancing as a deviant form of sexualized behavior works as an effective aural articulation of the film’s innovative take on the mondine’s image. The choral singing is mainly used in the film as the ground over which to instill the political relevance of the mondine’s class struggle. During the story, the audience is informed that singing is the weeders’ coded way to communicate, despite not being allowed to speak to each other while working. Through singing, the women manage to organize themselves and, when necessary, challenge their male bosses. Though the screenwriters were committed to realistically document the mondine’s work environment and singing practice—which is why they chose to cast real rice workers instead of professional actresses for the non-protagonist roles—they were equally interested in conforming the political significance of their struggle to the leftist doctrines that emerged from the complex political discourse of the time. Corrado Alvaro, a famous novelist involved in the literary movement of neorealism, was the one member of the screenwriting team tasked with (re)writing the lyrics of the folk songs, possibly with the goal of toning down the transgressive elements of the mondine’s singing practices (expurgating sexual innuendos in the lyrics and the like) and aligning them with the political guidelines of the communist and socialist (male) hierarchies. Such manipulation of the mondine’s musical repertory did not escape the criticism of the young ethnomusicologist Roberto Leydi. Writing as a film critic at the time, Leydi trenchantly noted that “the choice to adapt extremely fake and unlikely occasional words to these ‘arias’ was disappointing (especially if we consider that the authentic rice workers’ songs are by no means less polemically passionate and socially aggressive)” (60).11 The folk songs have a similar dramatic function to that of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, for the choral scenes punctuate and surround the individual stories of the four main characters. While the mythological aura of folk songs undoubtedly resonated with De Santis, the director was equally interested in the individual dimension of singing, thus using songs to unveil the political-­ existential tension between the subject and society. Not by chance did De Santis define Riso amaro a “‘drama for four voices,’ as a musician would call it,” inserted within a “choral drama” (qtd. in Pellegrini and Verdone 30). For Silvana and Francesca, singing plays a decisive role in their paths to self-­ determination and in making their way through the collective body of the fieldworkers. The dramatic tension between the chorus and the individuals finds its musical portrayal in the two call-and-response sequences, which— placed, respectively, in the first and second half of the film—symmetrically define the position of the two “soloists” in relation to the collectivity. In the first sequence (00:23:56–00:25:44), Silvana uses singing to expose Francesca to the scorn of the other workers. Suspecting that her rival is an intruder, Silvana foments the regular workers’ hostility against the illegals, among whom Francesca takes cover. Silvana chooses a very well-known emigrant tune, to which she “improvises” new verses accusing the illegals of

54  Maurizio Corbella stealing the regulars’ work on the fields. Her choice of the tune is not casual, as it identifies Silvana’s secret longing that will lead to her demise. Every Italian audience member could in fact recall the original lyrics of the song: “Mamma mia dammi cento lire / che in America voglio andar” (Mum, give me a hundred liras / ’cause I want to go to America). Silvana betrays the bond with her community by misusing the precious organizational tool of singing for her own personal gain. Francesca, on the other hand, by surprisingly keeping up with her rival during the song contest and by reinventing herself as a defender of the illegals’ working rights, demonstrates that she has the potential to integrate into that social group. In short, through singing, Francesca makes a step toward her definitive inclusion while Silvana marks her first step away from it. Visually, this scene enhances the statuary, monumental presence of the singing/working bodies in the static singing shots while it emphasizes the proverbial pugnacity of the mondine in the scuffle shots. In general, we are presented with a rigorously choreographed fresco, charged with ideological utopia and a good dose of voyeuristic indulgence (Figure 2.1). The impression that a masculine gaze informs the whole scene is corroborated by the fact that a man will eventually resolve the fight. Marco reconciles the two rivals by combining elements of both communist and catholic ideology in his speech, which is significantly underpinned by the first entrance of Petrassi’s underscoring since the opening credits. The visual spectacularization of the folk song allows the mondine’s bodies to be erotically objectified, whereas the control exerted by the screenwriters over the song lyrics deprives the women from verbally expressing their sexuality. Just as this sequence undermines Silvana’s role as a respected leader of the collectivity and Francesca’s designation as an outcast, the symmetric sequence occurring in the second half definitively ratifies Francesca’s integration into the community and Silvana’s self-marginalization from the group she once belonged to (01:11:32–01:13:10). Regardless of the pouring rain, the mondine have decided to go to work, so as not to waste another day of the harvest—as a payment for the working season they receive a share of rice determined from the total volume of their production. Silvana is not with them because she has meanwhile sneaked out from the dormitory to meet with Walter, who is hiding in the granary. At this point, she has started flirting with him but

Figure 2.1  S  election of stills from Riso amaro’s sung duel and scuffle sequence.

Which People’s Music?  55 resists his bolder advances. The couple reaches an isolated embankment outside in the fields, where Walter assaults Silvana, beating her with a stick. The shot showing Walter from behind menacingly stooping over the defenseless Silvana, who lies crying on the ground, suggests—without actually showing it—that a rape is about to take place.12 The assault scene is underscored by Petrassi’s orchestral cue, which makes full use of such tension devices as tremolos and dissonances. The scene cuts to the fields, where the mondine are singing one of their characteristic tunes, “È da un mese che faccio la monda” (It’s been a month since I’ve been weeding), while working in the inclement weather. Gabriella, one of the workers, whom we know to be pregnant, suddenly starts to scream in great pain: she has miscarried. Her fellows send out the alarm by abruptly introducing a new tune, which lyrics are “improvised” over the melody of the traditional alpine song “Il testamento del capitano” (The captain’s will) and contain the information and the instructions for the crowd to take Gabriella to a safe shelter. The singing gradually increases in intensity, combined with the sound of the heavy rain, suggesting—in a decidedly Marxist tone—that the whole community is uniting in a powerful effort to rescue the one member who is in need. This crescendo is sharply contrasted with Silvana’s rejoining the workers after being raped. Close-ups of Silvana advancing in the opposite direction to the crowd alternate with group shots of singing workers, visually rendered by way of a ritual, almost sacral iconology. Work, earth, and water, connoted by ideas of sacrifice, redemption, and sanctity, are all combined in these quasi-allegoric shots (Figure 2.2). The words of the song referring to Gabriella—“La Gabriella ci manda a dire / che l’è tutta insanguinata” (Gabriella sent us to tell you / that she’s all covered in blood)—strikingly relate to Silvana’s own circumstances of having been raped. Those same words overwhelm her, to the point that she screams: “Basta! Basta!” (Enough! Enough!). This sudden scream heightens the contrast between Silvana’s private misery (rape) and the public pain of Gabriella (miscarriage). The miscarriage is framed as part of a social battle, linking motherhood to the fight for improving women’s working conditions. The rape, on the other hand, is treated as the shameful consequence of a woman’s misbehavior, and for this reason, it does not carry political relevance. Silvana pays for her individualism, which has pushed her into refusing her working-class background and is instead aspiring toward a bourgeois status. The violation of her body marks the physical concretization of her self-alienation from the social group she has refused to be part of. The hallucinated look on Silvana’s

Figure 2.2  Selection of stills from Riso amaro’s miscarriage sequence.

56  Maurizio Corbella face, which will return in the scene preceding her suicide, takes on the shape of a bourgeois neurosis, all projected inward, which became a trope in the depiction of several female characters in Italian cinema in the following decades. The unspeakable nature of Silvana’s pain testifies to the general condition of women in Italy at the time, expiating—in this film as well as in countless others—the “original sin” of owning a body.

The Dancing Body and the Significance of the Accidental: Silvana’s “Boogie-Woogie” Riso amaro is but one in a long list of Italian films testifying to the impact of the new fashion for American dance styles brought by the Allies during the war. The singularity of Riso amaro therefore does not consist so much in featuring a type of music that was already spreading in Italian society, but rather in its memorable synthesis between showcasing recent American teenage trends and projecting a type of sensuality that scandalized the American way of life in return (Gundle, Bellissima 143–47). Silvana dances in the style of the “boogie-woogie,” as she herself terms it in the film.13 Among the most iconic scenes of Riso amaro is a moment in the ball sequence when the dancing Silvana Mangano, looking almost directly at the viewer, raises her hands to touch her flashy necklace and then gathers her hair on the back of her head (Figure 2.3). The position of the actress’s body exalts the abundance of her breasts, and the mix between naiveté and provocation in her expression suggests that the effect is calculated. The fact that Silvana’s body is turned into an object of erotic desire calls into question the ethical validity of the spectator’s audiovisual gaze, resonating with Laura Mulvey’s theorization of “the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure” (352). In Mulvey’s psychoanalytic terminology, Silvana becomes a “guilty object” (348), thus triggering the male’s punitive attitude, which is symbolized in the rape and suicide sequences. The boogie-woogie works as the aural counterpart to this objectifying, visual

Figure 2.3  Silvana Mangano in Riso amaro’s ball sequence.

Which People’s Music?  57 14

15

process. “She dances for herself,” the screenplay suggests, that is, she uses her dancing body to attempt to emancipate herself, yet she is unable to intellectually articulate her pain once she is overpowered. Silvana’s infatuation with the “boogie-woogie” is negatively connoted, not simply because the woman is attracted to this musical style—a fact that might be traced back to a genuine resonance between the African American rural roots of the music and her own peasant background16 —but because she accesses jazz via the degrading mass-popular mediation of capitalism. The gramophone can perhaps be intended as a symbol for capitalism. In De Santis’s previous film Caccia tragica (1947, Tragic hunt)—set during the Italian Resistance—boogie-woogie was also present, but was notably played by an accordionist, while people danced. In the preliminary treatment of Riso ­amaro, too, Silvana’s dances were supposed to be accompanied by live musicians (an accordionist in the first dance scene and an ensemble in the ball scene).17 Only at the screenwriting stage was the gramophone introduced, arguably to specify the nature of Silvana’s “technological deviance.” As much as jazz is negatively connoted in the film, Silvana’s dance resists univocal belittling readings. It does so by challenging our historically situated gaze. In other words, because of the temporal gap separating us from the film, we cannot help questioning the guilt and punishment mechanism triggered by the narrative. The carefree and positive exuberance of the character’s age and social status problematically confronts the chauvinist mindset legitimized by the film. Stefania Parigi accordingly notes that “rather than ‘denouncing the corruptness’ of American mass media, as the director would have wished, the exuberant and curvy mondina of Riso amaro expresses the seductive energy of a new society of entertainment, which has not yet completely removed and eradicated its rural roots” (167). One should not forget that the real Silvana Mangano, who—before Riso amaro—had taken part in the national beauty contest Miss Italia and made just a few film appearances, achieved her breakthrough in show business precisely thanks to her dancing in this film. In the dance sequences of Riso amaro Mangano’s acting persona coincides with the role that De Santis tailored for her. When she proudly affirms that, in the countryside where she is from, people dance all day and learn any new style that comes from outside, she may be speaking both as her character and as her real self—a girl who had lived in poverty during the war and pursued dancing as a means of social redemption. Consistently with Silvana’s statement, all the characters who engage in the dance are portrayed as joyful in the film; in other words, their positive attitude toward jazz does not appear to cohere with the negative connotation with which jazz is invested in the film’s dramaturgy. As a result, by almost directly addressing the camera—­and thus the s­ pectators—Silvana’s dancing threatens the political and moral content of the story, emphasizing the seductive, inclusive bodily pulses of popular music. The two dance scenes in Riso amaro reflect those musical moments that Amy Herzog describes as “being marked by excess, rupture, fluidity, and the

58  Maurizio Corbella dissolution of the space-time continuum that orders the reality of everyday experience” (7). These two musical moments condense three performative agencies into one event: (1) the performance of the dancers on screen and the response of the onlookers clapping to the rhythm; (2) the performance of the session musicians post-synchronizing their playing to the diegetic dance; and (3) the performance of the camera guiding and/or reacting to the actors’ movements. The “artistic intentionality” of these musical moments is therefore open to be “continually destabilized by the significance of the accidental” (Herzog 4). An example of “the accidental” is the discrepancy that emerges between the music track and the audience clapping. Although possibly due to technical issues (I was not able to ascertain whether the diegetic music we hear was indeed used on set or composed after the shooting), the rhythm of the music aligns much better with the dancers’ movements than with the onlookers clapping. As a result, some of the crowd surrounding the dancers and even Marco’s character convey a certain clumsiness when faced with this foreign, modern urban groove. Their clapping is mostly off-beat, displaying a bodily uneasiness with syncopation. In contrast, Silvana and Walter harmoniously empathize with the music. Their corporeal participation with the rhythm bonds with the audience’s emotional involvement in the scene, thus indirectly undermining the overall ideological framework of the film. Not by chance did Silvana’s dance numbers survive independently from the film as cultural artifacts in their own right. Despite the highly predetermined choreography, in which these dances are embedded, Silvana’s dancing body transcends its fictional status by affirming the almost spontaneous feelings of an 18-year-old woman, who would not have been allowed to express herself in such a way in the context of late 1940s everyday life.

Between Moralism and Social Critique: Locating Petrassi’s Score De Santis and the production company deliberately chose an art music composer to score Riso amaro. Since its foundation in 1934, and particularly between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Lux Film and its artistic director, music critic Guido M. Gatti, sought to bring together “serious” composers and the cinema. In addition, De Santis expressed that his choice of Petrassi was intended to counterbalance the risk of the film turning into a popular feuilleton.18 Though this premise is in line with attributing to the score the role of critical commentary on the narrative, I shall explore how Petrassi’s music generates a set of simultaneous functions in its combination with the moving image. I am specifically interested in highlighting the correlation between the anticipated “Brechtian” meta-critical ingredient and what I define as a ­moralist, patronizing point of view. In response to a survey entitled “La musica italiana verso il popolo” (­Italian music toward the people) promoted by the weekly magazine Film in 1939,

Which People’s Music?  59 Petrassi explained that the masses—a notion he rejected—are made of “hundreds of thousands of individuals” who need to be guided with the most enlightened judgment, by someone who should pick for them, with the highest care, culture, and humanity, the music they should listen to; someone who should seek for all the available means to help them comprehend that the horizon does not end with the line they see but that there are vaster and deeper dimensions to be discovered. (Petrassi, “La musica italiana” 15) Given that such a statement was delivered to a film magazine, it is plausible that the composer included cinema among the “available means” to spread musical literacy. Convinced like many other academic composers of his generation that film music is “not the expression of an autonomous art, but simply an applied art” (qtd. in Magaldi 205), he also thought that the role of the composer could elevate the artistry of film: The Italian film milieu has generally got the wrong idea about so-called “serious” musicians. It is thought that they are not easy to fit into this type of work, they are imagined almost as being haughty, shut up in their pretended Olympus. In fact, if they were offered more frequent chances to collaborate, they would not miss the chance to contribute to the greater dignity of the soundtracks and therefore to heighten the general level of Italian cinema. (qtd. in Magaldi 205) His decision to collaborate with De Santis was thus arguably motivated by a political and educational endeavor, which he felt “passionately” about in the post-war years—a period he later remembered as one of “great ferment and enthusiasm” for the renaissance of the country’s cultural life (qtd. in Pozzi, “La mia musica. Intervista a Goffredo Petrassi” 358). Even though Petrassi declared many years later that he did not follow any particular method in scoring Riso amaro,19 I believe that his approach to film scoring sought to mark a distance from the musical style used by other composers in earlier neorealist films, which was “by and large indistinguishable” (Dyer 29) from pre-war fascist cinema. After all, Petrassi did not miss the chance to lament the “disparity of intelligence existing in the Italian cinema between our best directors, who are people of the highest artistic and aesthetic qualities” and their musical collaborators, who are nothing more than “hirelings of the lowest order, messing around with bafflingly cheap music scores” (Petrassi, “Nessuno mi ha più chiesto” 31). Because of the political importance that he bestowed on Riso amaro, which “confronted me with issues and commitments” (qtd. in Pellegrini and Verdone 31), De Santis’s film arguably represented the chance for Petrassi to put his own musical stamp on the popular medium. Although his score is stylistically distant from his own contemporary

60  Maurizio Corbella concert compositions, other elements set it apart from mainstream contemporary Italian film music, such as his frugal use of highly charged thematic material and the overall chromaticism of his writing, which occasionally ventures into 12-tone technique. These stylistic features become evident with the music written for the opening credits. The first, faded-in shot shows a segment of a rice field. The camera is tilted downward to frame a portion of the ground with water running from the lower left corner of the frame toward the center. Over this image, the title RISO AMARO is superimposed in capital letters. The lack of ambient sound emphasizes Petrassi’s score even more. The visual fade-in is paralleled by a two-note chord (E-A) played by the woodwinds in a crescendo from p to ff that saturates the dynamics by culminating in an accented orchestral chord (A-C-G), underlined by the timpani (00:00:05). The musical accent is closely synchronized with a woman’s bare foot entering the frame from the left and plunging into the water at the film frame’s center, which is perfectly placed between the two words of the title graphic (Figure 2.4). This audiovisual synchronism deserves closer attention. The bare legs and feet of the mondine will be the recurrent erotic motif during the film. Yet, Petrassi seems here to prevent—and even castigate—any erotic temptation. The boldness of the opening symphonic gesture, if anything, conveys a sense of “masculinity,” accentuating the foot’s entrance into the frame and emphasizing its “gravity” rather than its “graciousness.” Not only does the music avoid sensual references, but it quite explicitly emasculates latent sexual impulses into a celebration of labor and fatigue. The music seems to suggest that those bare legs are workers’ legs. In other words, the folk songs shape female bodies into objects of contemplation, the jazz idiom presents these bodies as subjects of seduction, and the symphonic score oscillates between the sublimation of the working body, the toning down of the objectifying gaze, and the punishment of the sinning (female) body. Such a sublimating, punitive attitude is disseminated in other details of the opening title and can be interpreted as a means of exorcizing the viewer’s later temptations to bond with Silvana’s character.

Figure 2.4  S  till from Riso amaro’s opening credits with synchronized chord.

Which People’s Music?  61 As the opening credits scroll up, other bare legs enter the frame in close-up, walking through the frame from bottom to top. The upward movement of the text and the running water together with the direction of the women’s walk is underscored by an ascending melodic progression of fourths, starting in the contrabasses and ending in the highest regions of the strings and the woodwinds. The figure rests on a two-note chord (F-C), giving way to the emergence of a folk tune played by French horns (00:00:12; motif 1, Example 2.1), which is an orchestral rendering of the rice weeders’ song, “Alla mattina alle ore cinque” (In the morning at five o’clock), a song that will return as diegetic music later in the film (see Table 2.1). The motif is visually paralleled by the camera’s slow upward pan from its original tilted position, revealing the rice field in a long shot, populated by workers wading through the water. At this point, one of the film’s key visual perspectives is disclosed: the camera is positioned a few inches over the water’s surface, approximately in line with the women’s hips. This angle is consistent with the paradigm of a neorealist documentary style, committed to bringing the viewers right into the fields with the workers. Nevertheless, the camera angle can equally be interpreted as an indiscreet voyeuristic focal point. When the camera leaves the ground to reach the level for an establishing shot over the field, the score carefully avoids another “pitfall,” which the mondine (audio)visual iconography of the time had accustomed the audience to: the topos of the pastoral idyll. By comparing Petrassi’s score to the music of two other films dealing with the subject of rice weeders, one can appreciate the extent to which the composer deviated from the musical cliché of portraying the mondine as peacefully integrated nymphs into the landscape of the rice fields. The composers Raffaele Gervasio in the short documentary Noi mondine (1941, We, mondine) and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino in the feature-length La risaia (1956, Rice Girl) both underscore shots descriptive of the working

Example 2.1  Goffredo Petrassi, Riso amaro, “Titoli”: folk motif 1 “Alla mattina alle ore cinque” played by the French horns. Transcription from orchestral parts. Courtesy of Biblioteca “L. Chiarini,” Rome, Fondo ­R izzoli Film.

62  Maurizio Corbella environment with a professional choir humming vaguely folkloric melodies over a relaxed orchestral background. Besides suggesting the timelessness of the rice workers’ world and adding a touch of uncontaminated serenity, these scores emphasize the gendered specificity of the subject by drawing on exclusively female choral voices. Petrassi had distinctly different goals in mind when he instilled into the apparently reassuring profile of the folk tune musical elements that can be interpreted as hints of the working class’s tormented condition. The restless dynamism of the music disturbs the pictorial peacefulness potentially emerging from the visuals. Petrassi achieves this effect by coercing the folk motif into a tour de force of several modulations and breaking down its melodic flow through repeated dramatic orchestral jolts. As the camera pans over the field, Petrassi introduces a reference to a second folk tune, the above-mentioned “Mamma mia dammi cento lire” (00:00:59; motif 2, Example 2.2). By precipitating the second semi-phrase of the motif, which corresponds to the lyrics “che in America voglio andar” (’cause I want to go to America), into the lowest register of the orchestra, the score duplicates the camera’s descent to the ground level (00:01:10). This combination of a downward visual movement and a falling musical gesture concisely foreshadows the tragic outcome of Silvana’s ill-fated aspirations: she wishes to go to America but will end up by throwing herself off a tower. It is tempting to draw a parallel between the two folk quotations by attributing motif 1 to the workers’ collectivity and motif 2 to Silvana’s individualism. To consider these two motifs as leitmotifs, it would imply that their dramatic references ought to be cemented as the film proceeds. The viewer’s memory should be stimulated to “learn” the relations between the melodic material of the opening credits and the dramatic content deployed later in

Example 2.2  G  offredo Petrassi, Riso amaro, “Titoli”: folk motif 2 “Mamma mia, dammi cento lire” played by the piccolo flute. Transcription from orchestral part. Courtesy of Biblioteca “L. Chiarini,” Rome, Fondo Rizzoli Film.

Which People’s Music?  63 the story. However, this process of recollection in “hindsight” (Biancorosso 211–13) does not fully occur in Riso amaro because memory cannot fill in the gaps between the infrequent appearances of the score during the film’s first half. Had three orchestral cues (Nos. 1, 3 and 4) not been cut from the first half of the film, the motivic design of the score would arguably have been more evident. The unused cue No. 1 was intended to underscore the verbal argument between Silvana and Francesca immediately following the scuffle scene (Example 2.3). There is little doubt that the music would have emphasized the already mentioned dualism between Francesca’s integration into the worker’s collectivity (motif 1) and Silvana’s exploitation of the situation for her own personal gain (motif 2). The fact that the cue with the two folk song motifs would have appeared right after the consecutive, diegetic occurrences of the two folk songs would have made the two motifs in the cue sound like a kind of recapitulation. This discarded, elaborate design remained confined to the composer’s plan, and little more than a pale shade of his conception is left in the actual film. It is precisely the traces of suppressed intention that makes this film a valuable, historical witness. Petrassi references motif 2 again in a later scene, where Marco, who is planning his future life after his release from the army, invites Silvana to leave with him for South America (No. 5, 00:42:45–00:46:00). ­Petrassi orchestrates the folk tune joyfully with high-pitched woodwinds (piccolo, flute and oboe). The motif’s implied lyrics are in tune with Marco’s desire to emigrate. They also mark the gulf between Marco and Silvana’s divergent ideas of America, as she tells him: “But you never read anything about South America. But in the north, everything is electric.”20 She is not dreaming of being an emigrant in the manner of many Italians of the previous generations. Her dream identifies completely with the northern American dream, the kind of Hollywood lifestyle she fantasizes about when reading photo-romances and listening to jazz records. The atmosphere of the music abruptly changes in close synchronization with Silvana’s lines. Fragments of the folk tune are still vaguely discernible, although disguised as a moaning lament played by the

Example 2.3  G  offredo Petrassi, Riso amaro, “N. 1” (unused): combination of folk motifs 1 and 2 (in brackets). Transcription and collation from orchestral parts. Courtesy of Biblioteca “L. Chiarini,” Rome, Fondo Rizzoli Film.

64  Maurizio Corbella violoncellos. Marco’s worried response (“Yeah, even the chair is electric”) acquires an ominous tone. Never again is this motif used in the remainder of the score. Instead, a specific variation of motif 1 emerges in the second half of the film. The first time this motif is heard again after the title sequence is one hour into the film, when Marco and Silvana bid farewell, having realized that things cannot work between them (No. 8, 00:58:55–01:01:22). Most importantly, the tune is transfigured into a lyric cantabile (Example 2.4), setting the tone for Marco’s broken dream, the failure of the sober, virtuous life he had envisioned for ­Silvana and himself. Marco’s idealism contrasts with Silvana’s mundane dream for a different future. This is not a love theme, though it might sound like one in this sequence. If Marco seems to voice a Catholic-socialist stance on the mondine’s condition in many passages of the film, this lyrical reprise carves a tragic, individual dimension into the collective struggle of the working class. The melodic-harmonic re-elaboration of the folk motif attaches a nostalgic undertone to the split between two equal victims (Silvana and Marco) of an unfair society. The same connotation is true during the emergence of a shorter version of the same cantabile motif, accompanying Gabriella’s departure from the rice fields after her miscarriage (No. 14, 01:14:17–01:15:20). In the final sequence of the film (No. 23, 01:41:11–01:44:10), the flute and oboe play the motif while Marco and Francesca—the new couple that emerges as a result of Silvana’s suicide—stare at Silvana’s corpse lying on the ground, covered with a blanket (Example 2.5). As the full orchestra repeats the melody, now with the strings to the fore, a mondina takes the initiative and advances

Example 2.4  Goffredo Petrassi, Riso amaro, “N. 8”: variation of folk motif 1 (in brackets). Transcription from orchestral part. Courtesy of Biblioteca “L. Chiarini,” Rome, Fondo Rizzoli Film.

Example 2.5  Goffredo Petrassi, Riso amaro, “N. 23”: variation of folk motif 1.  Transcription and collation from orchestral parts. Courtesy of Biblioteca “L. Chiarini,” Rome, Fondo Rizzoli Film.

Which People’s Music?  65 from the standing crowd to pay tribute to Silvana by sprinkling rice upon her body. Her action is taken up, in turn, by all the other women. The gesture of showering the wedding couple with rice as they walk out of the church has been reimagined as sprinkling rice onto a dead body. This replaces the traditional gesture of throwing earth on a coffin. Silvana and ­Marco’s never-realized wedding has become a funeral.21 A full-orchestra reprise of the theme is a prelude to a final outburst of lyricism. Silvana has now risen to the status of a cinematic heroine through the expiation of her guilt. And yet, as this quasi-Hollywoodian finale is about to take over, the passionate climax is interrupted by the voiceover, wrapping up the story and providing a decidedly didactic ending. The goal of the film—the voiceover implicitly reminds us—is to spread awareness about the rice weeders’ condition by exposing the audience to a world filled with intense human passions and the exploitation of labor. The reprise of the theme at full volume is forcedly faded down in the mix to feature the narrator’s voice. The flawed timing between the entrance of the voiceover and the musical climax might be due to a miscalculation of the sync point on the part of the composer or simply to the director’s disregard of the musical climactic momentum. As a result, the voiceover turns out obtrusive and overemphatic, producing a somewhat frustrating effect. Whose voice is the narrator’s? Whose standpoint does the music voice? Yet again, the discrepancy between the music and the voiceover can be interpreted as a further sign of Riso amaro’s unresolved tension among its many interpretative levels that account for the film’s complex and fluid cultural heritage.

Conclusion Media scholars have adopted the notion of “media witnessing” in terms of a threefold category that “refers simultaneously to the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness, and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events”—in short, “between witnesses in the media, witnessing by the media, and witnessing through the media” (Frosh and Pinchevski 1; emphasis in the original). By adapting this multi-directional approach to film music analysis, I have explored how Riso amaro bears witness to and through the music of its time. I have considered the director, screenwriters, producers, and composer(s) as creators, mediators, and witnesses to their historical time and its music, and I have addressed the film’s musicscape as a trace of the socio-historical world to which the film refers. More specifically, I have investigated the three musical layers featured in the film, both as enacting different ideas of “the popular” and as interacting in the film’s dramaturgy. The discrepancies I have outlined as they apply to the idea of “the popular” within the film have enabled me to interpret the film’s unintentional agency and to take the temporal distance between us and a historical multimedia artifact into account. It is my hope that viewing (and listening to) Riso amaro as a testimony of the rapidly mutating reality of post-Second World War Italy enriches our perception of music as an active agent in neorealist cinema.

66  Maurizio Corbella

Notes 1 For a reconstruction of the critical debate on the film’s release, see Repetto. 2 Apart from Roma, città aperta and Riso amaro, the neorealist “classics” hardly reached a box-office success (Brunetta 1). 3 All translations from the Italian texts are mine, unless otherwise specified. 4 Cano based the information about Trovajoli’s credit on De Santis’s direct testimony. Other scholars have later reiterated this assumption, although I am not aware of any incontrovertible evidence confirming it. A curious misunderstanding has accompanied the anecdote that Trovajoli was the author of the boogie-woogie numbers in the film. Several publications—including Lizzani (103) and the BFI database—misreport that the composer contributed the song “Il bajon” to the film under the pseudonym Roman Batrov. Clearly, the confusion was generated by the almost contemporary film, Anna (1951), also starring Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassmann, and Raf Vallone, in which Mangano dances to the song “El negro zumbón” (also known as “Anna’s Baión”), a million-copy-selling single distributed by MGM Records in 1953 and composed by Roman Vatro, otherwise known as Trovajoli. This conflation of two extremely popular dance numbers is telling as to the way Mangano’s performing persona crystallized in the public memory and as how hard the actress had to struggle to wash off her sex-symbol image throughout her subsequent career. 5 Time codes are extracted from the Cristaldi Film DVD edition (2007). Twenty seconds should be added to match my time codes with those of The Criterion Collection DVD (spine # 792, 2016). 6 The film was originally shown with a half-time break, as is discernable from the screenplay. 7 Both Mangano and Dowley’s singing voices were dubbed. Two different ­people dubbed Mangano’s singing and speaking parts (Cano 99). 8 Either preparatory materials such as sketches and short scores or a full score for this film have not yet been retrieved. However, the orchestral parts, which were used during the recording sessions of the RAI Symphony Orchestra of Rome conducted by Ferdinando Previtali, account for the existence of cues Nos. 1, 3, and 4, which were recorded but not used in the final cut. My numbering of the cues in this chapter and in Table 2.1 follows the indexing used in the orchestral parts. 9 The idea of simultaneous readings of Riso amaro, if variously nuanced, has accompanied the film’s critical reception for at least four decades, starting with Vittorio Spinazzola’s seminal analysis (31–33) through Stefania Parigi’s recent contribution (165–67) and the analyses of Lizzani, Brunetta, Masi, and Valentini. 10 Although Masi does not use this precise terminology, he pinpoints three reading levels that refer to “an audience of workers, farmers and artisans” (50), “the middle class” (49), and “an audience with intellectual ambitions” (48). 11 Leydi’s criticism notwithstanding, one should not underestimate the film’s pioneering role in being the first ever audiovisual document of female rice weeders performing work songs in Italy (Castelli et al. 100–03), predating the earliest ethnomusicological audio collections by around five years. The first field recordings realized by Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella date from 1953. 12 De Santis frequently referred to the episode in interviews as “the rape scene.” 13 It should be mentioned that the musical track is not a boogie-woogie in the strict sense. The typical eight-note bass ostinato is absent, and the tempo is medium rather than fast, evoking rather a swinging bounce style.

Which People’s Music?  67 14 Punishing the guilty object is one of the strategies, through which—according to Mulvey—the male viewer disavows his castration anxiety (Mulvey 348). In this respect, Mulvey’s reference to film noir perfectly fits with Riso amaro’s subplot revolving around Walter’s character. 15 “Riso amaro. Sceneggiatura: I tempo, I stesura,” typescript, GIDS 0004, Fondo Giuseppe De Santis, National Cinema Museum, Turin. 16 In an article written in 1943 and dedicated to jazz dance in film, De Santis contrasted the “oleographic,” “castigated,” and “shallow” character of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s movies, which “ jeopardized the deepest meaning of jazz music, its true nature and scope” (237), with the authentic African Americans portrayed in King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929). One could interpret Silvana’s dance performance as metaphorically paralleling the very degrading process described in De Santis’s article, from the rural authenticity of jazz roots to the artificial futility of Broadway musical. 17 “Riso amaro. Trattamento I, Natale 1947—Pasqua 1948,” typescript, GIDS 0002, Fondo Giuseppe De Santis, National Cinema Museum, Turin. 18 “Perhaps the choice of Petrassi—that is, a personality devoted to art music or at least to a music that is certainly not accessible to the masses—may somehow illustrate that Riso amaro in our intentions was not meant to be a kind of cheap popular film” (qtd. in Pellegrini and Verdone 30). 19 “I followed no system, since it was the first time that I worked on a fiction film, and I had not yet developed a personal method” (qtd. in Vasio 78). 20 The text is taken from the subtitles of The Criterion Collection edition. 21 I am grateful to Michael Baumgartner for these thoughtful suggestions.

Works Cited Bassetti, Sergio. “Continuità e innovazione nella musica per il cinema.” Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 8, 1949–53, edited by Luciano De Giusti and Veronica Pravadelli, Marsilio, 2003, pp. 325–35. Biancorosso, Giorgio. “Memory and the Leitmotif in Cinema.” Representation in Western Music, edited by Joshua W. Walden, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 203–23. Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Continuum, 1990. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema neorealista italiano. Storia economica, politica e culturale. Laterza, 2009. Cano, Cristina. “La musica: Petrassi, i canti popolari, il boogie-woogie.” Visioni moltiplicate, edited by Michelone and Simonelli, op. cit., pp. 99–105. Castelli, Franco, et al. Senti le rane che cantano. Canzoni e vissuti popolari della risaia. Donzelli, 2005. De Santis, Giuseppe. “Il jazz e le sue danze nel cinema.” La danza nel cinema, special issue of Cinema: quindicinale di divulgazione cinematografica, vol. 8, no. 164, 25 April 1943, pp. 236–38. De Santis, Giuseppe, and Giovanni Cimmino. Audio interview recorded in 1989–90. Extra feature on the DVD, Riso amaro, CG Home Video, Cristaldi Film, 2007. Dyer, Richard. “Music, People and Reality: The Case of Italian Neo-realism.” European Film Music, edited by Miguel Mera and David Burnard, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 28–40. Frosh, Paul, and Amit Pinchevski, editors. “Introduction: Why Media Witnessing? Why Now?” Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 1–19.

68  Maurizio Corbella Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988. 1990. St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Gundle, Stephen. “Beauty, National Identity and Political Conflict in Postwar Italy.” European Popular Culture, 1945–1960, special issue of Contemporary European History, vol. 8, no. 3, November 1999, pp. 359–78. ———. Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. Yale University Press, 2007. Herzog, Amy. Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Iannone, Pasquale. “Bitter Rice: A Field in Italy.” The Criterion Collection, ­January 2016, www.criterion.com/current/posts/3868-bitter-rice-a-field-in-italy. ­Accessed 5 April 2018. Imbergamo, Barbara. Mondine in campo: dinamiche e retoriche di un lavoro del Novecento. editpress, 2014. Lane, John Francis. “De Santis and Italian Neo-Realism.” Sight & Sound, vol. 19, no. 6, August 1950, pp. 245–47. Leydi, Roberto. “La musica nel film: Motivi popolari.” Cinema: quindicinale di divulgazione cinematografica, vol. 3, no. 43, July 1950, pp. 59–60. Lizzani, Carlo. Riso amaro: dalla scrittura alla regia. Bulzoni, 2009. Magaldi, Marina. “Goffredo Petrassi e le musiche per film” (1964). Goffredo Petrassi, edited by Pozzi, op. cit., pp. 204–06. Masi, Stefano. Giuseppe De Santis. Il castoro cinema 96, La Nuova Italia, 1982. Miceli, Sergio. Film Music: History, Aesthetic-Analysis, Typologies. Edited and translated by Marco Alunno and Braunwin Sheldrick, LIM and Ricordi, 2013. Michelone, Guido, and Giorgio Simonelli, editors. Visioni moltiplicate: immagini culturali in “Riso amaro.” Edizioni Mercurio, 1996. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. ­Kellner, revised edition, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 342–52. Parigi, Stefania. Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra. Marsilio, 2014. Pellegrini, Glauco, and Mario Verdone, editors. Colonna sonora. Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1966. Petrassi, Goffredo. “La musica italiana verso il popolo” (1939). Goffredo Petrassi, edited by Pozzi, op. cit., pp. 15–16. ———. “Nessuno mi ha più chiesto di lavorare per il cinema.” Cinema nuovo, vol. 2, no. 14, July 1953, p. 31. Pozzi, Raffaele. “La mia musica. Intervista a Goffredo Petrassi” (1987). Goffredo Petrassi, edited by Pozzi, op. cit., pp. 350–62. ———, editor. Goffredo Petrassi: scritti e interviste. Suvini Zerboni, 2008. Repetto, Tonino. “L’ideologia: Boogie-woogie o ‘Bandiera rossa’? Materiali di un’antica polemica.” Visioni moltiplicate, edited by Michelone and Simonelli, op. cit., pp. 57–64. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and ­David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Spinazzola, Vittorio. Cinema e pubblico. 1974. Bulzoni, 1985. Valentini, Paola. La scena rubata. Il cinema italiano e lo spettacolo popolare (1924–1954). Vita e Pensiero, 2002. Vasio, Carla. Autoritratto di Goffredo Petrassi. 1991. STEM Mucchi Editore, 2017.

Which People’s Music?  69 Films Cited Anna. Directed by Alberto Lattuada, music by Nino Rota, Carlo Ponti Cinematografica, Compagnie Cinématographique de France, Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, et al., 1951. Caccia tragica (Tragic hunt). Directed by Giuseppe de Santis, music by Giuseppe Rosati, Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI), Dante Film, 1947. Hallelujah. Directed by King Vidor, musical director: Eva Jessye, Metro-­GoldwynMayer, 1929. La risaia (Rice Girl). Directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, music by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Excelsa Film and Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1956. Noi mondine (We, mondine). Directed by Vittorio Carpignano, music by Raffaele Gervasio, INCOM, 1941. Riso amaro (Bitter rice). Directed by Giuseppe de Santis, music by Goffredo P ­ etrassi and Armando Trovajoli (uncredited), Lux Film, 1949. DVD: CG Home Video, Cristaldi Film, 2007. Roma, città aperta (Rome, open city). Directed by Roberto Rossellini, music by Renzo Rossellini, Excelsa Film, 1945.

3 Phantoms of Italian Opera—Cultural Memory in Italian and (West) German Films Roger Hillman Prelude The object of this chapter’s enquiry is Italian opera on film soundtracks from post-Second World War Italy and (West) Germany, as both nations rebuilt from the rubble of nationalistic excess. While firmly positioned in the West bloc, in Cold War terms, both sought alternatives to earlier, discredited national models, at a time when such models were in flux across post-war Europe, but nowhere more so than in the conquered erstwhile Axis powers Germany and Italy. Within the social and political flux, prestigious cultural heritages such as Italian opera provided a degree of continuity. In Italy, that was to be expected in the case of Verdi. But while post-war reception of W ­ agner in ­Germany could not overlook the Nazis’ appropriation, it is a surprising fact that on German-language stages, Verdi’s performances outstripped Wagner’s, first “in the 1931–32 season” and then again from 1939 until the end of the war (Kreuzer 161 and 192). Just as music in film crosses media borders, music as an art-form has always transcended national borders. And when a film score is not commissioned from a contemporary composer, but compiled from works that pre-exist the film, it embodies cultural memory as part of the film’s historical archaeology. Beyond opera houses, film soundtracks provided a less immediate site for ­Italian opera as a cultural marker. As part of the cultural heritage of post-­Second World War European Cinema movements, nineteenth-century Italian opera brings a prior history which affects its function as film music. This history and its resonances are both musical—for example, the ongoing reception history of Verdi—and filmic, with Italian opera having been used in many Italian silent films. The fusion of media—of opera, film, and film music—at the particular historical junction covered by this chapter (the late 1970s and early 1980s) offers an under-researched challenge for the field of cinema and memory, namely “the articulation of memory across media” (Radstone 341–42). Cinematic memory in the present project is present in a film’s music, which usually has a far more subliminal impact than its visuals, and thereby opens up aspects of memory that evade more conventional histories. The key question then becomes: to what extent do national borders still hold for composers like Verdi in films from the second half of the twentieth

Phantoms of Italian Opera  71 1

century, when both filmmakers and Verdi’s reception history are now viewed from an early twenty-first-century perspective? A comparative study of cultural memory and national identity in two national cinemas, specifically in the films set out in the next paragraph, will yield answers to this question. A historically informed approach to the interaction between image and music in the films chosen will trace their negotiation of national and transnational culture, both visual and musical. Analysis focusses on Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (1979, The moon), as a melting pot of Italian traditions, including Italian opera and Italian cinema, all subjected to Bertolucci’s self-­referential approach in his films. Crucial scenes in Alexander Kluge’s Die Macht der Gefühle (1983, The power of emotion) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) provide complementary examples of Italian opera in German cinema. The historical patina of Italian opera when functioning as film music takes on particular inflections in Italy itself. It takes on potentially different ones in Germany, through both its dominant symphonic tradition (drawn on by directors of the New German Cinema) and the ambiguous status of Wagner vis-à-vis the impeccable credentials of Verdi. The trope of counterpointing these two composers plays out against post-war identity politics in Italian and West German films, where representations of Italian opera take on significance that goes far beyond the presence of music on a soundtrack. Staging and the deconstruction of opera’s artifice are further important aspects of contemporary context. Performative aspects of opera staged within a film—a different equation to opera films directed by Joseph Losey, Ingmar Bergman, and others—exemplify intermediality, as does film music. Like national opera, the concept of “national cinemas” is no longer self-­ explanatory. Analysis of Italian opera in two different cinema movements will further differentiate cultural memory across borders. Italian cultural and historical memory once indelibly linked Verdi to the cause of nascent nationalism (the Risorgimento, a sanctioned, even sacred form of nationalism). Postwar Italian film was able to recruit Verdi as cultural continuity midst national fault lines, given his iconic status in the Italian cultural imaginary. From our vantage point, Verdi’s music has a far more global appeal, not least through the three tenors, or worldwide direct simulcasts from the Met. The film that follows was something of a fusion of national and transnational perspectives, and also the last significant site of Verdi opera in post-war Italian cinema.2

Bernardo Bertolucci, La luna (1979) The opening images signal an oedipal drama—a mother licks honey off the leg of her toddler, whose bottom lip quivers as she abandons him to dance with an unidentified male. The male (ultimately emerging as the boy’s father) is watched closely by his own mother, a figure who trails a skein of wool as she entangles the toddler. As a nod to conventions rather than a convincing narrative development, the family threads choking the boy seem to be unraveling in the final scenes. Open air rehearsals of Un ballo in maschera (A masked

72  Roger Hillman ball) in the Roman ruins of the Baths of Caracalla accompany a tableau of the outwardly reconciled family. The drama seems to evaporate in operatic insubstantiality (akin to Bellini at the end of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo). The music of Verdi figures prominently in keeping with the mother’s role, an opera singer who returns from the United States to Italy. But the Verdi excerpts3 are used neither as overlay nor in straightforward diegetic vein, and the Verdi heritage underpins an oedipal drama of national identity.4 In this, the film links up with others by Bertolucci, most closely with his Prima della rivoluzione (1964, Before the revolution), where Fabrizio’s affair with his aunt and his flirtation with Marxism are brief escapes from his own, nationally inflected bourgeois past, and a false but sustaining national identity is embodied by a Verdi tamed for domestic consumption. Following the opening sequence, the mother (Caterina), her teenage son ( Joe), and the man he refers to as “Dad,” all sit at a meal table without communicating. This father is killed off almost immediately. Mother and son go to Italy, and Joe witnesses her performance at the opera house in the scene that follows a screening of the film Niagara (1953). We hear Marilyn Monroe “singing” in dubbed Italian. In both Niagara and La luna, the juxtaposition of singers and stage passions is truly striking, as are the blended nationalities within vocal renditions. The American Caterina sings Italian opera, and Monroe sings “The Kiss,” a number that launched her as the (diva-like) star eclipsing all others, but seemingly she sings in Italian. (The fact that her singing voice can be effectively dubbed is no doubt a comment on the quality of that voice, though less transparently we are drawn in by the same convention in Bertolucci’s narrative, with Jill Clayburgh (Caterina) of course miming to recordings acknowledged in the film’s end credits.) At the movies, Joe has his first fumbling encounter with Arianna, while at the opera he witnesses the scene in Il trovatore where Leonora mistakes Count Luna (!) for Manrico. All the artifice of an opera production is foregrounded, right down to prompter and props. The “waterfall” of paper/fabric glued to the rotating wheels of stage machinery seems still less naturalistic in the immediate wake of (Hathaway’s) images of the Niagara Falls, in the film within the film. Verdi’s character Leonora is caught between two men who prove to be related, a foreshadowing of the constellation at the end of La luna. Beyond some plot parallels between the Monroe film and Bertolucci’s, there are more fundamental overlaps, too, which permeate the view of opera in general—and Verdi in particular—that emerges from Bertolucci’s film. One is the supposed communal aspect of opera and film spectatorship (Lindenberger 309). The Niagara inserts in Bertolucci’s film are disorienting through a triangulation of shots edited together—the Monroe film filling Bertolucci’s screen, side-on shots of the (sparse) audience witnessing it blankly, and in a different part of the cinema, Joe and Arianna. Their awkward embraces are interrupted by the cinema roof opening for unexplained reasons. It reveals a bluer than blue sky and above all, the moon, almost a match-shot to the stageset of the opera in which Caterina is performing, where the moon dominates even her.5 The kiss which Monroe savors in song, and with knowing looks

Phantoms of Italian Opera  73 of dreamy bliss, is cross-cut with Arianna removing the braces on her teeth, and looking like a startled rabbit, ahead of the kiss with Joe. She and Joe form no community whatever with the rest of the audience, echoed by the largely empty seats at the rehearsal of Un ballo in maschera at the end of the film. This points to the crucial parallel between the melodrama of film noir and that of opera. Just as her lover whistles their song after their telephone encounter, Monroe sings and hums it to her lover in his absence, oblivious to the couples dancing behind her. She misreads the cue when a carillon plays this tune, supposedly their secret code that the moment is ripe for conspiracy (but again the public, communal face of the carillon is lost from view). Privatized music thus becomes a fatal flaw in this particular film noir. But Verdi’s dimensions are similar in Bertolucci’s film, as will be shown below. Progressively, Joe’s drug dependency grows. His mother is drawn to his room by “Tutte le feste al templo” from Act 2 of Rigoletto. The voice proves to emanate from his record player, and her lips almost involuntarily start moving in synch with the aria, as a kind of mute rehearsal. For Joe, the recording functions as both homage and cry for help, for a level of confiding shared by Gilda and her father in the aria. But for Caterina, drawn by the voice and failing to intercept her son, it is narcissistic. The real, recorded singer backing visuals of Jill Clayburgh’s Caterina is not constant across the earlier Il trovatore performance and this Rigoletto excerpt. For a listener capable of discerning between the Verdi renditions, yet more artificiality is created by the chameleon quality of a single visual figure with two voices. By the end of the film, a third opera (Un ballo in maschera) is supposedly rendered by the one audiovisual performer (and Jill Clayburgh was known as an actress, not a singer). With Joe in a drugged swoon, the Prelude to Act III of La traviata is heard, but in Bertolucci’s plot, the grander operatic gesture of dying proves misleading (not least because of the gender inversion—the heroine of nineteenth-­century opera was conventionally doomed to die; cf. Clément). This emphasizes the receding of Verdi’s historical immediacy, as another layer is added to the archaeology of his reception: at one level, narratives seem to invite comparison with those of Verdi’s operas, while at another, they burst the evoked frame of expectations. This scene immediately precedes Caterina’s trip to Parma, home ground of both Bertolucci and Verdi. Her old singing master dissuades her from renouncing singing with the tape-recorded quartet of farewell from Così fan tutte (an opera where momentarily misaligned couples are also of course at the core). In relation to the Verdi thread of this film, this is strongly reminiscent of a scene in Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione when Gina says that she has had a surfeit of Verdi-type emotion, and longs for the cleansing exorcism of Mozart. Far beyond the opera repertoire, her statement goes to the core of national identities. Caterina and Joe then drive in search of a house they lived in earlier. Instead, they end up at the Villa Verdi itself. Joe’s lack of interest in all associations with Verdi disappoints Caterina: “This is my roots. This is my family you’re talking about. He’s like a father to me.” Given her American roots, we

74  Roger Hillman seem to be viewing Verdi at this point as a global godfather in the cultural realm. The search for the real house of Joe’s childhood yields another family house, seemingly beyond the purely musical connection between composer and opera singer. Rather, it is as if her singing career were an odyssey for cultural roots, an oedipal odyssey at that. This emphasis is reinforced elsewhere in Bertolucci, for example, on the fateful day at the beginning of the film 1900 when two sons are born who will go on to become a socialist and a Blackshirt, and a figure called Rigoletto proclaims the death of Verdi.6 It is as if a certain bourgeois lineage which has spawned the two opposed forces of the new century finds its summation with Verdi. The death of this symbol of Italy’s fairest aspirations for freedom and democracy seems to signify to Bertolucci the dying of the bourgeois age. It is succeeded by the mediatized twentieth century. At the Villa Verdi itself, late in La luna, Caterina muses on the great man looking out and transforming a particular hunchback into his own immortal opera figure. Concretely, he sees the Po River, but in his mind’s eye he “sees” the Nile (of Aïda). Italy is then no longer the site of stirring historical struggles, but an opera-set; reincarnated in post-war America, this Verdi (who “saw the world in this little house”) would have looked out on the Niagara and “seen” Marilyn Monroe and “heard” her song. In that sense, the search in La luna for the childhood house yields two fathers. Late in the film, Caterina admits that they were looking for the house where “we lived, not with Douglas [the father-figure killed off early in the film] but with your real father.” Joe’s meeting with this figure, Giuseppe (!), functions as a reward for a parallel, less conscious search by Caterina. Before Joe is reunited with his father, Caterina farewells a potential lover with whom she has tantalized Joe. She asks the innkeeper: “Do you have a room?” whereupon he replies with part of the aria “Condotta ell’era in ceppi” from Act 2 of Il trovatore, sung by the gypsy Azucena.7 This aria relates to Manrico’s grandmother; Joe, in Bertolucci’s story, is shortly to be reunited with his biological father, and peripherally with his own grandmother. At least three levels of artificiality are reinforced here. The mezzo-soprano role of Azucena is rendered by the innkeeper’s bass voice, which further incorporates some of the orchestral line into her melody (when in fact they overlap in the score). At a broader level, it is as if the preceding film dialogue has functioned as libretto rather than film script, and hence as if the “real” underpinning of the film scene is neither a film set nor some pro-filmic reality, but the world of opera, which lies just beneath the surface and breaks through even outside the operatic set pieces. Both setting and style are also reminiscent of Bertolucci’s film La strategia del ragno (1970, The spider’s stratagem) while the character (and actor) of the innkeeper is a straight quotation of the salami curer in the earlier film, implying that Bertolucci’s own oedipal tussle with Verdi continued throughout the 1970s. In the last 15 minutes of La luna, Joe traces his mother to the vast open-air stage of Caracalla, set midst ruins, where life meets art, and the geography of Rome merges with the cultural mindscape of a nation (Figure 3.1).

Phantoms of Italian Opera  75

Figure 3.1  W  orkshop/opera: family drama and the stage props of nationhood.

All the artifice of Caterina’s first performance has vanished; it is neither night nor “night” as indicated by a mise-en-scène, and the “temple” housing the performance is open to the elements, as well as to a largely non-existent public. Film and opera coalesce, not the way Verdi’s music did with the Italian unification process, according to myth, but more in the manner of Niagara counterpointed against Il trovatore, and/or the prospect of Monroe singing in Italian. Punctuating a rehearsal of Un ballo in maschera, the hidden family connections are finally revealed like the intricacies of an operatic plot. It emerges that Caterina’s relationship with Giuseppe had floundered because he could not tolerate her voice, and because “he was in love with his mother,” as, in a strong sense, Joe has been with his own mother. After Joe has been reunited with Giuseppe, Caterina reacts with the verdict: “And now you’re in love with your father.” The father himself seems to have overcome his aversion to Caterina’s voice, while Caterina in turn rediscovers her voice after fearing she would only be able to read her part. At the conclusion, the voices of the chorus soar, a musical ensemble which seemingly parallels the newfound harmony among the main players in the film—though Bertolucci sees it quite differently in an interview.8 What is undeniably achieved is the embodying of Caterina’s voice, the voice that renders Verdi, in a film which has featured scenes where the voice is at least initially disembodied (dramatically matching Monroe’s rendition of “Kiss” in Niagara). The tone remains highly elusive. La luna is neither an unproblematic opera film nor the jaundiced sideswipe at a fossilized Verdi reception found in Prima della rivoluzione. The film’s take on opera is perhaps closest to those scenes foregrounding the artifice of opera, while they simultaneously reduce Verdi’s strong communal base to an almost narcissistic individual

76  Roger Hillman reverie. However affectionately, these elements ironize any unquestioning celebration of Verdi as the voice, not just the operatic voice, of Italy. For as with the privatized voice of Niagara—“Kiss” as “our” song—Verdi’s status as a Risorgimento figure seems remote. The lengthy Il trovatore excerpt early in the film is shot from the perspective of Joe, with close-ups of his rapture—his only interactions with the “community” of opera-goers is to silence those whispering, and to lead off another round of applause when the group has fallen silent. The Rigoletto excerpt is a private homage, rendered to the diva Caterina rather than the giant Verdi. La traviata is not “heard” by either figure (see p. 73), and the rehearsal of Un ballo in maschera in the final sequence is a pretext for the elaboration of offstage relationships, and plays before a virtually empty auditorium. Verdi’s four great successes of the 1850s punctuate Bertolucci’s own wrangling with Verdi in a number of his own films at the end of the 1970s, a wrangling which at the same time is a leave-taking. Like the Victor Hugo text on which Rigoletto is based, the original setting of Un ballo in maschera was deemed too close to the bone of courtly European machinations. But in La luna, any political resonance of Verdi and his music has been dispelled by the operatic world of illusion. However grand the substance may once have been, la bella figura prevails. The political thrust of assassination that was still present with Un ballo in maschera as featured in La strategia del ragno has disappeared—except for the communist who fails to provoke the American Caterina, this is a singularly apolitical film on the surface.9 And yet of course the emasculation of Italian identity politics is itself a comment on a political state of affairs. By the end of Bertolucci’s reckoning with Verdi’s reception, the Verdi formed in the image of twentieth-century Italy functions as a virtual cultural reality. Unlike Visconti’s Senso (1954, Sentiment; The Wanton Contessa) and Rossellini’s Viva l’Italia (1961, Garibaldi) and Vanina Vanini (1961), Bertolucci avoided historicized settings of the Risorgimento. His focus is on Verdi, the appropriated and convenient myth, rather than Verdi, the historically based statesman-cum-composer. His mythical view of Verdi accords with an avoidance of historical setting, implied though the latter must always be. At the same time, La luna seals the Italo-American alliance (with Italian and German cinema always needing to be triangulated with Hollywood). Foreshadowed by scenes with Marilyn Monroe dubbed into Italian, but equally culturally questionable, the choice of Un ballo in maschera as the final opera restores the balance: there is a symmetry between the setting of Verdi’s opera, forced offshore to Boston by Italian censorship, and the American soprano’s recovery of her “lost” voice, in Bertolucci’s film, during Verdi rehearsals in Rome.

Intermezzo Directors of the New German Cinema used Italian opera as a mixed cultural marker. Like much Italian cinema of the same era, many German films of the 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied with issues of national identity. But

Phantoms of Italian Opera  77 Kluge’s Die Macht der Gefühle and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo engage strongly with Italian opera. Through analysis of these films, recent insights into Verdi and the ­Germans (Kreuzer) can be extended to German cinema as a further site for Verdi reception.10 Herzog and Kluge stood at a skewed tangent to wrangling with identity issues, and their use of Italian opera broadens the way they positioned themselves. The Verdi contra Wagner debate looked very different for Italian and German cinema in the wake of their respective fascist/national socialist eras. In Marco Leto’s La villeggiatura (1973, Black Holiday), a history professor claims of Wagner: “Too many irrational myths. Verdi was ours. His music was a weapon for our freedom.” This, too, lends particular interest to a comparison between Italian opera when used in Italian cinema and when used in German cinema. The latter was largely conscious of the shadow of Wagner. In Italy, on the other hand, the cultural baggage associated with Verdi found anachronistic application in a “second Risorgimento” myth, “the mythology of the Resistance as a convenient post-war view of Italian history.”11

Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo (1982) Herzog’s output12 effaces a direct engagement with German history. This means that German(ic) music on his soundtracks is not straitjacketed by the overtones of its historically layered reception. It also opens his films to other national cultures as orientation points. Fitzcarraldo is virtually framed by opera performances. The narrative is also punctuated by Caruso performances issuing forth from an old-style gramophone, the mellifluous tones accompanied by a duly scratchy record surface. Here, Herzog thematizes the crossovers at the levels of artificiality, audience involvement, and self-reflexiveness, between film, opera, and mythology. ­Italian opera serves to exemplify artifice in music; as a sole counter-example toward the end, a misleading report comes in that a touring European opera company has arrived to perform Wagner. But in fact they render Bellini’s I puritani, and Fitzcarraldo dissolves on a note of light unreality. In a film whose realization took many turns, Wagner was in fact planned up till toward the end. In Herzog’s script version published in 1982 (Herzog), the opening opera house performance is of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, while Wagner’s Die Walküre is the opera he brings to the jungle at the end. In the final cut of the film, the conclusion of Verdi’s Ernani is performed at the start. Ostensibly sung by Caruso, and with the role of Elvira acted by Sarah Bernhardt, this segment of the film was directed by Werner Schroeter, whose own films have strong ties to opera. He directed operas in the 1980s, his masterpiece Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972, The death of Maria Mali-­ bran) concerns a cult nineteenth-century diva, and a phrase like “operatic excess” is regularly used even of those of his films not directly concerned with opera (Sieglohr). The link to cinema history is undoubtedly the opening scene of Visconti’s Senso, where the performance of Verdi sets the stage for the film (Crisp and Hillman, “Verdi in Postwar Italian Cinema” 157–63). Visconti

78  Roger Hillman emphasizes the incendiary potential of music both through the historical context of the performance and the reception of his fictional audience. Nothing could be further from the effect achieved by Schroeter within the Herzog film. Schroeter compounds those elements that free Ernani from any anchoring social reality. The mise-en-abîme possibilities of performer and role emerge from the giddying credits for the performance at Manaus: Soloists: Ernani—Singer: Veriano Luccheti Actor: Costante Moret Silva—Singer and Actor: Dimiter Petkov Elvira—Singer: Mietta Sighele Singer in Orchestra Pit—Lourdes Magalhães Sarah Bernhardt—Jean-Claude Dreyfuss In the timeframe of Herzog’s film, the character of Ernani is performed by (an enactment within Herzog’s film of) Caruso. “Caruso,” in turn, is rendered vocally and dramatically by different embodiments. The complex relationship between cast and actual sound sources crystallizes in this one figure; the first silent film performances of the historical Caruso were mimed, silent onstage (in that respect like Sarah Bernhardt here), but synched to a recording of his own voice. The squat Ernani figure upstages Schroeter’s towering Elvira by remaining in frame during her erratic descent of the staircase, and by seeming oblivious to her acknowledgment of teamwork as the final bows are taken. Alone among the principals, Silva’s performance combines both actor and singer.13 The last three listings in the credits all relate to a single stage figure, the celebrity Sarah Bernhardt. Unlike Caruso, she is acknowledged in the dramatis personae. A listing of two singers for the part of Elvira is enigmatic, unless we assume that the “singer in the orchestra pit” is only acting there, and that the voice on Herzog’s soundtrack belongs to the “singer: Mietta Sighele.” But this singer is not onstage, since Elvira is ostensibly acted by Sarah Bernhardt, who is played by Jean-Claude Dreyfuss and is a counterpart to the historical Caruso. According to this logic, the role of Elvira is actually sung by a vocal source outside the visual performance staged by Schroeter, a source superimposed on those visuals and present only on Herzog’s soundtrack. Inasmuch as the singing capacity of the figure is crucial to the opera’s narrative, a Russian doll effect is set in place of ever greater removes from the source of musical communication. Elvira nearly stumbles down the stairs into the arms of Ernani, but less through the distractedness of the emotional moment than, we sense, through the technical unfamiliarity of the male actor negotiating the long train of “her” apparel and “her” footwear. The impresario mentions crowds flocking to see an actor who can’t sing and who has a wooden leg. This held for the historical Sarah Bernhardt as of 1915. The notion of this anachronistic feature being in turn mimed by a presumably uninjured male lends a further

Phantoms of Italian Opera  79 contortion to the layers of unreality here. Elvira gestures with flamboyant extravagance, and is acoustically demystified for Herzog’s cinema audience as the camera draws back to focus on the supposedly real singer (“Singer in Orchestra Pit”). But according to the analysis above, this is, in turn, an actress. Ernani in his swansong points out in the direction of the audience; for Fitzcarraldo this gesture singles out him alone. The scene represents the passing on by the operatic figure of the legacy of an artificial, but grand endeavor. And the self-styled successor seems to live up to the challenge when the ship is dragged up and over the mountain. Historic recordings, with their crackly rendition of Caruso’s voice, further evoke the era of the silent cinema through the isolation of this voice on Herzog’s soundtrack, often without competing sound elements. Elvira’s disembodied voice also points toward the silent era, without a one-to-one relationship between any visual source of sound and the sound we hear. This further turn of the screw positions us as viewers not just of an opera, but of an opera film of the silent era, the era of the authentic Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt. And these trans-historical ghostings create a strong sense of how the artificiality of opera is enhanced by that of cinema. The resulting fusion of synchronized voices and diegetic voices is possible only in filmed opera, not in a live performance, and it creates a further performative level. The missing three-dimensionality of Herzog’s characters complements the amalgam between opera and life. Beyond its name, the “Molly Aida,” the boat itself is configured to be suggestive of an opera-house. Its railings and their surrounding framings create phantom opera-boxes, and when Caruso’s voice issues forth on deck, the ventilators resemble an assembly of gramophone horns, or when viewed singly, a prompter’s box. The fusion of vessel and operatic arena is total by the end, when Fitzcarraldo does indeed bring opera to the jungle, as the touring company momentarily transforms the deck of his boat into an opera stage. Fitzcarraldo evaporates in insubstantiality, with a strong acoustic after-image. This matches the role played by the voice of Caruso cranked up on a gramophone, as ghostly arias from Ernani, Pagliacci, Rigoletto, La bohème, and I puritani ring out (Rogers 93). Fitzcarraldo fuses with his beloved opera, and the scene fades out visually (as the soundtrack continues into the darkness) on the central figure with his monumental cigar. In ending with I puritani, Fitzcarraldo espouses an aesthetic for images and for narrative weight similar to the bel canto ideal of opera. Except for the opening landscape shot, Italian opera then accompanies the first and last curtains in Herzog’s film. The conspiratorial element of Ernani at the beginning leads only to the natives’ concealed conspiracy, as they subvert Fitzcarraldo’s vision. The political overtones of this opera from its Risorgimento reception, drawn upon by Bertolucci in La strategia del ragno (Crisp and Hillman, “Verdi and Schoenberg”), are defused. Operatic national politics yield to an internationalized opera as fantastic vision, as pure artifice. Herzog has remodeled reality to bypass restraints on the imagination. At the end of the film, Wagner, whose reception embodies the confluence of opera and ideology, is retracted

80  Roger Hillman at the levels both of Herzog’s plot, and of cinema history embracing Herzog. The New German Cinema is conventionally marked as ending in 1982, with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death. But historically, Herzog’s mock epic was perhaps the movement’s last film, in dissolving that cinema’s favoring of ideologically laden music, as Bellini on the soundtrack displaces Wagner in an earlier script.

Alexander Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle (1983, The Power of Emotion) Kluge is the most cerebral and the most musically literate of directors considered here. This film engages with the power of emotional revisionism exercised by opera of the long nineteenth century, with invariably tragic outcomes for heroines and a prevailing tragic fatalism. The latter is no doubt resonant of the Nazi death cult, given that Kluge’s filmic essays are to be viewed through the prism of the Second World War. Typical of his output, Die Macht der Gefühle is immeasurably rich in music, including Italian opera excerpts; their staging is shot unconventionally. Kluge’s non-linear “plots”—suggestive mosaic-pieces to be combined by the viewer/listener—lend themselves to such a vast and diffuse subject matter, just as Italian opera of course lends itself to exemplifying particular emotions.14 In plot dramatization and in acting styles, twentieth-century film is viewed here on a continuum with nineteenth-century opera.15 A succession of slayings in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, the first film excerpt within Kluge’s film, features overwrought emotion while also, inevitably, evoking Wagner’s Ring cycle. Still more directly, when the unflappable voiceover claims, “In all operas dealing with redemption a woman is sacrificed in Act 5,” the accompanying close-up of a female face seems to be a feature-film, not an opera. The fusion, or rather the clash, is established with the first diegetic opera excerpt, briefly intercut with a war film in the opening ten minutes. After a further ten minutes comes a more substantial opera excerpt, in which normally paced music is overlaid on fast-motion visuals of a stage performance (paralleling the constellation of the film’s opening “prelude,” described in the next paragraph). This creates a complete disjunction between technical and performative aspects, that is, a distanciation from the emotional pull of opera. In fact, this film has a prelude which, in turn, is a prelude to an opera, namely Wagner’s Parsifal. As background soundtrack, it accompanies timelapse photography of a Frankfurt skyline. Starting at night, the effect of pinpoints of light in fast motion, accompanied by this particular music, returns us to the opening of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1977, Hitler: a film from Germany). Wagner’s mystical opera is demystified midfilm, when a firefighter’s curiosity strips the veil from the Grail, leaving but an empty stage prop. The presentation of Verdi’s Aïda also fluctuates between film and opera. It is first viewed in a silent film version, which considerably varies the ending—the lovers are released from the tomb by a mob, only to be stoned by the same mob, furious at their self-absorption at the expense of

Phantoms of Italian Opera  81 patriotism. In the self-contained miniature crime film with which Die Macht der Gefühle ends, Kluge subverts both standard and silent film endings in a variation on the Aïda plot. Effectively entombed by the murder that they have seemingly committed, the murderer and his girlfriend are unaware that the couple they have implicated has managed to revive the victim. With the sometimes bizarre connectedness of motifs that Kluge seeks in his films, this would seem to echo the last opera cited, Leoš Janáček’s Ve ̌c Makropulos (1926, The Makropulos affair), with its centuries’ old figure, itself a Nosferatu-type theme. Altogether, Kluge explores the power of emotion in opera as a whole musical genre; he does not, for instance, play off Verdi against Wagner. His ­musical choices often have an iridescent suggestiveness. Why, to take one example, include three excerpts from Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite, the second (the opening of Lemminkäinen in Tuonela) quite substantial in length, the third accompanying the demystification of the Grail prop referred to above?16 Alongside its reminder that there are other Nordic myths than those incorporated by Wagner, this was a work originally conceived as a Wagnerian, mythological opera, but refashioned by its composer as an orchestral composition.17 Through removal of the vocal element, Kluge seems to be valorizing the tone poem in relation to the responsible exercise of the power of emotion. In this sense, the inter-connections across his soundtrack work further against any national boundaries of opera. Nested among Kluge’s characteristic potpourri of classical and tango music, the instances of Italian opera consolidate the director’s foregrounding of the labor and production aspects, as in his branding of nineteenth-­ century opera houses as powerhouses of the emotions (the example we see is in F ­ rankfurt). With Rigoletto, for instance, the frame is largely filled by a male chorus as viewed from the wings, with a TV monitor in the background letting us share their view of the conductor. In one sequence, a voiceover summarizes the opera’s plot, male chorus members move toward the camera and obscure the source of the singing we can hear, and finally this emerges as a distant, onstage Gilda. This singer has only been seen briefly between scenes as the object of the costumer’s art and as a virtual stage-prop (her “corpse” in a sack) so that she emerges as anything but a diva. The final example of Italian opera is an excerpt from the overture to The Sicilian Vespers, superimposed on the waking face of the figure supposed dead, in the crime story with which the film ends. The exorcism of nationalism, as the ultimate misused power of emotion, comes in the final sequence, where a German musical example is overlaid on what has been read above as a contemporary reworking of the plot of Aïda.18 This example has figured earlier: in the wake of images edited to associate opera with war, two house painters ply their peaceful craft to the soundtrack of the German national anthem, but in the Haydn string quartet (pre-vocal, pre-ideologized) version. In the concluding minutes, this music accompanies the unlikely couple who have survived their own victimization and nursed back to life a man thought to be dead. They have defied conventional endings, and finished on an unspectacular note of growing closeness as a couple, nothing more dramatic than

82  Roger Hillman that. A more satisfying successor has been found to opera, including Italian opera, and the inversion of Aïda’s ending has been achieved with a whimsical inversion of crime thriller conventions. Within Italian traditions, Antonio Gramsci had taken aim at Verdi librettos in equating his operas with a kind of musical version of pulp novels (Falasca-Zamponi 262, n. 147). Bertolucci, a kindred political spirit, had consistently located this melodramatic simplification of Italian life, and this trivialization of Verdi, within Verdi reception. Kluge’s own film essay on nationalism and the emotions goes far beyond Verdi the icon of Italian nationalism. His sovereign transnational and intermedial gaze makes a contribution to Verdi reception that could only come from outside Italy.

Final Curtain The three films considered in this chapter provide something of a retrospective on vibrant post-war film cultures in Germany and Italy. Clustering round the early 1980s, they are less concerned with national identity quests, and more with intermediality across national borders, in the direction of the international and, increasingly, of the transnational. Within Italian cinema, La luna comes at the end of the line, as an apolitical pendant to the earlier, ­Verdi-drenched political subtexts of films by Visconti and by Bertolucci himself. The examples of Italian opera in Kluge and Herzog at the end of the New German Cinema movement throw that movement’s obsessive preoccupation with a national identity quest into international relief. This chapter has focused on multivalent cultural markers, on the operation of cultural memory within an opera and film nexus. A single opera tradition, that of Italy, intersects with two film traditions, Italian and (West) German. The dramatic and potentially political effect of nineteenth-century Italian opera in combination with film, the new medium of the twentieth century, makes for a very powerful mix, across social and aesthetic hierarchies, across media, and across fading grand narratives of the nation.

Notes 1 With the exception of the final scene of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which uses ­Bellini, all film examples for close analysis come from Verdi’s œuvre. 2 However, a crucial role is played in the Tavianis’s La notte di San Lorenzo by the highly operatic Requiem of Verdi. 3 One of the film’s most trenchant critics concedes: “In only one area does the allusive structure of the film cohere, and that is, once again, in the use of Verdi” (Kolker 156). 4 Oedipal family dramas stud Bertolucci’s major films and parallel something being rotten in the State of Italy. The most telling example is the omnipresence in La strategia del ragno (1970, The spider’s stratagem) of a father whom the main figure never knew, and the inversion of an anti-fascist myth as his real story emerges. 5 Angela Carter’s witty review mentions a single opera. She misses Mozart’s Magic Flute in this film that is “so jam-packed with screaming symbols” (365).

Phantoms of Italian Opera  83 The establishing shot of Caterina onstage, dwarfed by a sky studded with stars and yet another incarnation of the moon, is in fact strikingly reminiscent of Schinkel’s famous stage-design for a Magic Flute production in 1815. 6 The curse motif from Rigoletto accompanies this proclamation. While 1900 makes little use of Verdi, it is viewed autobiographically by Bertolucci, who speaks of its “melodramatic view of things which grew directly out of my practically atavistic love of Verdi” (interview with Gian Luigi Rondi in 1983, Gerard, Kline and Sklarew 170). 7 See Conrad: “Azucena describes her mother being dragged to the pyre: like a spirit-guide, he [the innkeeper] introduces a scene of maternal perversity though the secret in this case is not infanticide but wishful incest” (347–48). 8 “Joe has finally found his identity. There’s no question of him going to live with Giuseppe, and the parents don’t come together again, because Giuseppe is still in love with his own mother” (Bertolucci interview with Richard Roud in 1979, Gerard, Kline and Sklarew 143). Leaving aside issues of the intentional fallacy, his film lacks the same degree of unambiguity. 9 “It’s a very odd film for the maker of The Conformist to have made, but, on the evidence of La Luna, Bertolucci appears content to reserve politics for his specifically political movies, as though politics had nothing to do with human relationships” (Carter 364). Beyond their coruscating style, Il conformista and La luna are indeed odd bedfellows, yet the real oddity is the absence of Verdi in Il conformista. 10 Kreuzer acknowledges the “boundary … of mediality” (xii) in her own brief, precisely what the current chapter aims to breach. 11 Crisp and Hillman, “Verdi in Postwar Italian Cinema” 172. For a fuller contextualization of this notion, and a detailed discussion of Leto’s film, see Crisp and Hillman, “Verdi in Postwar Italian Cinema” 163–73. 12 The following section draws on a more expanded analysis of the film in ­Hillman 140–46. 13 See Leppert: “The ventriloquism of Caruso and the off-stage soprano is nondiegetic … yet plainly visible and hence discursive” (102). 14 For Kluge’s own understanding of this film, see Hansen, especially 107–08. 15 See Flinn: “Kluge’s multidirectional critique of nineteenth-century opera constructs his subject variously as narrative form, historical phenomenon, cinematic precursor, and trader in unhappy feelings” (141). 16 In a rich examination of this film’s relationship to music, Flinn sees the disparity between Parsifal and Sibelius as Kluge’s “refusal of his soundtracks to match ‘correct’ opera recordings to their accompanying images” (152). 17 Antokoletz writes of “an originally operatic conception of certain pieces of the Lemminkäinen legend coming by way of Wagner” (125). 18 This complements Flinn’s close analysis of the film’s final segment (159–63), in which Parsifal provides its central thread. Kluge’s bizarre but innovative suggestiveness finishes up pointing to a fusion beyond that of Parsifal and Aïda, in what on the surface is a banal crime fiction story. It is worth recalling one of the director’s own central images of self-reflexivity, the “Film im Kopf” (film in the head) that he seeks to activate. The viewer’s head has more than visual and cerebral functions; Kluge’s viewer is always also addressed as a listener.

Works Cited Antokoletz, Elliott. A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretical-Analytical Context. Routledge, 2014. Carter, Angela. “Bertolucci: La Luna.” Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, edited by Jenny Uglow, Chatto & Windus, 1997, pp. 362–68.

84  Roger Hillman Clément, Catherine. Opera, or, The Undoing of Women. University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Conrad, Peter. Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries. Thames & Hudson, 2011. Crisp, Deborah, and Roger Hillman. “Verdi and Schoenberg in Bertolucci’s ‘The Spider’s Stratagem’.” Music and Letters, vol. 82, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 251–67. ———. “Verdi in Postwar Italian Cinema.” Between Opera and Cinema, edited by Jeongwon Joe and Rose M. Theresa, Routledge, 2002, pp. 155–76. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. University of California Press, 1997. Flinn, Caryl. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. University of California Press, 2004. Gerard, Fabien, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, editors. Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews. University of Mississippi Press, 2000. Hansen, Miriam, editor. “Kluge on Opera, Film, and Feelings.” New German Critique, no. 49, no. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 89–138. Hillman, Roger. Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideolog y. Indiana University Press, 2005. Herzog, Werner. Fitzcarraldo: Erzählung. Hanser, 1982. Kolker, Robert Phillip. Bernardo Bertolucci. Oxford University Press, 1985. Kreuzer, Gundula. Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich. ­Cambridge University Press, 2010. Leppert, Richard. “Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo.” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 99–109. Lindenberger, Herbert. “On Opera and Society (Assuming a Relationship).” ­Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 294–311. Radstone, Susannah. “Cinema and Memory.” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham University Press, 2010, pp. 325–42. Rogers, Holly. “Fitzcarraldo’s Search for Aguirre: Music and Text in the Amazonian Films of Werner Herzog.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 129, no. 1, 2004, pp. 77–99. Sieglohr, Ulrike. “Divine Rapture: The Films of Werner Schroeter.” Film Comment, vol. 48, no. 3, May/June 2012, pp. 50–55. Films Cited 1900. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Ennio Morricone, Produzioni Europee Associate, Les Productions Artistes Associés, and Artemis Film, 1976. Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The death of Maria Malibran). Directed by Werner Schroeter, music by Hellmuth Pattenhausen, et al., Zweites Deutsches ­Fernsehen (ZDF), 1972. Die Macht der Gefühle (The power of emotion). Directed by Alexander Kluge, music by Giuseppe Verdi (amongst others), Kairos-Film and Zweites Deutsches ­Fernsehen (ZDF), 1983. DVD: Madman Entertainment, 2010.

Phantoms of Italian Opera  85 Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs). Directed by Fritz Lang, music by Gottfried Huppertz, Decla-Bioscop AG and Universum Film (UFA), 1924. Fitzcarraldo. Directed by Werner Herzog, music by Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo ­Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Popol Vuh, et al., Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Pro-ject Filmproduktion, Filmverlag der Autoren, et al., 1982. Videodisk: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1982. Il conformista (The conformist). Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Georges Delerue, Mars Film, Marianne Productions, and Maran Film, 1970. La luna (The moon). Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Ennio Morricone, Fiction Cinematografica S.p.a. and Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. DVD: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2009. La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars). Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, music by Nicola Piovani, RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, Ager Cinematografica, and SACIS, 1982. La strategia del ragno (The spider’s stratagem). Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Giuseppe Verdi from Aïda and Rigoletto, RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana and Red Film, 1970. La villeggiatura (Black Holiday). Directed by Marco Leto, music by Egisto Macchi, Ministero del Turismo e dello Spettacolo and Natascia Film, 1973. Niagara. Directed by Henry Hathaway, music by Sol Kaplan, Twentieth Century Fox, 1953. Prima della rivoluzione (Before the revolution). Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, music by Ennio Morricone, Cineriz and Iride Cinematografica, 1964. Senso (Sentiment; The Wanton Contessa). Directed by Luchino Visconti, music by Giuseppe Verdi from Il trovatore and Anton Bruckner from his Symphony No. 7, adapted by Nino Rota, Lux Film, 1954. Vanina Vanini (The Betrayer). Directed by Roberto Rossellini, music by Renzo Rossellini, Zebra Films and Orsay Films, 1961. Viva l’Italia! (Garibaldi). Directed by Roberto Rossellini, music by Renzo ­Rossellini, Galatea Film, Cinematografica RI.RE, Tempo Film, and Francinex, 1961.

4 A Bridge Too Far? Music in the British War Film, 1945–80 Mervyn Cooke

In his 2014 book Projecting Britain at War, Jeremy Havardi identifies four aspects of the national character which have been recurring themes in British films concerned with the Second World War: chivalrous stoicism (the “stiff upper lip”), understated humor in adversity, amateurish improvisation, and pride in the indomitability of the underdog (6–7).1 As is typical in general accounts of the British war movie, however, Havardi does not assess the crucial role played by film scores—which include some of the most famous in British movie history, now firmly lodged in the national consciousness—in helping to delineate these characteristics, beyond a few fleeting mentions of “stirring” musical themes. This label and “rousing” have always been by far the most common catch-all epithets associated with overtly patriotic film scoring, and they are also used repeatedly in the brief allusions to music in another recent survey of Second World War films (see Hughes). The present chapter offers an assessment of scoring practices in a range of British war films from 1945 to the end of the 1970s, by which time the combat film in particular had grown moribund. It concentrates on the development of a distinctive martial idiom borrowed not only from the military but also from coronation music, and action capers conceived in a spirit of almost comic-book schoolboy adventuring strangely at odds with the horrific reality of modern warfare. The Suez crisis, the chilling paranoia of the Cold War, and the costly futility of Vietnam all helped transform the genre in the 1960s and 1970s into a more thoughtful reflection on the issues involved; yet even in the bleakest contexts the romanticized portrayal of resilience in the face of impossible odds—an attitude still very much prevalent in contemporary TV dramas and documentaries about both World Wars—could, with a little musical help, turn some of the worst defeats in British military history (Dunkirk, Arnhem) into a source of fierce national pride, and in its last gasps the combat genre continued to reflect a deep-seated nostalgia for the Second World War as a time of unambiguous moral purpose. German culture minister Michael Naumann once controversially declared that the UK was obsessed with the War, and the only country to have made this conflict the “spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride” (qtd. in Havardi 12). Even a noted British film critic, writing in 1958 at the height of the war film’s popularity, lamented that “A dozen years after World War II we find ourselves in the

A Bridge Too Far?  87 really quite desperate situation of being, not sick of war, but hideously in love with it” (Whitebait). This uncomfortable notion of the nostalgia for wartime as a source of national identity is often inescapably reflected in the upbeat musical style of post-war British scores illustrating the conflict. As the war-film genre became increasingly popular due to its exploitation of a widely shared nostalgia for the Second World War,2 so the musical provision for films of this kind relentlessly tapped an undiminished fondness for somewhat antiquated patriotic marches. In particular, the upbeat tone of the revitalized march idiom that gained a firm place in the public consciousness as a result of ceremonial music composed for (or otherwise inspired by) the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II coincided with a general sense of optimism that the United Kingdom had finally re-emerged triumphantly onto the world stage after the austerity and uncertainties of the immediately post-war years.

Marching for King (and Queen) and Country The typical British war-movie soundtrack of the 1950s and 1960s was just as concerned with exploiting a memorable “big theme” as the contemporaneous American western. Whereas the latter’s sweeping melodies drew from the bright, diatonic optimism, and pioneering dynamism of a nationalistic American sound which owed much to the style of Aaron Copland, for ­British film composers the prototype of what became an instantly recognizable patriotic soundworld was the music of Edward Elgar—considerably more old-fashioned, since the style concerned had originated in the 1890s and tapped directly into the aura of imperialistic grandeur that prevailed until the catastrophe of the First World War. Specifically, it was the set of five orchestral Pomp and Circumstance marches, four of which were composed in the first decade of the twentieth century, which spawned a whole host of imitations in both the cinema and concert hall. In the words of Michael Kennedy, Elgar’s initiative had been “an unprecedented effort to give the full-dress ceremonial military march something of a symphonic status” (“Foreword”). Elgar’s first and fourth marches became the best known on account of the dignified and broadly expressive melodies in their central trio sections: that of the first was famously lyricized as “Land of Hope and Glory,” while that of the fourth bears the composer’s characteristic marking nobilmente. “Land of Hope and Glory,” a tune which in its original instrumental form Elgar had declared would “knock ’em flat” and of which early performances brought standing ovations from audiences yelling with enthusiasm (Kennedy, “Foreword”), was launched in song form as the finale of the Coronation Ode, written for the crowning of Edward VII in 1902.3 From here on, this patriotic style became inextricably associated with the pageantry and heraldry of royal rituals; among Elgar’s other marches with royal associations were an Imperial March for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and a Coronation March for George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Elgar’s celebrated trio melodies are predominantly diatonic, delivered by warm-hued strings and enlivened by an

88  Mervyn Cooke occasional dash of syncopation, and presented above solid bass lines plodding relentlessly along in the simplest of plain, repeated-crotchet rhythms and outlining strongly functional harmonic progressions—all of which characteristics are easily imitable. In one sense, it might be thought richly ironic that Elgar’s style, which was so heavily influenced by German music, came to be adopted as thoroughly emblematic of the British nation. It should be remembered, however, that the present royal family was of German ancestry, and only changed its name from “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” to the homelier “Windsor” in 1917—as a direct result of rife anti-German sentiments during the First World War. Nonetheless, even as late as William Walton’s coronation music in the early 1950s (see below) the distinctly post-Elgarian echoes of the glowing diatonicism of Wagner’s Meistersinger—Hitler’s favorite opera—might still strike listeners as rather ironic. A direct link between Elgarian pomp and circumstance and the increasingly rousing British movie scores of the 1940s and 1950s lies in the music of William Walton, who cornered the market for coronation marches with a more modern hue, and also transferred the idiom directly to the silver screen. Walton’s Crown Imperial, which some dubbed “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6” (Avery 7), was written in 1936 and intended for the coronation of ­Edward VIII, after whose abdication it instead accompanied the crowning of George VI in May 1937. Reviewing the first recording of Crown Imperial, critic William McNaught was decidedly unimpressed: Walton’s march is frankly a pastiche on a well-known model of ternary pomp and circumstance, with the regulation strut and swagger, plenty of plain diatonics, and a nobilmente tune in the middle. Walton was exempted from military service during the War on condition that he provide music for propaganda films—in the euphemism of the day, films “of national importance.” In addition to scoring three such projects for Ealing Studios in 1941 and 1942, he provided the music for Leslie Howard’s Ministry of Information production, The First of the Few (1942), and this gave him the opportunity indelibly to affix his neo-Elgarian patriotic spirit to what was by then an already legendary piece of military hardware. A fictionalized account of the life of Spitfire designer Reginald Mitchell, the film was furnished with a score from which extracts quickly became popular in the concert hall in the guise of the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. The patriotic tone of the Prelude inhabits the same post-Elgarian soundworld as Walton’s coronation march, while the boisterous Fugue originally accompanied shots of the assembly line working intensely to produce the prototype aircraft. Elsewhere in the score Walton employed the standard device of supplying musical quotations at appropriate moments, including a leitmotif from Wagner’s Ring for the Nazi domination of Europe—a rather obvious trick he would later reprise in his rejected score to Battle of Britain (1969). The Spitfire Prelude and Fugue became firmly lodged in the

A Bridge Too Far?  89 public imagination as a wartime instrumental anthem, and, for example, was conducted by Malcolm Arnold in 1965 to mark the recent death of Winston Churchill (Meredith and Harris 245).4 Walton’s Crown Imperial was revived for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, for which occasion Walton composed a companion piece, the more flamboyant Orb and Sceptre, which contains a splendid trio melody of which Elgar would justly have been proud. The revival of patriotic and splendiferously ceremonial music of this kind for the Queen’s coronation, an event symbolizing the optimism of a fresh generation of Britons emerging from post-war austerity into what was widely considered to be the birth of a new Elizabethan Age, had a profound and immediate impact in the cinema. Even Miklós Rózsa aped the coronation-march style in his music to MGM’s Young Bess, for example, a treatment of the early years of the first Elizabeth released—­ appropriately enough—in 1953. Laurence Olivier asked Walton to base the opening music for his film of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1955) on Orb and Sceptre (Walton 243), since the screenplay opens with an extended sequence during which Edward IV is crowned: this was a gratuitous attempt to cash in on the still-current coronation fever, since it involved not only the wholesale importation of lines from the wrong Shakespeare play but also (just in case the coronation context was not obvious enough) the insertion at the outset of a huge title card proclaiming the importance to the story of “The Crown of England.”5 This conjunction of coronation-fueled nationalism with a refreshed dose of musical pomp and circumstance fed into British film music just as the warmovie genre began to acquire a new confidence. As the new Elizabethan Age dawned, so the coronation-march style seemed perfectly suited not only to capturing a spirit of indomitable optimism and fierce national pride in the cinema but also for exploiting the “big theme” mentality which has always helped film scoring to achieve popular appeal. In 1952, the Battle of Britain film Angels One Five featured in its main-title sequence the rousing “Royal Air Force March Past,” here arranged by former Mosquito pilot John Wooldridge but co-composed back in 1919 by RAF music director H. Walford Davies; its Elgarian trio section was later added by Davies’s successor, George Dyson.6 Another film about the RAF, Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters (released in 1955, the same year as Richard III ) vividly told the tale of 617 Squadron and their legendary 1943 bombing raid on three Ruhr dams vital to the German war effort, and Eric Coates’s famous main-title march deliberately and unashamedly adopted the Elgarian nobilmente idiom, complete with plain-crotchet plodding bass line and some thoroughly familiar localized modulations. In 1956, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made an ambitious film of the first significant British victory of the War: the scuttling of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939, after it had been hemmed in at Montevideo harbor by the Royal Navy following a thrilling cross-Atlantic pursuit. Meticulously researched, and partly filmed during official exercises with real ships, The Battle of the River Plate featured a fine Prelude and March by Brian Easdale, who skillfully managed to avoid

90  Mervyn Cooke the more obvious Elgar–Walton clichés by exploring muscular dissonances, bold orchestral rhetoric, and unpredictable and often bitter-sweet harmonic twists hinting variously at triumph or adversity. Powell recalled a preliminary screening of the film arranged for the benefit of the project’s financiers: There was a big theme that went with the big naval stuff, but we used Brian’s Latin American music and the voice of Muriel Smith singing for the playout of the film. When the lights went up, we all knew we had a big hit. John [Davis] turned to me, and said, “Micky, why didn’t you use that big naval theme of Brian Easdale’s for the playout of the picture?” Emeric said [in his Hungarian accent], “Vell, you see, John, the battle is over. The Graf Spee is no more, and we felt it would be nice to finish with the song and the music as if it came from the shore of this neutral country who had been so kind to us.” (Million-Dollar Movie 347)7 It emerged that Davis, managing director of the Rank Organisation, wanted to delay the film’s premiere until the next Royal Command performance (to be given in the presence of the monarch) and therefore wished it to conclude with a stirring naval scene. So the music was duly changed. “But I didn’t really agree with him…,” recalled Powell: “The idea of showing these great ships sailing into the sunset accompanied by this gay Latin American music was a good one. After such a victory, to crow over your defeated enemy would be really a little too much” (Million-Dollar Movie 347). Like Alan Rawsthorne’s film music, Easdale’s score also reflected his ability to compose sophisticated, dissonant cues which avoided hyperbolic cinematic clichés. Another significant British naval victory, this time from 1941, was celebrated in C. S. Forester’s script for Sink the Bismarck! (1960), for which Clifton Parker composed a march with strong echoes of Elgar and Walton.8 Parker’s march follows the Elgarian ternary model, with nervously bustling energy in the outer sections and a broad trio melody, trudging crotchet bass line, familiar harmonic twists, and occasional catchy syncopations; the trio melody is recapitulated by way of a stirring coda, again following the Elgarian pattern. According to James Marshall, Parker’s piece was so authentically “regal and patriotic” in tone that the film’s early audiences “were reported to be standing up for the end title, mistaking it for the National Anthem” (12).9 Particularly striking is the musical sequencing at the start of the film.10 Alfred Newman’s Twentieth Century-Fox fanfare—composed in 1933—is immediately followed by a military-band arrangement of the German national anthem, accompanying newsreel footage of the Bismarck’s gala launch in 1939; after a brief interruption by the sound of an air-raid siren in London, Parker’s Elgarian march then commences against the main-title footage of the uniformed Captain Shepard (Kenneth More) walking across Trafalgar Square in 1941. The sequence thus juxtaposes and parallels militaristic music from three different nations, with Parker’s stiff-upper-lip march shifting the tone to one of noble optimism, and the brash American fanfare at the very opening paving

A Bridge Too Far?  91 the way for the first words we hear at the conclusion of the sequence, which are those of an American journalist in London: “To an American reporter, there is something very special about the people of this city, this island, this nation….” More unusual than the Bismarck march had been Parker’s earlier march for the desert-war escapade Sea of Sand (1958), a whimsical cue with folk-like modal inflections more reminiscent of Vaughan Williams and merely a (delicately played) snare drum lending the music a military feel. The jauntiness of the music here is also reflected in a catchy theme whistled elsewhere in the film, but this lost out in popularity to the prominence of Kenneth Alford’s 1914 march “Colonel Bogey” in David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (released in 1957), for which the film’s composer Malcolm Arnold won an Academy Award. In both instances, the carefree whistling perfectly captured the undiminished cheerfulness of plucky troops resourcefully facing impossible odds, and established a jaunty musical stereotype later to be emulated by Elmer Bernstein in his famous main-title theme for The Great Escape (1963) which, significantly, became a staple chant of supporters of England’s national football team who responded readily to what its composer described as the music’s “indomitability” and “spirit” (Redman 13). Thanks in part to a best-selling recording of Alford’s tune by Mitch Miller and his band, The Bridge on the River Kwai brought a belated hit status to Colonel Bogey, for which Arnold had composed a slick counter-melody which could also be played as a march in its own right (and became known as The River Kwai March). This was just as well, given that litigation from Alford’s estate meant that for years afterwards no recording of the two tunes in combination could be issued (Cushion 4). They were still kept well apart in the half-hour concert suite which the BBC commissioned from Christopher Palmer to mark Arnold’s seventieth birthday in 1991, a venture which (thanks to Palmer’s skill) lent the music a coherence it scarcely possessed in the film itself: “the music is necessarily so episodic and fragmentary,” wrote the arranger, “that the only way to deal with it, as far as I could see, was to take the materials apart and put them together again” (Palmer 5). Although Alford’s tune, which is whistled diegetically by the Allied troops in their harsh Japanese prison camp as a means of maintaining morale, might seem ineffectually naïve and unthreatening, anyone familiar with it from its earlier popularity during the War would have been aware that it had been lyricized in a manner designedly offensive to the luminaries of the Third Reich: Hitler has only got one ball, Göring has two but very small, Himmler has something sim’lar, But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all. Not wishing to taint his project with vulgarity, Lean had opted to jettison these lyrics. Even so, the melody’s popular status as an affront to the Axis powers

92  Mervyn Cooke meant that considerable embarrassment could still be caused as late as 1980 when, in a spectacular gaffe, a military band proudly played it to welcome the Japanese prime minister on his visit to Canada (“Our Band Hit Sour” 1). Both Bogey and the Kwai March inhabit a jocular soundworld which contrasts  markedly with traditional Elgarian pomp and circumstance, and reflects the moods of humor in adversity and pride in the resilience of the underdog which Havardi identified as consistent character tropes in British war movies. Arnold nevertheless incorporated an unmistakable nod toward the Walton coronation-march idiom in a broad melodic strain half-way through his otherwise turbulent and grittily dissonant main-title overture. As sometimes with the like-minded Walton, however, the gesture may have been intended as tongue-in-cheek; and Kwai—made as it was more than a decade after the end of the war—certainly marked a turning point in the mood of British war movies as a new spirit of adventure came partly to replace the earlier emphasis on patriotism and chivalry. In any event, the film’s great success meant that Arnold was instantly typecast as a composer for this genre: “Afterwards I was sold every bloody war movie that there was!”, he moaned (Meredith and Harris 167), and he went on to rework his own generic formulae in Dunkirk (1958) and The Heroes of Telemark (1965). Such typecasting also meant he was an obvious choice to help out Walton when his friend ran into difficulties while scoring the aerial epic Battle of Britain—an ill-fated last blast of the patriotic style considered in more detail below.

Spirit of Adventure The Heroes of Telemark is a good illustration of how the 1960s British war movie and its music were not solely about stiff-upper-lip patriotism: indeed, the ­coronation-march idiom (which appears fleetingly in the film) dwindled somewhat as the genre became far more concerned with cultivating a heady sense of adventure in which the excitement of the chase, the sheer ingenuity of the escapades, and the ability to overcome seemingly impossible odds were far more important—and cinematically thrilling. Not surprisingly, the heroic action sequences which characterized so many big-budget war movies in the 1960s (and not merely British examples) inspired film composers to develop the “big theme” mentality to a high point of visceral excitement and melodic memorability; at the same time, more modern elements from music associated with other contemporaneous action-driven genres—such as enormously popular and commercially successful spy thrillers—increasingly infiltrated the traditional war-movie idiom with harder-hitting dissonances, obsessive ostinati, and the suggestion of dark psychological undercurrents. At times, the adventures portrayed on screen became so implausibly ­entertaining—and so far removed from the grim and bloody reality of ­warfare—that they seem more akin to schoolboy yarns than historical essays; and sometimes the tone of the War’s portrayal even approached that of a sports fixture. But the trend was often an accurate reflection of the first-hand

A Bridge Too Far?  93 accounts on which several films of this type were based. If the daredevil dressing up in German uniforms which allows the fictional Allied heroes of Where Eagles Dare (1968) to infiltrate a Nazi mountain stronghold seems far-fetched, such audacious impersonations of the enemy were indeed carried out with some success during the War, as in two historical accounts which were later filmed: Ill Met By Moonlight (book: 1950; film: 1957), in which a German officer is kidnapped on Crete by Allies working with the Greek resistance, and The Colditz Story (book: 1952; film: 1955), in which escape attempts are made by prisoners wearing German uniforms fashioned from blankets and cardboard, with insignia forged by secretly melting down lead pipes from the castle’s lavatories. Allusions to sport, and sporting metaphors, abound in both real-life wartime accounts and fictional stories inspired by their authors’ personal experiences of active service. Regarding war as a sport conveniently brought together British eccentricity, understatement, teamwork, self-discipline, and above all a sense of fair play (Havardi 20). And escaping from a prison camp— especially one so uncannily like an English boarding school as Colditz, with its after-lights-out dormitory escapades, and where the inmates’ rough-and-tumble sports exercises were routinely followed by morally uplifting cold baths— simply became “the greatest sport in the world” (Reid 9, 70, 75). In his preface to the memoir on which Powell’s and Pressburger’s film of Ill Met By Moonlight was based, W. Stanley Moss revealed that he had based his account on a diary he had kept at the time because he did not want to “lose the spirit of light-heartedness and twenty-two-year-old exuberance (almost bumptiousness) with which it was written”; the book’s prologue quotes a radio announcer as having described the tale thus: “Of all the stories that have come out of the War this is the one which schoolboys everywhere will best remember” (Moss 13–14). The schoolboy spirit shines through in Moss’s account, in which a young sailor (as his vessel approaches the Cretan coast) “seemed to be enjoying the whole affair much as a schoolboy at a pantomime” and a possible attempt by the occupying Germans to trick them from the shore with a signal lamp is described as a “prank” (Moss 25). As in the movies, German soldiers are dehumanized mannequins (“seated primly upright like tailors’ dummies” as they pass by in a motorized convoy) and their General is “a thick-set man” possessing “most of the regular Teutonic features—thin lips, bull neck, blue eyes, and a fixed expression” (Moss 94, 105). The almost comic-book two-­d imensionality of the treatment is unlikely to have fazed Powell, who in the preface to his own tie-in monograph to The Battle on the River Plate (written in the year before Ill Met was released) declared: “My facts, times and dates are as correct as I can make them but this is not an historical document, it is an adventure-story” (Last Voyage 6). In an attempt to combine solid symphonic writing with a local folk color, Powell and Pressburger commissioned Cretan composer Mikis Theodorakis to compose the score for Ill Met, but encountered hostility from him when it emerged he considered both the British directors and wartime provocateur Patrick Leigh-Fermor to be “interlopers”: he said his fees would be paid to the Enosis revolutionary movement.

94  Mervyn Cooke The film had to be shot in the Alpes-Maritimes because the Greek government felt that to make it on location in Crete would be “a provocative act.” Powell later regretted having filmed the adventure in monochrome as he felt this made it look too much like a “historical document” (Million-Dollar Movie 349–50, 358–59). Two authors whose thrilling fictional tales had a profound influence on British war movies both made their names with best-selling action adventures at around the same time: Ian Fleming with his James Bond series of secret-agent novels (publication commencing in 1953; filmed from 1962 onwards), and Alistair MacLean with his eclectic output of action thrillers, several of which were set in the War (publication commencing in 1955; filmed from 1961 onwards). Fleming’s Bond led a constantly womanizing and headily fast life which left virtually no time for conventional patriotism: his forays against the enemies of the state were more in the nature of single-handed gladiatorial combat, laced with a savory tinge of personal vendetta. With a new Cold War ruthlessness and lack of sentimentality, these were modern action adventures par excellence, and John Barry’s celebrated pop-orchestral scores for the early instalments in the (still ongoing) film franchise caught the mood of the times perfectly. MacLean’s debut novel HMS Ulysses, on the other hand, was a grimly serious account of the Arctic naval convoys, based on the author’s first-hand wartime experiences: quite unlike his often tongue-in-cheek later adventures, the book shared a kinship with Nicholas Monsarrat’s starkly realistic 1951 novel (also semi-autobiographical), The Cruel Sea, which was memorably filmed in 1953. The movie version preserved the sometimes deeply uncomfortable moral dilemmas of Monsarrat’s tale, and also broke significant new ground in its soundtrack by making prominent use of what MacLean in his own novel described as “the monotonous, nerve-drilling pinging of the Asdic” (MacLean, HMS Ulysses 149), referring to the anti-submarine sonar technology which in The Cruel Sea becomes something of a character in its own right. The tension these dogged bleeps generate sometimes obviates the need for an orchestral score to fulfill this function, and it was to remain a stock device in later Cold War naval dramas. Rawsthorne’s economical non-diegetic music elsewhere took a notably fresh approach to the genre, with its characteristically gritty dissonances and resultant sense of uncomfortable struggle rather than easy patriotism.11 Early on in his first book to be filmed, The Guns of Navarone, MacLean reflected that the conflict was “not a war of bugle calls and roaring engines and magnificent defiance in the clamor of battle” but one “of patience and endurance and stability, of cunning and craft and stealth, and these were not commonly the attributes of youth…” (Guns of Navarone 192). However, the movie treatment of this tale (which did well at the box office) entirely lacked these serious undercurrents by adopting the customary ­Hollywood-style big-budget sweep, with a suitably traditional orchestral score by Dimitri Tiomkin rounded off with old-fashioned allusions to Thomas

A Bridge Too Far?  95 Arne’s patriotic tune “Rule, Britannia!” when Royal Navy destroyers finally come to the rescue of the valiant commandos. By the time the long-delayed sequel Force 10 from Navarone was filmed in 1978, the inevitable choice of composer had now become Ron G ­ oodwin, who single-handedly transformed the soundscape of the British war movie during the 1960s and generated some of the most viscerally effective scores ever conceived for the genre. With only occasional allusions to the coronation-­ march idiom, Goodwin’s music was characterized by a fresh formula ideally suited to unsentimental action scenes, and most of his scores showcased the kind of thrilling “big theme” which served to remind spectators that, in many respects, these British war adventures had now become a direct equivalent to the American western. Goodwin’s action formula was honed in 633 Squadron (1964), a fictional tale of the exploits of a daredevil Mosquito squadron based on the far more somber novel by Frederick E. Smith, of which the tragic ending and unpleasant character flaws in certain of the pilots were both significantly toned down for the film. Smith’s novel nevertheless (like Bond’s missions) perpetuates both the growing myth that a single daring act of heroism can halt an entire enemy initiative (“the Germans are on something big. Something so big, in fact, that it might have a far-reaching effect on the war if it isn’t destroyed”) and that the Norwegian landscape on which the bombers inflict their damage might as well be in Monument Valley (“another redskin will bite the dust” as the mountain collapses) (Smith 194, 195). Goodwin’s exciting main-title theme is propelled along by spirited hemiola rhythms which he claimed had been inspired by the numbers 6 (= 68 ) and 3 (= 43 ) in the film’s title (Bond and Kaplan, “Break for the Fjord!” 6). The unmistakable feel of a western-like “big theme” stems entirely from this catchy rhythmic underpinning, which conceptually recalls the hard-driving, dislocated rhythmic accompaniments for many scores to Hollywood westerns and related genres, from Elmer Bernstein’s trailblazing The Magnificent Seven (1960) to John Williams’s Star Wars (1977). In its second section, Goodwin’s theme lapses into a more conventional march rhythm, and the contrast between the swirling compound- and triple-time opening melody and the foursquare march passage parallels a similar metrical shift in John Addison’s theme for the earlier RAF drama Reach for the Sky (1956), which recounts the life of legless fighter ace—and onetime Colditz inmate—Douglas Bader. In both scores, the buoyant triple-time rhythms and swirling accompanimental figures recall the swashbuckling naval adventures of an earlier age and put the listener more in mind of an aerial ballet than airborne carnage. In addition to the “big theme,” the formula Goodwin laid down here also includes economical thriller-type cues for moments of tension, often featuring spine-tingling octatonic discords and obsessive reiterations of terse rhythmic motifs; the generic nature of such cues meant that some of the less immediately identifiable music from 633 Squadron could be recycled in the later film Attack on the Iron Coast (1968; original music by Gerard Schurmann) without incongruity.

96  Mervyn Cooke As if to illustrate how traditional British stereotypes can easily lead to uncritical assumptions, American film buffs Jeff Bond and Alexander Kaplan describe Goodwin’s energetic themes as having “so defined the feeling of ­British stiff-upper-lip militarism that they qualify for anthem status among war-movie buffs” (“Break for the Fjord!” 5). Anthem status they may well have acquired, but the sheer excitement generated by this kind of scoring is worlds apart from the dignified restraint of the proverbial stiff upper lip; and neither is the whole 633 Squadron main-title cue a march, as these authors incorrectly state. More of an Elgarian flavor creeps into Goodwin’s main-title music for Operation Crossbow (1965), in which the action cues add another ingredient to the basic formula: a persistent four-note descending ostinato, used in both major (Lydian) and minor modes, as a simple tension-generating device in a manner not dissimilar to the more understated moments in some of Barry’s contemporaneous Bond scores. The parallel with 007’s adventures persists in the way in which the climactic destruction of the Germans’ V-weapon base “echoed the obligatory destruction-of-the-villain’s-compound finale of many of the James Bond films”; after a poor start at the US box office, MGM (for whose British arm Goodwin was a staff composer) wanted to retitle the film The Great Spy Mission in a seemingly cross-generic marketing strategy (Bond et al., “What’s the Buzz?” 21). Made in 1967 but not released until 1969, Submarine X-1 toted the kind of knife-fight between frogmen which had been a memorable feature of the Bond movie Thunderball (1965); as with Crossbow, some of Goodwin’s action music was not in the event used, but the project benefited from a main-title “nautical anthem brimming with optimism” (Bond and Kaplan, “Prepare to Submerge!” 14).12 Where Eagles Dare (1968) is arguably Goodwin’s finest achievement in the war genre. This is another Bond-like action yarn featuring an enemy fortress in a spectacular Alpine setting (probably inspired by Fleming’s 1963 novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), a wise commander-in-chief keeping a close listening watch on the progress of the mission back in the UK—just like Bond’s boss, “M”—and a hero (Major Smith) whose description as “a man of resource… A man of infinite resource … who can extricate himself from positions of utmost difficulty” is worthy of 007 himself (MacLean, Where Eagles Dare 112).13 The strength and freshness of Goodwin’s non-diegetic score for Where Eagles Dare lie in the jettisoning of the major-key triumphalism of his earlier war assignments in favor of minor-key music of dogged determination. The obsessively repeated snare-drum rhythm accompanying the gradual nocturnal approach toward the camera of the Junkers 52 aircraft above breath-taking Alpine scenery, on its way to drop the Allied agents behind enemy lines, is a potent distillation of similar rhythmic ostinati in his earlier scores, and in this instance a reflection of the director’s wish that there would be no competition between the sound of the aircraft’s engines and heavy orchestral scoring at the opening of the film (Bond et al., “Die, Nazi, Die!” 7). Once the full orchestra then gets the main-title underway with its grim march, Goodwin adopts the time-honored tradition of equating muscular counterpoint with struggle or flight, basing his fugato section on a

A Bridge Too Far?  97 diminution of the ascending minor-scale tetrachord which serves as a simple main motif elsewhere: as Rózsa had been before him, he was fully aware of the historical symbolism of the fuga (that emblem of German intellectual severity in the Baroque era) which underlies gestures of this kind, and recalled that the passage had been inspired by “people following each other around and dodging away from each other” (Bond et al., “Die, Nazi, Die!” 7).14 Much of the rest of the score is tautly economical, with the music often restricted to simple parallel chordal motion set against determined pedal points and snare-drum ostinati maintained at some considerable length. The most striking inspiration is the intensely chromatic string music for the climactic hand-to-hand combat on the icy cable-car roof, in which the component parts of Goodwin’s “sort of twelve-tone version” (Bond et al., “Die, Nazi, Die!” 7) of the fugato interlock with a claustrophobic logic of which Lutosławski might well have been proud.

A Bridge Too Far? As the vivid and seemingly never-ending horrors of the Vietnam War became widely understood by the public in the late 1960s, both mindless patriotism and escapist wartime action—even if firmly cast in a historical setting—not surprisingly went out of fashion in the cinema. For the British, the Suez crisis of 1956 had already uncomfortably demonstrated just how little the country’s former imperial might was worth in the modern era, and this realization may well have subconsciously shaped the more adult flavor of war films from the later 1950s onwards (e.g., Ice Cold in Alex (1958; music by Leighton Lucas) and The Bridge on the River Kwai), with their flawed characters—sometimes reliant on alcohol for Dutch courage and on the verge of cracking under pressure— and willingness to tackle major defeats such as that portrayed in Dunkirk, Arnold’s score for which nevertheless includes a lush Waltonian main-title march. Dunkirk was a success at the box office in 1958 and was also given a Royal Command performance, but critic William Whitebait wrote a scathing review which reflected on its cultural and political context: So while we “adventure” at Suez, in the cinemas we are still thrashing Rommel—and discovering that he was a gentleman!—sweeping the Atlantic of submarines, sending the Few to scatter Goering’s many. The more we lose face in the world’s counsels, the grander, in our excessively modest way, we swell in this illusionary mirror held up by the screen. It is less a spur to morale than a salvo to wounded pride; and as art or entertainment dreadfully dull. Up to this point, according to groundbreaking director Lindsay Anderson, the British cinema had been as “snobbish, emotionally inhibited, willfully blind to the conditions of the present, [and] dedicated to an out-of-date, exhausted national ideal” (qtd. in Chapman 196). In her study of the US combat film, Jeanine Basinger notes that between 1965 and 1975 the genre at last

98  Mervyn Cooke came to be “tested” by parody, satire, and a sense of “opposite reality” (210). In the UK, too, satire and black comedy memorably reared their combined heads in Richard Lester’s singular Second World War project How I Won the War (1967), with music by Ken Thorne. More historically remote wars were commandeered for this purpose, too, with Tony Richardson’s highly inventive The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) in equal parts a “savage condemnation” of Britain’s past imperial control and a direct response to Vietnam (Petrie 609). Although both Battle of Britain (1969) and A Bridge Too Far (1977) are characterized by a greater sense of realism in their action sequences than had been the norm in earlier movies in the genre, these two big-budget films demonstrate how the conventional Second World War action genre somewhat uneasily tried to adapt itself to this new context. In both cases, a tension between outmoded gung-ho attitudes and the modern bleakly pessimistic view of warfare and the suffering it engenders is reflected in the films’ scores, one of which was summarily rejected by the producers and the other remained arguably inadequate to its task. Both projects were technically British productions but, as had by this stage become the norm, were heavily indebted to US financiers and therefore kept a keen eye on the transatlantic market (reflected in the prominent casting of American actors in leading roles, a trend in evidence since The Guns of Navarone): by the late 1960s, the UK film industry was 90% funded by the US, and Battle of Britain (produced by 007 mogul Harry Saltzman) has been cited as a clear example of the blockbuster-mentality overspending which directly caused the industry’s fortunes to slump in the following decade (Petrie 609). Both films tap into the by now long-established Hollywood tradition of lavish action-driven epics based on the detailed recreation of historical events, which Basinger views as the combat genre’s “final evolutionary stage: the true war has been removed, and in its place is its filmed replica. This finally makes the war a legendary story—fully distanced and mythic—suitable to be one of our national stories for all time” (170). Analyzing The Longest Day (1962), Battle of the Bulge (1965), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), she laments in particular the inability of these films’ all-star casts to engage the audience in effective character development (188 and 192). Walton’s return to film scoring with Battle of Britain, after a lacuna of some 14 years, was a far from happy experience.15 He wrote to Arnold in September 1968 saying he had “rashly” accepted the commission and asked him to conduct the recording of the score to give him some moral support. Walton’s wife remembered that he was “determined to write something rousing and British, something people would remember. It also amused him to discover that the German armies had marched into battle to the accompaniment of music by Wagner; William felt he could make good use of this” (Walton 97). The outcome of this discovery was some Sieg fried-derived motivic material associated with the Luftwaffe pilots, and yet another coronation-style march for the RAF. The latter no longer came easily, however. “No sign of a tune!”, Walton informed Arnold (who once claimed he had helped his friend compose Orb and Sceptre), and continued: “Every time I think of one I find I’ve

A Bridge Too Far?  99 16

written it before” (Meredith and Harris 278). Eventually, the new Walton march duly materialized, as part of a somewhat meagre score amounting to a mere 20 minutes, of which the undoubted high point was a scherzo for dog-­ fighting sequences which had to be heavily arranged by Arnold, who supplied some transitional material in order to patch together repeats of identical passages: a substantial part of the manuscript for this cue is in Arnold’s hand (­Burton-Page 104). The first Walton knew of the rejection of his score was when a journalist phoned to ask him about it. It emerged that the United Artists executives, who had been sent the music in isolation from the film, had at first deemed it to be of insufficient length for a soundtrack album; in a rather half-hearted measure, this concern resulted in an interim request via his agent that Walton add a new 16-bar section to the middle of the march. The composer responded to his agent (with a reference to Elgar’s most famous trio melody) that “If they want another ‘Land of ho. and glo.’ it’s not on the cards—for it is one already on a slightly smaller scale in that it doesn’t last quite as long” (qtd. in Kennedy, Portrait of Walton 239). The whole score was then rejected, Barry declining to provide a replacement and the task in turn passing—perhaps inevitably—to Goodwin. Walton’s close friend Olivier, playing the part of RAF supremo Sir Hugh Dowding, retaliated by threatening to have his name removed from the film’s credits if none of the original score was used: in consequence, the dogfight scherzo (“Battle in the Air”) was reinstated (and included on the soundtrack album), and Walton’s music was not given the slightest competition from sound effects, which were memorably suppressed during the entire aerial sequence. In some release prints, the march was also retained, underscoring Dowding’s final appearance—for which moment it had been specifically conceived (Walton 98).17 A DVD release of the film in 2004 for the first time offered Walton’s rejected score as an alternative music track, but (if accurately reconstructed) the cue locations are somewhat puzzling: the glowing patriotic march accompanies the opening main-title sequence of solely German pomp and circumstance, not the British, and one of the Sieg fried-­ derived cues illogically accompanies a narrowly averted wheels-up landing by an RAF Spitfire.18 Goodwin’s much more ubiquitously spotted replacement score, in addition to reworking the formulae thoroughly familiar from his earlier war features, gave the Germans their own cheerily diatonic march as a clearer recognition feature, at first entitled “Luftwaffe March” and later (when it became a military-band hit in Anglophone countries) going under the less treasonable title “Aces High.” The sheer jolliness of this naïve-sounding music was by no means unique in later British war movies, others of which applied this more general-purpose militaristic style to the British as well as the Germans. The march of this type in Goodwin’s score to Force 10 from Navarone (1978), his last for a major feature, might even be thought to mark out the film “as something of a comedy. Stylistically, it recalls nineteenth-century European military marches rather than the inherently ‘British’ harmonic language of the

100  Mervyn Cooke composer’s other war scores” (see Bond and Kendall, “A Return to Force”).19 This film, however, was another lightweight MacLean adventure not as likely to trouble the moral conscience as much as a purportedly accurate account of a major historical set-piece: the humiliating British defeat attendant on the massive airborne assault on the Arnhem and Nijmegen bridges in September 1944, known as Operation Market Garden, which as musically depicted in A Bridge Too Far treads an uncomfortable middle ground between traditional patriotic defiance and the film’s gritty depiction of what Basinger terms “the futility of war and the wretchedness of a specific military debacle” (331). Addison’s jolly main-title march, of a kind he had already written for I Was Monty’s Double (1958), jars on its first appearance, materializing as it does immediately after somber newsreel footage; there are momentary nods to the Elgar–­ Walton lineage, but (apart from one dissonant flattened sixth in the bass) the idiom is again more rooted in the nineteenth-century diatonicism of the parade ground. Admittedly, there is relatively little music in what is a very long film, and the violent scenes are left unscored; but the recapitulations of the march repeatedly strike an inappropriate tone. At the start of the end credits, the march is faded in for the final time after an appreciable pause, perhaps indicating a recognition on the part of the filmmakers that such cheerful music is by no means the ideal response to the closing scenes of carnage, dejected troops, devastation, and displaced civilians. (Interestingly, one commentator who admires Addison’s march describes it as “stirringly heroic and yet bittersweet,” but quite erroneously believes it to be a “minor key melody” (Hughes 216).) Such caution had also been in evidence in the soundtracks for two 1950s war films. In The Dam Busters, Coates’s march is drowned out by the homecoming bombers’ engine noise and is briefly sneaked back in at a discreetly low volume beneath a radio announcer’s report of the mission, needing to be faded back out into solemn silence when it emerges that eight of the bombers failed to return; as in A Bridge Too Far, the march is faded back in again for the end credits rather than starting in a triumphant blaze. And in Dunkirk Arnold’s march is recapitulated for the triumphant arrival, cavalry-like, of the Royal Navy, but is quickly replaced by somber underscoring as a voiceover reminds us of the appalling human cost of the defeat. Addison had himself served as a tank commander in the aftermath of the Normandy landings (though not, as often reported, during Market Garden itself). Perhaps, like the project’s screenwriter William Goldman, he believed the battle to have been the last “in which any of the old romantic notions of war held true,” Goldman directly contrasting it to the “brutal and dirty” Battle of the Bulge which followed (n.p.).20 The traditional stiff-upper lip was still very much in evidence during the chaotic struggle for the Rhine bridges. The Arnhem veteran Lt. Colonel John Frost, watching actor Anthony Hopkins portraying him on location trying frantically to dodge a German sniper’s bullets, advised him: “you’re running too fast … you would never run that fast. You have to show the Germans and your own men your contempt for danger” (Goldman n.p.). This sentiment would not be out of place coming from one of

A Bridge Too Far?  101 the numerous stereotyped Sandhurst officers in MacLean’s fictional war adventures. And it cannot be denied that, like so many of the film-score marches described in this essay, Addison’s musical response to the film subsequently became a staple of the real-life military-band repertoire. Two other British war films from the late 1970s showed (in very different ways) how more resourceful composers could still keep audiences on the edge of their seats. For the “what if” scenario of The Eagle Has Landed (1976)—a kind of Where Eagles Dare in reverse, in which crack German paratroops infiltrate a Norfolk village in a bold attempt to kidnap Churchill—Lalo Schifrin composed a memorably tense score, including a main-title march which avoided well-worn British and Continental stereotypes. For Yanks (1979), Richard Rodney Bennett prevented his own march tune from lapsing into cliché by utilizing a Britten-like dissonant bass line, much as fellow British composer Benjamin Frankel had done in his elaborate and inventive score for Ken Annakin’s epic US film Battle of the Bulge back in 1965. But 1977, the year in which A Bridge Too Far was released, had also seen the release of Sam Peckinpah’s relentlessly violent Anglo-German production Cross of Iron (sparsely scored by US composer Ernest Gold), and the controversial director’s trademark brutality lent the genre a new level of viewing discomfort which would be revisited and modified by filmmakers in later decades. The significance of A Bridge Too Far for the genre should not, however, be underestimated. Remarkably, considering its frank depiction of such a shambolic defeat, the film received official backing from the Armed Forces because, as S. P. MacKenzie puts it, the project clearly showed how, cinematically, “the Second World War had finally become history” (158). As the public taste for both epic-scale recreations of real battles and escapist action-adventures with a wartime setting continued to wane, the combat genre’s influence remained crucial in the hugely lucrative family-oriented blockbusters of the New Hollywood. For example, many critics have noted how elements of The Dam Busters, 633 Squadron, and Where Eagles Dare appear to have directly inspired the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars (1977), Williams’s score for which contains a melodic strain strongly reminiscent of Elgar and Walton in the trio section of its “Throne Room” march. If Star Wars hero Harrison Ford’s acting career was hardly helped by Force 10 from Navarone in the following year—a story for which the film rights had been secured in 1968 but which took ten years to reach the screen owing to diminished public interest in such war-set adventures in the Vietnam era (Bond and Kendall, “A Return to Force” 3–4)—the same was certainly not true of his star participation in the Indiana Jones series, launched with Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. This franchise skillfully revitalized the action-adventure impulse in a patently fantasized take on a period wartime setting, and once more gave Williams the chance to write a splendid— and decidedly American—march of the kind which helped put the traditional non-diegetic orchestral score firmly back on the broader Hollywood map. Returning, by way of conclusion, to Havardi’s categorization of the basic character tropes promoted by post-war British war movies, this chapter has

102  Mervyn Cooke shown how all the stereotypes he identifies were directly reflected in the music composed for such films. First, and most prominently of all, chivalrous stoicism was communicated by constant reworkings (and the occasional modernizing) of the nobilmente idiom of the Elgar–Walton lineage of symphonic marches, in ways which meshed effectively with the strong sense of patriotism and duty engendered by this brand of music’s indelible association with coronations and other royal events. At the same time, the popularity of arrangements of the best-known British movie marches in the military-band repertoire (which is still prevalent today) demonstrated that such musical nostalgia readily fed back into the psyche of the armed forces themselves, in the shape of what we have seen one critic describe (of Walton’s music) as “regulation strut and swagger” (McNaught). Second, humor in adversity and the cheerful spirit of amateurish improvisation inspired jaunty and catchy melodies which contrasted effectively with the traditional musical pomp and circumstance—and sometimes did this even within the confines of a single film. To Havardi’s list we should also add action-driven portrayals of heroic adventuring, in which combat became a kind of dangerous sport and elicited particularly thrilling underscoring influenced by musical trends in other genres of the action film. Collectively, these dramatic preoccupations and their often memorable and uplifting musical portrayals vividly reflect a consistent feeling of nostalgia for Britain’s finest hour, when moral and patriotic issues had seemed clearer cut than at any other time in the nation’s history, when people from all classes buried their differences to venture good-­ humoredly and resourcefully into battle, and when even the most horrendous defeats could still be viewed with pride. Naumann’s assertion that the British have uniquely made the Second World War the “spiritual core” of their “national self” is undoubtedly confirmed by the boldly memorable film scores which did so much to ensure the indestructible popularity of the war-movie genre in the UK.

Notes 1 Havardi notes that the national character under consideration is essentially that of the English rather than Britons as a united group: Naturally, any talk of a unified British identity is automatically contested and invites recrimination from non-English Britons who cling proudly to their rich cultural heritage. But the fact that English traits were projected onto the wider British nation makes the confluence of these terms ­inevitable. (9) 2 These top-grossing films included The Dam Busters (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), and The Battle for the River Plate (1957). The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) won seven Academy Awards and was the world leader at the international box office in 1958. Also in 1958, Dunkirk netted the second highest UK receipts for the year and was selected, like River Plate, for a Royal Command performance. 3 In the United States, the melody became a popular choice for graduation ceremonies.

A Bridge Too Far?  103 4 For further information on The First of the Few, see MacKenzie 36–38 and on Walton’s music, Huntley 59–60. 5 The English crown also appears as a prominent image at the very end of Young Bess. 6 “A Brief History of RAF Music Services.” www.raf.mod.uk/rafmusic/­ aboutus/historyofrafmusicservices.cfm. Accessed 4 November 2017. 7 Powell distilled his research for the film into another book, Graf Spee (White Lion Publishers, 1956), later retitled The Last Voyage of the Graf Spee. 8 Forester, best known as the author of the Hornblower adventures set in ­Nelson’s navy, wrote the screenplay in conjunction with his book Hunting the Bismarck (Michael Joseph, 1959). 9 The repertoire on this disc was reconstructed and arranged by Philip Lane. 10 I am grateful to Michael Baumgartner for sharing his thoughts on this opening sequence with me. 11 Rawsthorne’s strong compositional personality, also heard in his music for the real-life wartime story The Man Who Never Was (1955)—for which he incorporated a German spy’s Morse-code rhythms into his score, generating tension in much the same way as the “pinging of the Asdic” in the naval drama—meant that he could achieve this without lapsing into dissonant film noir clichés of the kind heard in Francis Chagrin’s music for The Colditz Story and John Addison’s for Reach for the Sky, both of which seem overdone for modern tastes. 12 This was the first release of the X-1 soundtrack, based—as with other bonus tracks in this series—on Goodwin’s own private tape recordings from the studio sessions. The same submarine story had previously been told, with a less melodically memorable and less genre-specific score by Arthur Benjamin, in Above Us the Waves (1955). 13 The words are spoken by the German-born agent Heidi in such implausibly formal English that she claims to have remembered the description verbatim from a London source: “They have a funny way of talking in Whitehall.” 14 On the symbolism of fugal techniques in film scoring, see Cooke 99–100 and Rózsa 24. 15 For a full account, see Kennedy, Portrait of Walton 237–40. 16 The claim about the 1953 coronation march was made by Arnold in a radio interview in 1996 (see Meredith and Harris 278, n. 36). In another RAF-set film released in 1969, the low-budget Mosquito Squadron, Frank Cordell had no qualms about including in his main-title march a melody which is embarrassingly similar to that of the trio section in Orb and Sceptre, sitting oddly alongside muscularly rhythmic adventure scoring of the Goodwin variety. 17 British Prime Minister Ted Heath, an accomplished amateur musician, eventually retrieved most of Walton’s manuscript from UA to mark the composer’s seventieth birthday in 1972, but it lacked the “Battle in the Air”—over which they claimed legal ownership since it had been used in the film as released (Walton 211). For further on Walton’s rejected score, see Hubai 91–93. 18 Hubai asserts that in reconstructing the soundtrack for the DVD release the film’s first assistant editor, Timothy Gee, “knew exactly where each piece of the unused score was supposed to appear” (93). 19 As with Submarine X-1, this CD release was mastered from Goodwin’s personal stereo tapes. 20 In generally listing the various members of any film production responsible for ensuring its artistic success, Goldman overlooks the composer—and, not surprisingly, Addison’s score is never mentioned in the course of the book.

104  Mervyn Cooke

Works Cited Avery, Kenneth. “William Walton.” Music & Letters, vol. 28, no. 1, January 1947, pp. 1–11. Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Columbia University Press, 1986. Bond, Jeff, and Alexander Kaplan. “Break for the Fjord!” Liner notes to CD 633 Squadron/Submarine X-1, original motion picture soundtracks, FSM Silver Age Classics 8/4, 2005, pp. 2–11. ———. “Prepare to Submerge!” Liner notes to CD 633 Squadron/Submarine X-1, original motion picture soundtracks, FSM Silver Age Classics 8/4, 2005, pp. 12–18. Bond, Jeff, and Lukas Kendall. “A Return to Force.” Liner notes to CD Force 10 from Navarone, original motion picture soundtrack, FSM Silver Age Classics 9/4, 2006, pp. 3–14. Bond, Jeff, Lukas Kendall, and Jeff Eldridge. “Die, Nazi, Die!” Liner notes to CD Where Eagles Dare/Operation Crossbow, original motion picture soundtracks, FSM Silver Age Classics 6/21, 2003, pp. 2–16. ———. “What’s the Buzz?” Liner notes to CD Where Eagles Dare/Operation Crossbow, original motion picture soundtracks, FSM Silver Age Classics 6/21, 2003, pp. 19–26. Burton-Page, Piers. Philharmonic Concerto: The Life and Music of Sir Malcolm Arnold. Methuen, 1994. Chapman, James. Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film. I. B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 2005. Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cushion, Terry. “Worth the Money?” Beckus: The Quarterly Newsletter of the Malcolm Arnold Society, issue 96, Spring 2015, p. 4. Goldman, William. William Goldman’s Story of A Bridge Too Far. Coronet/Hodder and Stoughton, 1977. Havardi, Jeremy. Projecting Britain at War: The National Character in British World War II Films. McFarland & Company, 2014. Hubai, Gergely. Torn Music. Rejected Film Scores: A Selected History. Silman-James Press, 2012. Hughes, Howard. When Eagles Dared: A Filmgoers’ History of World War II. I. B. ­Tauris, 2012. Huntley, John. British Film Music. Skelton Robinson, 1947. Kennedy, Michael. “Foreword” to Edward Elgar, Pomp & Circumstance: Military Marches Nos. 1–5. Boosey & Hawkes, 1977. ———. Portrait of Walton. Oxford University Press, 1989. MacKenzie, S. P. British War Films 1939–1945: The Cinema and the Services. Hambledon Continuum, 2001. MacLean, Alistair. HMS Ulysses. William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd., 1955. ———. The Guns of Navarone. William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd., 1957. ———. Where Eagles Dare. William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd., 1967. ­HarperCollins, 2004 (paperback). McNaught, William. “Crown Imperial.” Subchapter of “Gramophone Notes,” Musical Times, vol. 78, August 1937, p. 710. Marshall, James. Liner notes to CD The Film Music of Clifton Parker. CHAN 10279, 2005, pp. 5–13.

A Bridge Too Far?  105 Meredith, Anthony, and Paul Harris. Malcolm Arnold: Rogue Genius. Thames/Elkin, 2004. Moss, W. Stanley. Ill Met By Moonlight: The Classic Story of Wartime Daring. Harrap & Co., 1950. Cassell, 1999. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, editor. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press, 1996. “Our Band Hit Sour Note for Japan’s Prime Minister.” Montreal Gazette, 6 May 1980, p. 1. Palmer, Christopher. Liner notes to CD The Film Music of Sir Malcolm Arnold, Volume 1. CHAN 9100, 2000, pp. 5–10. Petrie, Duncan. “British Cinema [1960–95]: The Search for Identity.” The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, op. cit., pp. 604–13. Powell, Michael. The Last Voyage of the Graf Spee. 1956. White Lion Publishers, 1976. ———. Million-Dollar Movie. Random House and William Heinemann Ltd., 1992. Redman, Nick. Liner notes to The Great Escape: Complete Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Intrada MAF 7112, 2011. Reid, P. R. The Colditz Story. Hodder and Stoughton, 1952. Rózsa, Miklós. Double Life: The Autobiography of Miklós Rózsa. The Baton Press, 1982. Smith, Frederick E. 633 Squadron. Hutchinson, 1956. Cassell, 2003. Walton, Susana. William Walton: Behind the Façade. Oxford University Press, 1988. Whitebait, William [George Stonier]. “Bombardment.” New Statesman, 5 April 1958, p. 432. Films Cited 633 Squadron. Directed by Walter Grauman, music by Ron Goodwin, Mirisch Films, 1964. A Bridge Too Far. Directed by Richard Attenborough, music by John Addison, Joseph E. Levine Productions, 1977. Angels One Five. Directed by George More O’Ferrall, music arranged by John Wooldridge, Associated British Picture Corporation and Templar Film Studios, 1952. Attack on the Iron Coast. Directed by Paul Wendkos, music by Gerard Schurmann, Mirisch Films and Oakmont Productions, 1968. Battle of Britain. Directed by Guy Hamilton, music by Ron Goodwin, Spitfire Productions, 1969. Battle of the Bulge. Directed by Ken Annakin, music by Benjamin Frankel, United States Pictures and Cinerama Productions Corp., 1965. Cross of Iron. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, music by Ernest Gold, Anglo-EMI Productions Ltd., Rapid Film, and Terra-Filmkunst, 1977. Dunkirk. Directed by Leslie Norman, music by Malcolm Arnold, Ealing Studios, 1958. Force 10 from Navarone. Directed by Guy Hamilton, music by Ron Goodwin, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Navarone Productions, and American International Pictures, 1978. How I Won the War. Directed by Richard Lester, music by Ken Thorne, Petersham Pictures, 1967.

106  Mervyn Cooke I Was Monty’s Double (US title: Hell, Heaven or Hoboken). Directed by John Guillermin, music by John Addison, Associated British Picture Corporation, 1958. Ice Cold in Alex. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, music by Leighton Lucas, Associated British Picture Corporation, 1958. Ill Met by Moonlight (also known under the title Night Ambush). Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, music by Mikis Theodorakis, The Rank Organisation and Vega Film Productions, 1957. Operation Crossbow. Directed by Michael Anderson, music by Ron Goodwin, ­Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer British Studios, 1965. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Directed by Steven Spielberg, music by John Williams, Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm, 1981. Reach for the Sky. Directed by Lewis Gilbert, music by John Addison, The Rank Organisation and Angel Productions, 1956. Richard III. Directed by Laurence Olivier, music by William Walton, London Film Productions, 1955. Sea of Sand (US title: Desert Patrol). Directed by Guy Green, music by Clifton Parker, The Rank Organisation and Tempean Films, 1958. Sink the Bismarck! Directed by Lewis Gilbert, music by Clifton Parker, Twentieth Century Fox, 1960. Star Wars [Episode IV – A New Hope]. Directed by George Lucas, music by John Williams, Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Submarine X-1. Directed by William A. Graham, music by Ron Goodwin, Mirisch Films and Oakmont Productions, released in 1969. The Battle of the River Plate (US title: Pursuit of the Graf Spee). Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, music by Brian Easdale, The Archers, 1956. The Bridge on the River Kwai. Directed by David Lean, music by Malcolm Arnold, Columbia Pictures Corporation and Horizon Pictures, 1957. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Directed by Tony Richardson, music by John Addison, Woodfall Film Productions, 1968. The Colditz Story. Directed by Guy Hamilton, music by Francis Chagrin, Ivan Foxwell Productions, 1955. The Cruel Sea. Directed by Charles Frend, music by Alan Rawsthorne, Ealing Studios and Michael Balcon Productions, 1953. The Dam Busters. Directed by Michael Anderson, music by Leighton Lucas, Associated British Picture Corporation, 1955. The Eagle Has Landed. Directed by John Sturges, music by Lalo Schifrin, Associated General Films and ITC Entertainment, 1976. The First of the Few (US title: Spitfire). Directed by Leslie Howard, music by William Walton, British Aviation Pictures, 1942. The Great Escape. Directed by John Sturges, music by Elmer Bernstein, Mirisch Company and Alpha Productions, 1963. The Guns of Navarone. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, Columbia Pictures Corporation and Highroad Productions, 1961. The Heroes of Telemark. Directed by Anthony Mann, music by Malcolm Arnold, Benton Film Productions, 1965. The Longest Day. Directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, et al., music by Maurice Jarre, Darryl F. Zanuck Productions and Twentieth Century Fox, 1962.

A Bridge Too Far?  107 The Magnificent Seven. Directed by John Sturges, music by Elmer Bernstein, Mirisch Company and Alpha Productions, 1960. Thunderball. Directed by Terence Young, music by John Barry, Eon Productions, 1965. Tora! Tora! Tora! Directed by Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, and Toshio Masuda, music by Jerry Goldsmith, Twentieth Century Fox, Elmo Williams, and Richard Fleischer, 1970. Where Eagles Dare. Directed by Brain G. Hutton, music by Ron Goodwin, ­Gershwin-Kastner Productions and Winkast Film Productions, 1968. Yanks. Directed by John Schlesinger, music by Richard Rodney Bennett, CIP Filmproduktion GmbH, 1979. Young Bess. Directed by George Sidney, music by Miklós Rózsa, Metro-­GoldwynMayer, 1953.

Part II

Trauma and Survival

5 Hidden in Plain View The Music of Holocaust Survival in Poland’s First Post-war Feature Film* Barbara Milewski In late summer of 1945, a few months after Poland’s liberation and the end of the European war, the erstwhile scenarist and songwriter Ludwik Starski posted a newspaper advertisement in the socialist daily Robotnik soliciting “forbidden songs” (Figure 5.1). Warsaw lay in ruin, sociopolitical chaos reigned, and much of the populace lived from hand to mouth, but early efforts to rebuild Polish cinema were improbably taking form in the nearby city of Łódz ́, which served as the country’s de facto capital in the initial post-war years. There, the nation’s surviving writers, directors, actors, and technicians were given living quarters in requisitioned apartment buildings, and enlisted to work for Film Polski, Poland’s new state-run film industry, housed in a repurposed athletic pavilion. Along with other Polish pre-war filmmakers who had endured the difficult war years, Starski was eager to get back to making films.1 His curious request, however,

Figure 5.1  “Forbidden songs sung during the occupation (on streets, in trams, trains, etc.), especially in sets, will be purchased by State agency ‘Polish Film’—Łódz ,́ Narutowicz Street 69, First floor. Please call on the 10th, 11th and 12th of this month between the hours of 4 and 6 pm” (Robotnik).2 * A preliminary version of this chapter was presented in 2014 at the First International Symposium of the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices, at the Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles. This lengthier study was supported by a 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a George Becker Fellowship from Swarthmore College. My heartfelt thanks to Allan Starski and his family for sharing revelatory details about Ludwik Starski’s wartime experiences. I am also grateful to Bret Werb, Allen Kuharski, Marek Haltof, Mackenzie Pierce, Andrea Bohlman, and Aaron Slepoi for reading drafts of this work.

112  Barbara Milewski caused an unexpected stir, especially less than two weeks after a studio call for extras sent rumors flying of people inexplicably being asked to sing songs.3 Ordinary citizens enthusiastically responded to the advertisement, and Starski, aided by director Leonard Buczkowski and cinematographer Adolf Forbert, shot footage of a dozen or so authentic street songs—roughly 30 minutes of cinematic-musical reportage. Starski’s collection of defiant, patriotic, satirical anti-Nazi songs, as things would have it, was to be a tribute to the everyday role that music played in psychologically sustaining the capital’s inhabitants during the years of Nazi oppression.4 In this regard, the project was not unlike other early post-war memory work: Polish publications of wartime ephemera—subversive cartoons, anecdotes, songbooks, and other so-called “folklore of the street”—that had surfaced alongside the more sobering memoirs of survival, and initial tallies of the nation’s losses.5 Illicitly circulated songs, satirical poetry, and even graffiti scrawled on sidewalks and walls, were looked upon as acts of minor cultural resistance by many who endured the occupation. These often anonymous popular creations helped ordinary Poles cope with their daily hardships, vulnerabilities, and fears, and let them make light of a situation that was otherwise almost too much to bear. Indeed, by preserving the capital city’s longstanding tradition of street humor, such entertainments had also provided a cultural continuity Varsovians deeply craved.6 Starski’s project, then, like that of others, was intended as an authentic, if fragmentary, record of Polish cultural resistance during the war.7 For Starski, as in the case of so many other filmmakers, artists, writers, and musicians who had survived the Nazi terror, the intended documentary was likely also a means of processing personal trauma, an escapist project that helped start life anew. For him, music was the means by which he might reclaim a destroyed community and share gratitude for the popular songs that had been central to his pre-war days. From this humble premise came Poland’s first post-war feature film. Today, Zakazane piosenki (1947, Forbidden songs) remains an important commemorative symbol of national survival, an iconic record of Polish wartime history. It is broadcast on Polish television before audiences who still appreciate the film’s heroics, witty dialogue, romantic subplots, treasured movie stars, and evergreen songs. For all its enduring popularity as an official memory marker, however, neither the scholarly community nor the public at large has heretofore recognized that the film’s score is the key to a concealed personal backstory, as well as a less veiled public witnessing of Soviet—not just Nazi German—aggression. In this chapter, I briefly trace the initial steps taken to make Poland’s first post-war film. I then explore the convergence of autobiography, cinematic narrative, and musical choices that characterize the film. Relying on a reconstruction of various drafts of the screenplay and interviews with Ludwik Starski’s family members and colleagues, I argue that the core of Zakazane piosenki preserves not only clues to a personal history of Jewish survival that might otherwise have passed into obscurity but also provides insight into the ways Polish

Hidden in Plain View  113 Jews and non-Jews alike struggled to recount their personal wartime odysseys alongside the broader perspectives on the national catastrophe of the war. For Starski, as for so much of Poland’s surviving population, the war and the losses left in its wake were too immense and too incomprehensible to take any other form than an immediate, and very personal one in those first post-war years. Zakazane piosenki might thus be understood as a window on a moment in Polish twentieth-century history that had not yet congealed into an “official state narrative” of wartime events, nor into the later (and by and large Western) construct of a “Holocaust narrative.” During this brief period before the consolidation of Soviet political power (1947) and the superimposition of Stalinist cultural-aesthetic dictates (1949), Polish war narratives, cinematic or otherwise, were not silent on the suffering of the nation’s Jewish population. Put another way, Polish and Polish Jewish wartime experiences were not only both represented but, in their intertwining and wide-ranging perspectives, far from the mutually exclusive constructs they would become in later years of remembrance.8 And as we shall see by examining more closely the performance of censored songs in Zakazane piosenki, this first post-war film even fleetingly risked bearing witness to the deception of Poland’s Soviet liberators.

Becoming Starski Ludwik Starski was born in Łódz ́ on 1 March 1903 as Ludwik Kałuszyner, the son of an assimilated and cultured Jewish family. His mother Chaja “Helena” (née Szpiro) was from a well-to-do Warsaw family, while the family of his father, Chaim Icyk “Ignacy,” had moved to Łódz ́ in search of better economic opportunities likely from the Polish town, Kałuszyn, east of Warsaw.9 Kałuszyner the elder worked as a merchant and office clerk. Together, there were five children: Ludwik, Maria, Sabina, Celina, and Adam. They lived on Piotrkowska Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the city. As the family’s first-born son, Ludwik took special care in looking after the youngest, Adam, when their mother suddenly died in January of 1914 shortly before Adam’s first birthday. After completing gymnasium in Łódz ́ and secondary schooling in Bydgoszcz, Ludwik Kałuszyner launched his career in the early 1920s as a journalist for Ilustrowana Republika, advancing soon after to secretary of the editorial staff of its subsidiary, Express Wieczorny Ilustrowany, where he published a series of his own sensational-erotic stories from 1923 to 1926 under the pen name Julian Starski. As L. St., Spleen or sometimes O. Kay he also began contributing sketches and songs to various Łódz ́ cabarets. Eventually, he changed his surname permanently to Starski in honor of the brash, young, womanizing, and penniless aristocrat in Bolesław Prus’s famous novel Lalka (The doll).10 He met and courted the talented dancer-choreographer Maria Bargielska, who frequently traveled from Warsaw with her dance partner, Władysław Zawadzki-Moran, to perform in Łódz ’́ s numerous theater revues. In 1931, Starski moved to Warsaw to write sketches, monologues, and songs for Morskie Oko, Qui Pro Quo, and Praskie Oko, Poland’s most successful variety theaters and finest literary cabarets.11 Surviving programs from the 1933

114  Barbara Milewski Praskie Oko season alone offer an impressive array of cabaret luminaries with whom Starski collaborated: the illustrious writer-artistic directors Julian Tuwim, Jerzy Jurandot, and Anda Kitschman; composers Henryk Wars, Jerzy Petersburski, Zygmunt Białostocki, and Zygmunt Wiehler; and singer-actor Tadeusz Faliszewski. Bargielska and Moran joined this talented company as prominently featured dancers.12 During those early years in Warsaw, Starski converted to Catholicism and married Bargielska at the Church of the Holy Cross on Krakowskie Przedmies ́cie Street (famous as the resting place of Fryderyk Chopin’s heart). According to family members, no record of the exact date of their wedding ceremony has survived, though with certainty it was before 1934.13 By the time the war broke out, Starski had moved on from cabaret to become Poland’s leading screenwriter and the author of numerous hit songs made memorable by the country’s beloved matinee idols Eugeniusz Bodo and Adolf Dymsza.14 The transformative moment came in 1934 when Starski collaborated with Bodo and Jerzy Nel to create the wildly successful film Pies ń iarz Warszawy (1934, Singer of Warsaw).15 Its signature number, “Zimny drań” (Cold-hearted cad), penned by Starski and Nel and composed by H ­ enryk Wars, became an immediate hit. Other songs such as “Ach, jak przyjemnie” (Oh, how pleasant), “Ach s ́pij, kochanie” (Sleep, darling), “Dzisiaj ta, jutro tamta” (Today this one, tomorrow that one), “Już nie zapomnisz mnie” (You won’t forget me), “Młodym byc ́ i wie ̨cej nic” (To be young and nothing else), and “Tylko z toba ̨ i dla ciebie” (Only with you, and for you), provided the musical soundtrack of Polish popular culture in the 1930s, and ensured Starski’s place among Poland’s greatest songwriters of the inter-war period.16 His creation of brilliant musical comedies such as Piętro wyżej (1937, One floor up), Zapomniana melodia (1938, Forgotten melody), Paweł i Gaweł (1938, Paul and Gaul), and Ja tu rządzę (1939, I’m the boss here) also standardized the convention of screenwriting in Polish cinema, lending it a professionalism it had previously lacked (Patek). With his love for the Polish language, exceptional wit, and brilliant storytelling, Starski made Poland laugh, sing, and, if just for a moment, escape the political tensions building all around.

Starski in Hiding At the start of the war, Starski, like a number of colleagues and close friends in the entertainment industry, fled eastward to escape Germany’s aerial bombardment of the capital.17 He made it as far as the country home of Maria’s parents in Radosć ,́ some 100 kilometers to the northeast. After Warsaw capitulated, Starski and his wife, along with her sister and niece, returned to the capital believing it more advantageous to be among a larger circle of family and friends in the city. One year later, Starski, like many assimilated Jews, ignored the German decree of forcible relocation to the ghetto, imagining that he might escape detection by maintaining a low profile on the so-called Aryan side. By the summer of 1942, however, the Germans had begun mass deportations from the Warsaw

Hidden in Plain View  115 ghetto—and once again Warsaw’s citizens were reminded that the penalty for harboring Jews was death. Sometime toward the end of summer, while still living with Maria in their apartment, Ludwik was betrayed. Likely the person who renounced him feared for their own safety or that of their families. More cynically, the informant may have attempted to extort money in exchange for protecting Starski’s secret, leading Starski himself to choose relocation. Or like other less tolerant Poles, the motive may have been simple anti-Semitism. Regardless the cause, the result was that Starski was forced into hiding, finding immediate shelter in the apartment of Władysław Zawadzki-Moran.18 Moran lived on the southern side of Złota Street, in the center of town, between the main Warsaw thoroughfare of Marszałkowska and the quieter Sosnowa Street,19 not far from the southern boundary of the ghetto on Sienna.20 Starski’s wife, who remained on Żurawia 28 just a short distance away, bravely provided him aid. Sidelined from dancing and capitalizing on her many theater and film industry acquaintances who now needed food more than luxury items, she operated a consignment shop on Krucza Street (personal telephone communication with Halina Szpilman, 14 August 2014, and Hania Walewska, 15 April 2016). Her resourcefulness in business matters was equal to her aptitude for strategizing visits with her husband and keeping him safe, as she did for two years. At least twice he was forced to abandon Moran’s apartment because circumstances in the building proved dangerous. During those episodes (each lasting about two weeks), he stayed with Maria’s niece, Hania Walewska (née Krawczyk), on Sosnowa, a mere block away. There, too, a suspicious neighbor, likely on a tip that Hania was harboring someone, repeatedly visited the apartment to use Hania’s phone under the pretense that hers was out of service. Amid these challenges, on 1 January 1943, Maria gave birth to their son Allan.21 Approximately two weeks later, Jews attempted armed resistance to halt the final liquidation of the ghetto, presaging the major ghetto revolt four months later. By June 1943, the ghetto lay in ruins and nearly all its inhabitants killed.22 Just over a year later, on 1 August 1944, a final attempt at resistance in the capital was launched, this time by the Polish underground. Starski, his wife and young son were rounded up in a house-by-house search and forced into Pruszków transit camp. There, approximately 350,000–550,000 inhabitants of Warsaw—the city’s remaining civilian population—were processed and transported either to labor camps in the Reich, to concentration or death camps, or to other locations in the General Government for release. Against odds, the family managed to stay together and avoid arrest.23 They were instead among the first refugee transports sent for resettlement to Kraków.24 Liberated in Skawina, a small town outside of Kraków where relatives of the family’s housekeeper gave them shelter, the Starskis returned to Kraków in January 1945 as the Germans retreated further west. The filmmakers Stanisław Wohl and Antoni Bohdziewicz had arrived there around the same time to jumpstart the Polish film industry (Haltof, Polish Film 13–14). By March, however, the plan to make Kraków the home of Polish film was deemed hopeless in the face of severe overpopulation, and sights were turned instead on Łódz .́

116  Barbara Milewski The forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from Polish lands after Germany’s defeat meant that living quarters and factories now abandoned were theirs for the taking (Kawczyńska and Rakowski-Kłos). This is how Starski and his family found themselves among the first to be settled in a trio of apartment buildings on Narutowicz Street, which served as an ad hoc film colony in those initial years of post-war rebuilding.25

Starski in Plain View Though the terror, destruction and human casualties of the German occupation were now in the past, it would be difficult to overstate the subsequent chaos that marked the early months of Poland’s liberation. Depending on one’s orientation, the Soviet occupation and the Soviet-installed provisional government that ruled from Moscow caused either apprehension and dread, or unbounded enthusiasm for building a new communist future. A ruthless civil war fought between remnants of the Polish Home Army and Polish communists aided by Soviet troops served as backdrop to mass expulsions and repatriation, homelessness, severe food scarcity, starvation, looting, and mob rule. If social trust and cooperation among the country’s surviving populations of Polish Catholics and Jews, ethnic Germans, and other minorities had not already been destroyed, it was further frayed. Then again, many Poles also staked out a middle ground, meeting the nation’s new political reality with cautious optimism and a hope that Poland would become a parliamentary democracy with a socialist culture supportive of arts institutions.26 The war’s “history” had yet to be codified by the new Soviet-appointed cultural authorities, and ideas concerning the appropriate representation of Polish identity were not only in flux but also actively contested among the populace, filmmakers, artists, composers, and bureaucrats from the new Ministry of Information and Propaganda. Still reeling from their own personal traumas but eager to throw themselves into any sort of productive activity, Poland’s surviving film professionals quickly set to work to create a studio that might satisfy the nation’s formidable hunger for homegrown cinema after years of Nazi censorship, propaganda, and deprivation. Dozens of film sketches and scripts were soon created, and of the handful that received serious consideration, all, unsurprisingly, concerned the German occupation.27 Czesław Miłosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski offered a new script as early as the spring of 1945. Based on conversations Miłosz had with the pianist, Władysław Szpilman, who had survived the war in hiding, their Robinson Warszawski (The Warsaw Robinson) was intended to show a Polish “Robinson Crusoe” desperately alone, a witness to the total destruction of his city (­Haltof, Polish Film 175; Pitera 16–22). Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina and Jan Szancer’s Dwie godziny (Two hours) was quickly approved and produced in 1946, but ultimately shelved until 1957. Censors believed that its melodramatic depiction of war-­ traumatized citizens attempting to restart their lives in a typical small town

Hidden in Plain View  117 was cinematically sophisticated, but ultimately too bleak. Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap (1948, The last stage), written with fellow former inmate Gerda Schneider as an eye-witness account concerning the experiences of women prisoners at Auschwitz, faced opposition from the very beginning for a host of reasons, not the least being its sober setting in a concentration camp.28 Scripts were thus revised and re-revised, but try as they may, the moguls at Film Polski could not agree on an “appropriate” war narrative.

Choosing Forbidden Songs Amid the infighting and rewriting, Ludwik Starski and Leonard Buczkowski’s modest song documentary found itself at center stage. Topically benign as well as optimistic and uplifting, their short film about music as resistance provided an ingenious framework on which to construct a chronological retelling of the occupation. Among the songs chosen were the ballads Dnia pierwszego wrzes ń ia (The first day of September); Gdy w noc wrzes ń iową (One September night; to the tune of Więc pijmy wino), and Rozszumiały się wieżby płaczące (The weeping willows rustle). Other wartime favorites included the broadsides Sielanka (Cakes and ale; to the tune of Cielito lindo); Wróg napadł na Polskę (An enemy has attacked Poland); Hej tam pod Krakowem (There, near Kraków); Czerwone jabłuszko (The red apple); and Siekiera, motyka (Hatchet, hoe), a particularly evocative selection for its allusion to the infamous transit camp on Skaryszewska Street within Warsaw’s city limits that the Nazis had officially disavowed.29 Starski’s actual experience collecting the music would provide a meta-plot for the fictional film. Actors were hired, and a pre-destruction Warsaw recreated in undestroyed Łódz .́ 30 With the original running time of 30 minutes soon extended to 100, Poland’s first post-war feature film improbably took the form of a light musical comedy shaded dark at select moments only by familiar betrayals and personal losses that contextualized the war. Starski thus ably traversed a minefield of competing narratives to produce a film that would both please the public and pass the state censors. With its unifying theme of resistance and emotional immediacy, it struck the right chord for a warweary populace eager to celebrate the nation’s defiance and courage in the face of oppression. This is how the film unfolded. The protagonist, a musician named Roman Tokarski, responding to a “call for songs” in the paper, appears at the atelier of Film Polski. Through reminiscences at the piano, Tokarski—played by the future matinee idol Jerzy Duszyński, making here his screen debut—initiates a series of flashbacks that enfold each of the film’s “forbidden songs” into larger narratives about the fate of his family and other residents of their apartment building, and, more broadly, that of Warsaw’s civilian population as a whole. Starski commissioned Roman Palester (1907–89) to create the film score. Considered Karol Szymanowski’s musical heir, Palester was a formidable talent among a younger generation of Polish classical composers finding their way not only in Polish music but also among a broader European musical

118  Barbara Milewski milieu. Muzyka Symfoniczna (1930, Symphonic music) marked his debut in Warsaw, and a year later the work received acclaim at the International Contemporary Music Society Festival in London. A series of prizes and awards followed, notably a gold medal at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition for his ballet, Pies ń ́ o ziemi (Song of the earth). During the 1930s, Palester also composed or arranged the music for nearly a dozen films created by industry notables, Starski among them.31 His single most successful foray in pre-war film, however, was his collaboration with writer Jerzy Nel on the wildly popular song “Baby, ach te baby!” (Dames, oh these dames!) for the 1933 hit film Zabawka (The toy). Palester, as it turns out, was a sympathetic colleague whose wartime experiences were arguably as perilous and fraught as Starski’s. He survived the war years initially in Warsaw, remaining in the capital after the Germans invaded. As the city’s cultural institutions and organizations were disbanded and his professional livelihood dried up, Palester relied for a while on modest contributions from the Council of Musicians, though he continued, rather remarkably, to write concert music, including a number of excellent works such as the Second Symphony, Third String Quartet, the Violin Concerto and the Concertino for Piano and Orchestra.32 He considered enlisting in the Polish Home Army, but early in 1940 was rounded up in a surprise raid at one of Warsaw’s cafés, charged with associating with members of the Polish intelligentsia and sent to the infamous Pawiak prison.33 He was released six weeks later, thanks to the intervention of Barbara Lubicz-Gużkowska, who would become his wife in June 1942. Later that same year, as the German frenzy to liquidate the ghetto and hunt down the city’s remaining Jews reached new levels of terror and brutality, his relative security became ever more tenuous. Though he now lived with his wife in another part of town, his father Henryk was Jewish by birth; his step-mother Maria was integrally involved in Żegota, the underground organization also known as the Polish Council to Aid Jews; his half-brother was a Home Army soldier; and his family’s apartment a refuge to numerous Jews during the course of the occupation as well as a makeshift depot for the Home Army’s smuggled weapons. For months at a time Palester was forced to abandon Warsaw, the final time before the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. He stayed variously with long-time family friends in Je ̨drzejów, and with his wife’s family in Żerosławice, near Kraków.34 In the immediate post-war period, Palester quickly found professional footing thanks to the reputation he had established in inter-war Poland. He relocated to Kraków and was appointed professor of composition at the State Conservatory. During that same period (from 1945 to 1947), as one of the few seasoned film composers to either survive the war or remain in Poland, he was called upon to compose music or serve as musical director for six of the first eight feature films made in Poland.35 Palester’s music thus gave sonic contour to the earliest cinematic expressions of Poland’s wartime losses and traumas.36 The musical score for Zakazane piosenki was undoubtedly quick work for Palester. His principal task was to arrange the songs Starski had selected for the

Hidden in Plain View  119 screenplay. Indeed, the confident, hand-written musical scoring for individual voices shows signs of only superficial edits and confirms the composer-­ conductor Jan Krenz’s account of Palester’s compositional process on the set of the film as confident and seemingly effortless (“Nuty-155”; Sowińska 48). In addition to the forbidden street songs featured in the film, Palester incorporated as the main theme Michał Zieliński’s jaunty, hugely popular Serce w plecaku (Heart in a rucksack).37 Composed for a Polish Army song competition in 1933, it was largely unknown until it became a wartime favorite of Polish soldiers and partisan fighters alike no doubt in part due to its inspired lyrics.38 Other archival materials suggest that Palester may have considered using various Nazi-era waltzes and marches to represent the Germans portrayed in the film. In the end, however, he settled on the oppressive refrain, Heili heilo—­ extracted from the popular Nazi marschlied, “Ein Heller und ein Batzen”—as the film’s German musical marker (“Nuty-155”). Two other “forbidden songs” that Roman Tokarski “recounts” in the film deserve lengthier discussion here. The first, a lyric rhapsody on the nation’s losses titled “Leci lis ́cie z drzewa” (Leaves are falling), was composed by Fryderyk Chopin in 1836. As such, it is the only art song included in the film. Musically, it features Polish dance rhythms—specifically the mazurka and krakowiak—around a prominent march at the song’s center, an altogether topically common approach to Polish patriotic songs of the nineteenth century. Its text, by the Polish poet-geographer Wincenty Pol, was written in exile to honor the insurgents of the failed 1830 November Uprising in which Poles tried to wrest control of their nation from Tsarist Russia, and in which Pol himself took part.39 When Chopin’s opus 74 song collection first appeared in Warsaw and Berlin in 1859, the controversial “Leci lis ́cie z drzewa” was omitted to appease the Russian and Prussian censors.40 Indeed, relentless censorship of overtly patriotic texts compelled Poland’s poets to interpret and convey national identity ever more inventively in response to the partitions of the late eighteenth century, when national expression was first harshly suppressed by imperialist Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rulers. As a strategy of cultural continuity, composers turned to particular national dances as enduring aesthetic placeholders (Milewski 2). After the brutal suppression of the 1830 November Uprising, dances such as polonaises, krakowiaks, and especially mazurs (mazurkas)—which came to be seen as most typically Polish thanks in part to Chopin’s successful export of the genre to the West—took on evermore significance as a means of sustaining a sense of nationhood until Polish independence was restored at the end of the First World War (Milewski, Chapter 2). Thus, the role subversive music-making had played in support of the nation during more than a century of foreign domination made its resurfacing during the German occupation seem a rather natural response. By that time, Chopin’s music had become an unassailable symbol of Polish culture, a fact well understood by the Germans, who promptly and contemptuously banned the composer’s works from concerts and other public gatherings in the occupied Polish territories.

120  Barbara Milewski Poland’s tradition of circumventing bans on cultural expression is of course what Starski enacts throughout Zakazane piosenki. But at approximately 33 minutes into the film, he uncharacteristically pays near-religious homage to Chopin’s music when the storyline retreats from the public setting of Warsaw’s streets into a private gathering of family and friends in Tokarski’s home. Tokarski, speaking at first to the Film Polski director in the set up to the scene, explains that even tried and true musical strategies of defiance were targeted by the Germans: It wasn’t just words that made them crazy. They were angered by music itself, so long as it was Polish. A polonaise, mazur, kujawiak—you couldn’t play such things. They were forbidden melodies. And Chopin was entirely banned. But could they really enforce this? For example, at our house, every Saturday, at 6 pm… At this point, we first hear Mazurka, Op. 63, No. 3, one of Chopin’s more wistful examples in the genre, performed onscreen by a young Jan Krenz. It is a performance of precisely the sort of coded textless music that historically preserved Poland’s cultural identity. In a voiceover, we hear Tokarski narrate: Those who came to those forbidden concerts took great risks, but despite those risks they came, because for an hour or two they were in Poland, not in a General Government. That was the miracle of Chopin. It was worth taking such risks. Such concerts lifted people’s spirits. They drew people away from the “entertainments” with which the occupier tried to debase their Polish slaves. Instead of music, German propaganda gave us trashy little tunes. Rather than theater—“tingle.”41 Gambling in casinos. They wanted their slaves to have slave souls.42 Against the classical strains of Chopin’s mazurka, Starski’s screenplay calls for a juxtaposition of “tawdry German light music” ubiquitous in Warsaw cafés during the occupation (“S-646”). And for this moment Palester obliges, providing a cacophonous collage of rhythmic, jazz-inflected motives in a jagged, modernist style. Krenz’s mazurka performance is nearly drowned out by Palester’s original jazz sequence while a montage of can-can dancers, a Nazi officer dancing with the female Volksdeutsche informant of the film, and spinning roulette wheels overwhelm the intimate scene of the Polish salon concert.43 As the mazurka battles through this “degenerate” onslaught and draws to a close, in another voiceover Tokarski explains: “But we also had our own propaganda.” Thus prepared, at 00:35:50, we hear Chopin’s “Leci lis ́cie z drzewa” performed by the singer and stage actress Maria Bielicka: Leci lis ́cie z drzewa, Co wyrosło wolne! Z nad mogiły s ́piewa

Leaves are falling From a tree that once grew free! Some sort of field bird

Hidden in Plain View  121 Jakies ́ ptasze ̨ polne. Nie było, nie było, Polsko, dobrze tobie! Wszystko sie ̨ skończyło44 A twe dzieci w grobie. Popalone sioła Rozwalone miasta, A w polu dokoła Zawodzi niewiasta. Wszyscy pos ĺ i z domu, Wzieli z soba ̨ kosy, Robic ́ nie ma komu, W polu gina ̨ kłosy. Kiedy pod Warszawa ̨ Dziatwa sie ̨ zbierała, Zdało sie ̨, że z sława ̨ Wyjdzie Polska cała. Bili zime ̨ cała ̨, Bili sie ̨ przez lato, Lecz w jesieni za to I dziatwy nie stało.

Sings upon a grave. O Poland, Poland Fate was cruel to you! Everything is over, And now your children lay entombed. Villages burned, Cities destroyed, In the fields A woman laments. Everyone left home, And took with them their scythes. No one’s left to tend the fields, The crops all wither and die. When our youth had gathered Near Warsaw’s fortress walls, It seemed to us that Poland Glorious would rise once more. They fought all winter, They fought through summer, But whence came autumn Our youth could stand no longer.

The text, “Villages burned…,” is reprised briefly before a hard cut ushers in a reprise of Heili heilo. Given the general uplift of the film and its strong message of resistance, “Leci lis ́cie” would seem an odd sort of homegrown musical propaganda, especially with its accompanying montage of the capital lying in ruins. Those familiar with the entire song would know, too, that its text shifts decidedly at this moment to an apocalyptic Polish landscape of post-battle destruction and continued occupation—obliquely but undeniably at the hands of the Russians—ending with the line “Freedom through force now seems impossible/Traitors flourish and the people are too good-hearted.” But even without knowledge of the text’s entirety “Leci lis ́cie” signals bleak resignation. How, then, might we square it with the film’s overwhelmingly inspiring populist songs? Could the scene as suggested have been borrowed from Palester’s own wartime experience of performing it among a circle of intimates? We will likely never know. Perhaps its inclusion in the film was a daring provocation in its own right, registering not only the nation’s devastation during the just-ended war with Germany but, significantly, hinting at Poland’s need to defend herself, yet again, from the threatening neighbor to her east. More specifically, could the song have subtly signified the destruction of Warsaw due to deliberate Soviet inaction during the tragically failed Uprising of 1944? Might we understand “Leci lis ́cie,” then, as a bold re-voicing of a historically censored text that builds a longer and broader arc of meaning conjoining Poland’s eastern and western oppressors? In this sense, might it be understood like the broadside “Siekiera motyka,” daring to give voice to unspeakable (now Soviet) terror perpetrated in plain view—in other words, a terror known, yet unacknowledged, by all? Regardless, in its multivalence it can be understood as an interior moment, one of shared understanding between the film’s creators and its sympathetic Polish audiences.

122  Barbara Milewski The strangeness of this musical moment is matched by an equally mysterious song that appears at the very heart of the film, the ballad “Warszawo ma” (O Warsaw mine). Ludwik Starski wrote the nostalgic text, setting it to the familiar melody of “Miasteczko Bełz,” the Polish-language version of the 1932 American Yiddish theater hit song “Mayn Shtetele Belz,” by Jacob ­Jacobs (words) and Alexander Olshanetsky (music).45 As such, this song— apart of course from “Leci lis ́cie”—is the only one featured in the film not drawn from the repertoire of topical anti-German and resistance songs popularly known and performed during the occupation. It is Starski’s own singular contribution. Precisely halfway into the film (at 00:49:00 to be exact), we meet again an unnamed character who had been briefly introduced to us earlier (00:29:51) as a Jewish man hiding out in an apartment next to the Tokarskis. He now receives provisions from Halina Tokarska, just returned from a weapons-­ smuggling expedition to the countryside. In the next scene, he is seated at a table speaking the words he writes in his diary: Today is my sorrowful anniversary. Today marks exactly two years I’ve been in hiding. Two years I have not been outside. Two years I do not approach the window so that no one can see me. Good people are saving me. Were it not for them, I would die of hunger. As he cadences on the thought, “were it not for them, I would die of hunger,” the camera pans to the window. In the courtyard below, a Jewish mendicant (played by Zofia Mrozowska) accompanied by a fiddler, sings Starski’s song, “Warszawo ma,” while passersby discreetly slip her food: Warszawo ma, o Warszawo ma Wcia ̨ż płacze ̨, gdy ciebie zobacze ̨ Warszawo, Warszawo ma.

O Warsaw mine, o Warsaw my own, I weep still whenever I see you My Warsaw, o Warsaw mine.

Tam w getcie głód I ne ̨dza i chłód I gorsza od głodu, od chłodu te ̨sknota Warszawo ma.

The ghetto is cold, There’s hunger and woe, But worse than the hunger and cold is my longing, For Warsaw mine.

Przez mur przekradam sie ̨ I biegne ̨ tu jak goniony pies! Choc ́ tropi mnie pan władza, Żandarm, Gestapo i SS.

I steal across the wall and race here Just like some gasping hound, ‘Though all the while they hunt me— Gendarmes, Gestapo and the SS.

Warszawo ma, Patrz w oku mym łza Bo nie wiem czy jeszcze zobacze ̨ cie ̨ jutro Warszawo ma.

O Warsaw mine. There’s a tear in my eye. I don’t know if ever again I will see you, O Warsaw mine.

Hidden in Plain View  123 As the scene continues, the hidden Jew, visibly moved by the beggar-girl’s singing, drops money to her from the window ledge. Doing so, he reveals himself to the watchful gendarme, whom he then must bribe to save his life. This tragic disclosure (or was it an intentional distraction?)—we are led to assume—thus spares the Jewish child from retribution for her public transgression.46 The earliest preserved version of the screenplay provides us with some revealing details. In Starski’s original script, the Jew-in-hiding records the date “8 September 1943” as the one-year anniversary of his being in hiding, and writes in his diary: Today is my sad anniversary Today marks exactly one year Since I’ve been in hiding. For a year I have not been outside. A year I have tiptoed, A year I’ve not been near the window. Across from me allegedly lives a Volksdeutsche (“S-646” 90). This specific date, however, we know was omitted in the later script and the film, and the text modified to underscore the kindness rather than the danger posed by the Jewish man’s neighbors.47 Another interesting revelation is a marginal note in Starski’s hand next to the title of the song “Warszawo, ma” which reads: “dziewczyna z getta/Mrozowska” (Girl from the ghetto/ Mrozowska). In this, the only instance in the entire film script where Starski assigns a particular song to a particular performer, the singer-actress he had in mind was Zofia Mrozowska, herself a Holocaust survivor.48 Along with the actor Henryk Szwajcer, who played the nameless, hidden Jew, they are the only Polish Jews identified as such to appear in the film.49 In light of what we know of Starski’s wartime experiences, including his own period of hiding (which closely corresponds to the dates given in the original screenplay), it is difficult not to see “Warszawo ma,” the “forbidden song” at the very core of the screenplay, as anything but a sincere expression of the author’s personal helplessness and (otherwise) unspeakable sorrow. For Starski, who at the outbreak of war was at the apex of his career—a celebrated Varsovian songwriter and scenarist who helped shape Polish popular culture—the feeling of separation from the everyday life of the capital may very well have felt real, and unbearable. Might, then, the film’s most “inauthentic” song, the invented ode to Warsaw, actually be its most emotionally true, daring to memorialize the distinct suffering of Warsaw’s Jews (as varied as that suffering was) amidst the larger story of the Polish capital’s trauma and destruction? Likely for Starski, the song “Belz”—that quintessential set piece of nostalgia—crystallized a separation from the past too painful to articulate, too complex to explain, and one too distant from the more familiar “national” experience of the war portrayed in the film.50 Was the Jew-in-hiding perhaps a stand-in for Starski himself? As with

124  Barbara Milewski the clandestine concert of Chopin’s music and whether or not it was drawn from Palester’s own experience of covert wartime music-making, we will never know for certain. Starski’s son Allan expressed regret that he never pressed his father for more information on the subject (Personal telephone communication). Danuta Szaflarska, the cast member who played Tokarski’s sister Halina, having spent much time working with Starski in those early years, believed it more than probable that the film was in part autobiographical and a gesture of gratitude, given what Starski had endured. She explained, “At that time, we didn’t talk about our wartime experiences. Everyone had endured so much. We were just so happy to be alive, and to be working. When we were off set, we just tried to have fun. Starski had the finest sense of humor of anyone I’ve ever met. But of course there was no way not to think of them” (Szaflarska). But “Warszawo ma” also raises a number of questions. How could a Polish Jew trying to survive the occupation in Warsaw consider “longing for Warsaw” a fate worse than the lethal environment of the ghetto? Cynically, one might argue that he knew his audience: predominantly Polish Catholic to be sure but also a Jewish one that may or may not have experienced the ghetto firsthand. An homage to the capital could steer clear of controversy and perhaps even elicit sympathy. Then again, could one song, real or invented, possibly represent the totality of inhumanity and suffering that defined the Warsaw ghetto? Given what we know of the authentic record of songs from the ghetto and how they were disseminated in the immediate post-war period, Starski likely would have had access to the repertoire that had been performed there, but elected not to use such explicit material. His objective, after all, was to present music that was banned. To record any such topical song from the ghetto would not have suited his nor Film Polski’s larger purpose. To remember and record a particularly Jewish experience of the occupation, all he could do, perhaps, was try to give voice to his own poetic ruminations of a Warsaw that had been forbidden to him—and during the time of the film’s creation still remained so, buried under the rubble.

Forbidding Forbidden Songs The film was released nationwide to great anticipation on 8 January 1947, and its audiences wept cathartically. Critics, however, soon went on the attack. The influential communist poet and essayist Adam Ważyk, who returned to Warsaw from the Soviet Union with the First Polish Army, complained that the film appealed to “banal sentimentalism,” and portrayed a bowdlerized view of the occupation that “had little to do with reality.” Other like-minded critics fell in line, calling the film a “falsified” view of history that wallowed in the “trivial atmosphere reminiscent of pre-war [read: bourgeois] films.” Poet and literary critic, Jerzy Wyszomirski, also went for the ad hominem attack, suggesting that such a film could only be produced by people who had not experienced the occupation firsthand (“Zakazane piosenki I”; “Zakazane piosenki V”).

Hidden in Plain View  125 Within three months of its debut, the film was withdrawn. Over the next year-and-a-half it underwent fresh editing by communist propagandists, reworked to meet the demands of censors who called for “corrections”; specifically, more depictions of German brutality and greater emphasis on Soviet liberation. Yet, a close side-by-side examination of the 1947 and 1948 versions of the script and films reveals that Starski’s original vision remained remarkably intact. Ultimately, aside from the changed location of the opening scene from Film Polski’s atelier to Tokarski’s post-war apartment, only the depiction of the German occupiers and their Polish collaborators was noticeably revised so as to create yet more menacing and perfidious characterizations. The songs of the film, too, overwhelmingly escaped closer scrutiny. Only Chopin’s “Leci lis ́cie,” criticized as too pessimistic and historical, was cut. No doubt the censors were concerned that its nineteenth-century Romantic revolutionary text would all too easily inflame age-old Polish-Russian enmity and distract Poles from despising their “real” enemy, the fascists. Chopin, in a newly emerging Soviet Socialist Reality, could be an anti-bourgeois hero for Poles and Poland’s new Russian overlords alike, but certainly not a threat to Soviet-Polish solidarity. Chopin’s melancholy vocal composition thus proved to be the film’s most politically charged element and ended up on the cutting room floor, while his mazurka, perhaps foreshadowing the special status that folk genres would receive under Socialist Realist dictates, was left to do its patriotic work without affair. As a result of this singular musical edit, the censors in effect reanimated the Tsarist and Prussian ban of 1859 and semi-­ reanimated the 1939 Nazi edict prohibiting public performance of Chopin— an irony of historical repetition the filmmakers, critics, and audiences could not have failed to miss. Censorship of “Leci lis ́cie,” then, only confirmed that any fears Poles may have had of a renewed cycle of oppression were not misplaced. Yet another era of forced forgetting was dawning, one intended again to disrupt Poland’s older social orders and meanings and to consolidate the new Soviet-backed communist regime’s control on Polish national memory (Connerton 12). At the very heart of the film, however, Starski’s song, the haunting “Warszawo ma,” about the experiences of Warsaw’s Jews, remained. As a tribute to the capital, it didn’t matter that the message was delivered by a Jewish girl from the ghetto. It was not yet impossible for Poland’s Jews to be represented alongside other Polish victims as fellow patriots, as would be the case beginning in 1949.51 Moreover, the flaxen-haired Mrozowska could elicit immediate sympathy in her portrayal of an innocent, so completely in line was she with well-worn national tropes of the suffering female as archetypal symbol of a victimized Poland. Yet precisely due to its evenhanded treatment of Jewish wartime experiences, Starski’s new text for “Mayn Shtetele Belz” could powerfully continue to evoke for Polish Jews a particular longing for an unrecoverable time, place and identity—a homeland forever altered now by the near total destruction of its Jewish population. Textually Polish, but musically marked as a Jewish melody, “Warszawa ma” could possess at

126  Barbara Milewski once a national universality and an ethnic particularity, allowing it to hold profoundly different meanings for different audiences.

Re-remembering Forbidden Songs While much has been written about the production and reception of this landmark film, many of its more personal stories, interwoven with both wartime and post-war survival, remain unknown to the public. This chapter, then, has been an attempt to write the missing chapter of the story of the film. Zakazane piosenki was created in a time when Poland was reeling from its losses and the war’s “history” had yet to be codified by the newly installed communist government. During this early post-war period, many Polish Jewish returnees, improbable survivors of the Nazi genocide, faced fresh threats of assault, robbery, or even murder. To make matters more complicated, that more Jewish survivors returned from the Soviet Union than those who managed to survive in occupied Poland led to overt accusations of Jewish complicity in the imposition of communism.52 While Poland’s citizenry had experienced a collective national destruction unlike any other European nation during the Second World War, non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews would increasingly come to represent two communities with two tragic but different wartime experiences. Against this historical backdrop, Zakazane piosenki is an unusually valuable document, one that captures a nuanced portrayal of Polish life under German occupation before narratives of Polish and Jewish wartime suffering diverged into mutually exclusive histories, largely driven by accounts that surfaced in the West. It also serves as a testament to how Poles—as authors, artists, performers, and audience members—in the immediate aftermath of the war tried to make sense of unprecedented ordeals of displacement, upheaval, and violence. By integrating the many starkly different experiences of Warsaw’s inhabitants through musical narrative, Starski—it would seem—attempted not only to process personal trauma but also reestablish the contours of a multi-ethnic community devastated by war, the Holocaust, and the collapse of the state. For a man who had devoted so much of his life to writing songs, the theme of musical resistance central to the film was a natural one, an attempt at trying to put things back together and carry on. Yet, the quality of unresolved tragic lament that characterizes both “Leci lis ́cie” and “Warszawo ma” reveals how fraught such an optimistic endeavor inevitably was. Despite their different fates at the hands of the censors, considered side by side as in the original, these two songs can be understood as a sensitive, cross-cultural keening in the face of foreign and authoritarian oppression, their sorrowful tones heard as related national questions that call forth the defiant responses offered throughout the rest of the film. By 1949, even in its remade version, the film’s overall aura of uplift and thanksgiving for survival would be interpreted as a post-war anomaly, causing the film to be shelved for nearly a decade as the Soviets exerted greater control over cultural messaging during the 1950s.53 While the revised 1948 film subsequently

Hidden in Plain View  127 remained in limited circulation to commemorate anniversaries of its release,54 other Polish cultural gatekeepers attempted to preserve authentic musical memories of the war by other means. In 1970, the state-owned record label, Polskie Nagrania Muza, separately released an LP under the same title as the film featuring the popular street musicians of Orkiestra uliczna z Chmielnej (The Chmielna street orchestra) performing a majority of songs that appeared in the film. Significantly, however, “Warszawo ma” was omitted.55 Some 30 years later, however, “Warszawo ma” was re-remembered, in the United States, by Jerry Silverman in his 2002 anthology of Holocaust songs, The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust (156).56 If we are to judge by YouTube posts and internet blogs that interpret or discuss the film today, there seems to be an overwhelming amnesia among Polish audiences about the reference of “Warszawo ma” to the Warsaw ghetto.57 It is quite simply received as one of the most beloved songs of the film (or sometimes simply as a standalone nostalgic piece) because it is understood as the song about the heart of Poland, about Warsaw, about the nation’s struggle for survival. In a word, it is about “home,” a home today overwhelmingly absent of Poland’s once thriving Jewish population.58 The ritual recounting—indeed, p ­ erformance—of a different, less complicated, less inclusive communal history of suffering, especially during the last decade or so, has threatened the loss of the song’s full resonance.59 But this striking film is also a reminder for us to consider the frictions of official and private memory. While it might be tempting to maintain the more popular thesis of Poland’s post-war “forgetting” or “repression,” Zakazane piosenki reminds us that themes of Jewish loss and redemption were indeed remembered and sometimes hidden in plain view. As during other times in Polish history, it would take a close listening to the music to understand fully the deeper meaning of such apparently “light” entertainments. As in the past, music again proves the key to unlocking some of Poland’s most closely guarded narratives.

Notes 1 Many of Poland’s film professionals survived the war in Warsaw or escaped eastward into the Soviet Union and returned to Poland in 1944 when the city of Lublin was liberated by the Red Army. Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Bossak, Stanisław Wohl, and Ludwik Perski were among the latter group—the Czołówka Filmowa Wojska Polskiego (The vanguard film unit of the Polish army) formed in 1943 to document Polish soldiers fighting alongside the Red Army. The daunting task of rebuilding Polish cinema was largely left to them (Haltof, Polish Film 13). Polish filmmakers who had escaped westward at the beginning of the war overwhelmingly remained abroad. 2 An advertisement was also placed in Głos Robotniczy no. 82, 9 September 1945. All Polish translations included in this chapter are my own. 3 The Łódz ́ paper Głos Robotniczy (no. 67, 25 August 1945) earlier published a call for extras (statystów) with no mention of street songs, but according to historian Waldemar Bronisław Ludwisiak rumors quickly circulated about people being asked to sing songs.

128  Barbara Milewski 4 Dziennik Powszechny (year I, no. 120, Radom-Kielce, 13 September 1945, p. 3) published an article titled, “Poszukujemy zabronionej piosenki z lat okupacji” (Seeking forbidden songs of the occupation), presumably penned by Starski himself, which explained the rationale for collecting songs: “Film Polski” has been collecting for some time now various documentary materials related to Polish life under the German occupation. They are gradually being used to make films concerning the war. These materials in essence present a multi-faceted view of the tragic experiences, sufferings and meager joys which everyone faced, relegated to a gloomy existence in the great concentration camp known as the General Government. Typical characters of the occupation were the anonymous singers who at times under threat of death showed off humorous, biting, sometimes sentimental songs. We encountered them on the streets, in trams and in trains—everywhere. The topic of these straightforward, but often very cleverly arranged works was Hitler and his gang. But there were also songs that celebrated the bravery of Polish soldiers and in simple words eulogized the hardships of the entire nation. Song had its appeal—it was desired. It was forbidden fruit. Its performer did not need to ask for a contribution. It was guaranteed in advance. Forbidden song, dressed in unshapely rhymes, was often the victorious challenger to the propagandistic bellow of Goebbels’s insane megaphone. Today we wish to find and preserve such song on film. We ask the performers of forbidden songs of the occupation to remember your repertoire and come to “Film Polski” where it will be appropriately utilized. We also ask people who collected such songs to share them with us. (Press clipping in “Zakazane piosenki Varia” Folder) A shortened version of these sentiments even made its way into the film. In the opening credits we read, “The hero of this film is song. Naïve and simple, but genuine. During the most difficult period of the occupation it managed to ridicule the enemy, lift people’s spirits, and offer optimism. That is why it has earned itself a film of its own.” 5 See, for example, Załe ̨ski. Among the earliest publications to document firsthand accounts of Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto in literary prose and poetry were: Seweryna Szmaglewska, Dymy nad Birkenau (1945, Smoke over Birkenau); Krystyna Żywulska, Przeżyłam Os w ́ ięcim (1946, I survived Auschwitz); Filip Friedman i Tadeusz Hołuj, Os w ́ ięcim: z przedmową Dr. Wacława Barcikowskiego (1946, Auschwitz: with a forward by Dr. Wacław Barcikowski); Michał Borwicz, Literatura w obozie (1946, Literature in the Camp); and, ­Stefania Ney, Dzieci getta (1947, Children of the Ghetto). 6 See Hull 145–46. Anna Jachnina, who was an active member of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army, recounted: Satire during the war played a major role. It was a weapon—more specifically a political weapon. … Varsovians turned every political move and report from the front (and not just those concerning the Germans) into a joke and recorded the terroristic actions of the occupier toward civilians. The “street” responded like the most sensitive seismograph. The greater the repression and terror, the more blunt and indiscriminate the satire. It was a safety measure, a self-defense mechanism. It should be noted that another type of cultural continuity was upheld by the clandestine Council of Musicians which commissioned songs by ­Polish

Hidden in Plain View  129 composers for the Home Army. Such compositions fell somewhere between “fakelore” and “folklore,” intended like other creations to raise morale. 7 The subject of Polish cultural resistance was discussed even before the war’s end: Despite such difficult conditions of life, despite imposed limitations, persecutions, arrests, man-hunts and deportations to concentration camps … music in Poland is not dead. Apart from … public performances, which are much limited by official vetoes and regulations, many concerts devoted exclusively to Polish music are organized in private houses…. In spite of the danger involved, they are well attended and steadily increase in number…. [A]rtists give their services free. Polish composers continue to work and have created various new [compositions]…. Some of them are already being performed at private concerts. Thus everything possible is being done to preserve musical life in Poland from demoralization and extinction. (Nazi Kultur 206) 8 The notion that Polish narratives of the war were silent about the experience of the Jewish genocide has, since the 1980s, largely been an American Jewish historical narrative. For an excellent exploration of this historiography, see Cesarani and Sundquist. 9 Artur Patek states that Starski’s father’s name was Józef. Helena Ochocka, Ludwik Starski’s niece, states that it was “Ignacy” (personal telephone communication, 11 February 2016). 10 See Patek. Starski’s brother Adam also became a journalist and changed his surname after another character in Lalka named Ochocki. It was not uncommon for assimilated Polish Jews to assume pseudonyms in order to secure professional positions and to avoid anti-Semitic backlash (personal communication with Allan Starski, 19 October 2014; personal telephone communication with Helena Ochocka, 11 February 2016). 11 For more on Polish inter-war cabaret, see Kałuży ński, Holmgren, and Mos ć icki. 12 See the programs for Prosto z Mostu!, Z Całego Serca, Klejnoty Pragi. Numerous creative artists engaged in cabaret also adopted pseudonyms. For example: Julian Tuwim became Juljan Oldak, Anne Weiner Kitschmann became Anda Kitschman, Henryk Warszawski became Henryk Wars, Jerzy Glejgewicht became Jerzy Jurandot and Bohdan Eugène Junod became Eugeniusz Bodo. 13 Conversion was common in interfaith marriages (personal communication with Hania Walewska, 15 April 2016, and Allan Starski, 19 October 2014). 14 Starski wrote the screenplays for a dozen Polish films made in the 1930s. 15 Ludwik Starski’s unpublished manuscript provides a colorful account of Bodo and Starski’s close friendship and their artistic collaboration on Pies ń iarz Warszawy (private collection of Allan Starski, Warsaw). 16 Starski penned some three dozen songs in the 1930s (Lerski 760; Michalski, Powróc m ́ y). 17 Many Poles believed escaping eastward into the Soviet-occupied zone would offer refuge from the chaos and dangers of the German occupation. Predominantly, socialists and communist sympathizers, they believed they would be welcomed by the Soviets and treated fairly. After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, however, the threat of persecution followed. 18 Hania Walewska, Maria Bargielska’s niece, confirmed that Starski was forced to leave his apartment sometime toward the end of summer 1942, remembering she had just wed and moved into her marital apartment on Sosnowa Street during that same summer (personal communication with Hania Walewska, 15 April 2016).

130  Barbara Milewski 19 This means that the building likely would have been either number 33, 35, 37 or thereabouts. These buildings no longer exist (personal telephone communication with Hania Walewska, 1 May 2016). 20 For a detailed rendering of the ghetto’s boundaries, see Engelking and Leociak. 21 Allan Starski has made his own impressive contributions to cinema. An internationally renowned production and set designer, he received an Academy Award in 1993 for Best Production Design in Schindler’s List and a French César Award for his production design for The Pianist in 2002, among many other honors and lifetime achievement awards. 22 Hania Walewska reports this period was “unimaginable.” “It sent chaos and terror through the city” (personal communication, 15 April 2016). Other than this comment from Hania, the family’s response to the events was not registered in any accounts. 23 The Warsaw Uprising was suppressed on 2 October 1944 (for an excellent historical account, see Richie). According to Allan, the family hid in basements during the bombings. Once they were taken to Pruszków, a Nazi soldier took pity on his mother when he tried to separate Allan and her from Ludwik, and the child wouldn’t stop crying. They remained together until they were liberated in Skawina (personal communication, 19 October 2014). 24 By 3 November, 100,000 Varsovians were seeking shelter in the central and western districts of Poland (Richie 608). 25 Starski lived in 69 Narutowicz. The Vanguard occupied 67, 69, 86/88 (Gronczewska). 26 At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin conceded to Roosevelt and Churchill the acceptance of a new Polish Provisional Government of National Unity (PCNL) formed out of the existing provisional government. The United States and Great Britain thereby transferred their recognition of the government in exile in London to the PCNL. In June 1945, a new Polish government was established, and Stanisław Mikołajczyk and Władysław Gomułka (the pro-­Western Prime Minister of the London government and head of the Peasant Party, respectively) were appointed as Deputy Prime Ministers, but it also included representatives of all “non-rightist” political parties (Kochanski; Babiracki). 27 For a fine treatment of film during this period, see Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 44–55. 28 It was also unapologetically ideological: Jakubowska and Schneider were both fervent communists who crafted their narrative along pro-Soviet lines, meeting Socialist Realist aesthetics that were not yet fully adopted by other pro-communist Polish filmmakers. It wasn’t until Stalin himself personally intervened on the film’s behalf that it was finally made in 1947 and released the following year. See Haltof, Polish Film, 28–52, and Haltof, Screening Auschwitz for a comprehensive book-length study of the film. See also Talarczyk-Gubała. 29 The song had countless variants, but its strongest leitmotif concerned the ­terror-inducing daily roundups of Polish civilians. It was written by Anna Jachnina in 1942 and included in the underground publication Posłuchajcie ludzie… published by KOPR in February 1943. Shortly after penning the text, she herself was captured in a roundup and taken to Auschwitz on 3 November 1942. She was taken to Ravensbrück at the end of 1944 and liberated in 1945 (Lada). Sowińska (48–60) and Michalski (Piosenka 11–15) also discuss the songs of the film. 30 One exception to this was the scene in the film of the student violinist informant being shot, which the crew was able to film in front of Hotel Polonia on Aleje Jeruzolimskie in Warsaw, a historic site that miraculously survived destruction (personal telephone communication with the actor who played the student violinist, Witold Sadowy, 29 June 2014).

Hidden in Plain View  131 31 He created, for example, the film scores for Dzikie pola (1932, Wild fields), Ludzie Wisły (1938, People of the Vistula), and Ja tu rza ̨dze ̨ (1939, I’m the boss here), to name the better known. 32 During the first two months of the German occupation, Polish composers systematically lost their sources of supplemental income as music critics, conservatory teachers, conductors, artistic directors, music editors, or by having their works performed. The careers of numerous talented composers of popular music also came to an abrupt end. They no longer received commissions from Polish Radio, cabarets, and theaters, or the previously flourishing recording and film industries because all had been disbanded by the Germans (Naliwajek-Mazurek, “Polish Composers”). 33 Palester played in the early months of the war at the Gastronomia café and had his compositions performed at Dom Sztuki (Home of art). That café’s ambitious programs of new chamber and solo works composed by various Polish musical talents were organized by composer and Warsaw Conservatory professor, Bolesław Woytowicz (Naliwajek-Mazurek, “Polish Composers”). 34 I am grateful to Mackenzie Pierce for sharing his most recent findings on Palester’s wartime experiences. See also Helman, Markowska and Naliwajek-­ Mazurek (Okupacyjne, losy vol. 1, 232–43), and Milewska. Palester’s father Henryk escaped detection but died at the end of 1944 when he was run over by a German truck. It is possible that the character of Dr. Białek in Ulica Graniczna (1948, Border street), for which Palester wrote the score, was an homage to Palester’s father. 35 All of these films took up the subject of the war. They included Dwie godziny, Zakazane piosenki, Ostatni etap, Ulica Graniczna, and Robinson Warszawski (heavily edited, retitled and released as Miasto nieujarzmione in 1950), where Palester’s name was removed from the credits due to his defection to the west. The film 2 × 2 = 4 (1945) was made by Antoni Bodziewicz but withdrawn and never released. Palester also wrote the music for a short documentary titled Budujemy Warszawę (1945), remade for English-speaking audiences by Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski and released in the United States as Warsaw Rebuilds (1946). 36 In 1947, Palester left for Paris. He returned to Poland in 1949, but in response to culturally imposed principles of Socialist Realism announced at the Polish National Convention of Composers and Music Critics held in Łagów that year, he returned to Paris and officially emigrated in 1951. As a result of his defection, he was stripped of professional membership in the Polish Composer’s Union and ZAiKS (the Polish artists’ rights society), his scores taken out of circulation, and his compositions banned. From 1952 to 1972, he lived in Munich and headed the cultural department of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe. Only in 1977 was the ban on his works lifted. 37 The song serves as a leitmotif throughout the film, but arguably its most powerful utterance is when Krenz performs it at the piano in the scene where Tokarski’s sister learns that her love interest is dead. 38 The patriotic songs Warszawianka (1831) and the Polish national anthem Mazurek Dąbrowskiego are also heard, as are Marsz pierwszego korpusu, and several other fragments, such as Franz von Suppé’s overture to the operetta Leichte Kavallerie (1866, Light cavalry) and a haunting violin melody that is performed by an informant working for the Germans while posing as a student busker. Predictably, there are also musical quotations of the German national anthem, Deutschlandlied. ́ 39 Pol’s poem was titled, S piew z mogiły (Song from the grave) and published anonymously in Paris in a collection titled, Pies ń i Janusza (1835, Songs of Janusz). Chopin’s song, published posthumously, derives its title from the poem’s first line.

132  Barbara Milewski 4 0 Gebethner and Wolff published the opus 74 collection of Chopin’s songs in Warsaw, while A.M. Schlesinger did so in Berlin (Kobylańska; “Pierwodruki”; Tomaszewski). 41 A reference to “tingeltangel,” sexually suggestive, risqué cabaret of the Weimar period. Female performers would double as “hostesses,” who mingled with the audience and encouraged them to buy drinks and other services on offer. 42 In the occupied territories as in the Reich, jazz remained popular as escapist entertainment among the German occupying forces and was used as a propagandistic tool deployed against Polish citizens. To counteract the effects of German bans on Polish music making, the composer Piotr Perkowski opened the Lira Café, which became home to the clandestine Council of Musicians, one of many underground institutions that surfaced during the occupation. It organized concerts of Polish music (especially Chopin) in private apartments, and concerts of classical music at Polish cafés. The Council also organized music education and offered financial support and other assistance for musicians in hiding (Naliwajek-Mazurek, “Polish Composers”). Visiting German gambling houses was also considered “not consonant with national dignity” by members of the Polish resistance, and “a roll of dishonour” was published by the Polish underground press. “Gambling houses and cheap vodka was to serve as a means to corrupt the Polish nation” (Williamson 57–59). 43 This is just one of several musical “battles” enacted in the film to underscore the heroic role of Polish music in resisting the imposition of German culture. To be sure, such musical clashes, particularly between classical and jazz forms, were a trademark of inter-war period films, and a convention perfected by Starski, especially in Piętro wyżej. 4 4 The original text is “Wszystko, wszystko sie ̨ przes ́niło” (Everything was foretold). 45 A large number of sources erroneously attribute “Warszawo ma” to lyricist Andrzej Włast (who perished in the Warsaw ghetto) and composer Kazimierz Oberfeld (who perished at Auschwitz), even though the song is registered under Ludwik Starski’s name at ZAiKS. Apart from its near-identical title, Włast and Oberfeld’s cabaret hit of 1928, “Warszawo ma!,” bears no resemblance to Starski’s poignant post-war “Warszawo ma” (Włast and Oberfeld). “Miasteczko Bełz” was first popularized in Poland in 1935 by the singer Adam Aston, born Adolf Loewinsohn. 46 On the seeming incongruity of a Jewish girl performing outside the ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum, chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, writing in 1943 tells us: Some children earned their living by singing in the streets or courtyards. They assimilated to their environment to such an extent that they even sang the anti-Semitic songs that came into being during the war. Some children were able to live on the Aryan side thanks to the Jewish workposts, which used them as errand-boys, sent them to do shopping in the streets, etc. (150) 47 Significantly, too, the original screenplay presents a different ending: a little boy held aloft in his mother’s arms waves from the second story window at the Polish soldiers returning home in the street below. One wonders whether this could be a sentimental homage to Starski’s wife and son’s survival. 48 Only Mrozowska’s closest friends and confidantes knew of Mrozowska’s Jewish identity and wartime survival (“S-646”; Szaflarska). 49 Henryk Szwajcer, sometimes spelled Szweizer (1916–2006), fled eastward, and in 1943 joined the theater of the Soviet-organized Polish First Tadeusz

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56

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Kos ́ciuszko Infantry Division (Teatr I Dywizji Wojska Polskiego im. Tadeusza Kos ́ciuszki) and returned home as a member of the Division. The song originally commemorated the Moldovan town of Bă lt ̧i (Belts, in Yiddish). Conveniently for Poles, a small Galician town (currently in Western Ukraine) also bears this name. While public commemorations of the Auschwitz Museum and the Ghetto Uprising Monument took place in 1947 and 1948, respectively, by 1949 approximately two-thirds of the remaining Jewish community had emigrated to Israel or to the West in response to the Kielce pogrom, increasing censorship, and the shuttering of Yiddish publications and cultural institutions. An official anti-cosmopolitanism campaign was launched after Gomułka came to power in 1956. Prominent Jewish members of the Polish communist party were purged or demoted, and security apparatchiks were accused of Stalinist crimes (Wróbel 572; Szaynok; Kochanski 532–78; Babiracki 52–96). Authorities were quite sensitive to this charge. Interestingly, the very opening of the revised version of the film, Zakazane piosenki (1948), replaces the Film Polski atelier setting of the original with a gathering of Tokarski’s Polish soldier friends just repatriated from England. Their ignorance of Warsaw during the occupation and their claim that it couldn’t have been so hard if there was time to sing songs sets off the narrative of the revised film. The substitution of Polish soldiers, who had fought in the West—not the Soviet Union—was a deliberate attempt to deflect attention away from those Poles, who had survived the war in the Soviet Union and themselves were accused of being ignorant of the nation’s wartime suffering when they returned, often to take up high-ranking posts in the newly-installed communist government. In 1949, Film Polski’s leading filmmakers adopted the principles of Socialist Realism presented by the Ministry of Culture and Art at the filmmakers’ congress in Wisła. Polish post-war films were criticized for their lack of political and ideological neutrality, and a series of Soviet films that told of revolutionary heroes or exuberantly productive workers was released in Polish cinemas (Haltof, Polish Cinema 56–72). Only after the collapse of the communist state did Filmoteka Narodowa dust off the 1947 version of the film and air it on national television, resulting in pirated copies of the original available for a time on the black market. Until recently, this had led to much confusion in the blogosphere about which version is the “true,” uncensored version. Even film professionals at Filmoteka Narodowa were not certain, and confirmed that more should be done to preserve the 1947 original (Łuczyński). Part of the confusion may lie in a limited release of the 1948 censored version of the film by “Propaganda OKO” in 2008, which wrongly lists the production date of the film as 1946. Presently, copies of the film—both the 1947 original and the 1948 censored version— are available only through KADR film studio, which controls the rights to the film. A digitally remastered version of the original 1947 film, with English subtitles by the author of this chapter, is in the planning stages. See Orkiestra uliczna. The LP was reissued in 1978. The same ensemble released a CD in 1991 titled, Bagnet na Bron !́ on the Bravo label, once again commemorating many of the songs featured in Zakazane piosenki, but, again, not “Warszawo ma.” In his annotation to the song, Silverman erroneously states: “This song was sung in a 1950s Polish movie, although it may have been composed earlier.… The melody is borrowed from a well-known Polish-Jewish song, ‘Miasteczko Belz’ (Mayn Shtetele Belz).” Among the stranger covers of the song is one by Ferajna z Hoovera (Gang from Hoover). In the “About” category, the group’s Facebook page states: “Our

134  Barbara Milewski gang formed so that the memory of the Warsaw Uprising combatants and their songs remains alive.” 58 A recent, moving cover of the song by Stanisława Celińska (on the 2012 album Nowa Warszawa) adds an interesting twist to memorializing the song, and the war. Celińska made her spectacular film debut playing a young Jewish girl in a post-war German DP camp in Andrzej Wajda’s Krajobraz po bitwie (1970, Landscape after battle). At the end of the film, her character, Nina, is randomly killed. On the 2012 release, Celińska’s somber, haunting interpretation of the song eerily reanimates memories of a Polish Jewish past. Her performance reminds listeners at once of the young Jewish girl she so brilliantly played in Wajda’s film, as well as the Jewish girl in Zakazane piosenki, who sings the song, played by the talented Zofia Mrozowska, who Celińska very much admired. I am grateful to Allen Kuharski for bringing Celińska’s performance to my attention. 59 See, the now yearly, hugely popular sing-along concert event, “Warszawiacy s ́piewaja ̨ (nie) zakazane piosenki” (Varsovians sing (not) forbidden songs), originally organized to commemorate the sixty-fourth anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. In its decade-long existence, tens of thousands of Poles have gathered on 1 August to sing the songs, memorialized in Zakazane piosenki, and others, associated with the Uprising (“(Nie) Zakazane piosenki”).

Works Cited Anon. The Nazi Kultur in Poland, by Several Authors of Necessity Temporarily Anonymous. For the Polish Ministry of Information by H.M. Stationery Office, 1945. Babiracki, Patryk. Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire 1943–1957. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Celińska, Stanisława. “Warszawo Ma.” Nowa Warszawa, Nowy Teatr, 2012. Cesarani, David, and Eric J. Sundquist, editors. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence. Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–38. Connerton, Paul. “Social Memory.” How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 6–40. Engelking, Barbara, and Jacek Leociak. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. Yale University Press, 2009. “Ferajna z Hoovera – Warszawo Ma (Oficjalny teledysk).” YouTube, uploaded by Mateusz Wyszogrodzki, 3 July 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbWtu5Sa_NE. Accessed 10 January 2017. Głos Robotniczy, no. 82, 9 September 1945. Biblioteka Cyfrowa Regionalia Ziemi Łódzkiej, 212.191.39.140/dlibra/docmetadata?id=67802&from=publication. Accessed 20 January 2017. Gronczewska, Anna. “Filmowa kamienica w Łodzi. Mieszkali tam Passendorfer, Starski i Kawalerowicz.” Dziennik Łódzki, 3 May 2014, https://dzienniklodzki. pl/filmowa-kamienica-w-lodzi-mieszkali-tam-passendorfer-starski-i-kawalerowicz/ar/3423105. Accessed 10 September 2019. Haltof, Marek. Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory. Berghahn Books, 2014. ———. Polish National Cinema. Berghahn Books, 2002. ———. Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. Northwestern University Press, 2018. Helman, Zofia. Roman Palester: Twórca i dzieło. Musica Iagellonica, 1999.

Hidden in Plain View  135 Holmgren, Beth. “Acting Out: Qui Pro Quo in the Context of Interwar Warsaw.” East European Politics and Society and Cultures, vol. 27, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 205–23. Hull, Eugeniusz. “Okupacyjny humor, dowcip, anegdota w dokumentacji Adama Che ̨tnika.” Rocznik Mazowiecki, vol. xviii, 2006, pp. 143–53. ́ Jachnina, Anna. “Smiechem zabijaja ̨c wojne ̨—rozmowa Marzeny Woz ń iak z Anna ̨ Jachnina ̨.” Czas, no. 3, 16 February 1975, p. 24 (as cited in Katarzyna Maniewska, “Szlaki Pamie ̨ci: Anna Jachnina,” http://4ict.pl/szlaki_pamieci/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=105. Accessed 15 October 2016). Kałuży ński, Wojciech. Kino, teatr i kabarety w przedwojennej Polsce. Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2013. Kawczyńska, Dominika, and Igor Rakowski-Kłos, “Pocza ̨tki filmowej Łodzi: Armia Czerwona, spirytus i filmy.” Wyborcza.pl, 27 January 2013, wyborcza. pl/1,75410,13292415,Poczatki_f ilmowej_Łódz í _ _ Armia_Czerwona_ _ spirytus.html?disableRedirects=true. Accessed 30 August 2016. Kobylańska, Krystyna. Rękopisy Utworów Chopin, vol. 1, Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1977. Kochanski, Halik. The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War. Harvard University Press, 2014. ̇ Lada, Wojciech. “Zakazana piosenka.” Z ycie Warszawy.pl, 17 March 2011, www. zw.com.pl/artykul/579168.html. Accessed 17 October 2016. Lerski, Tomasz. Syrena Record: pierwsza polska wytwórnia fonograficzna, 1904–1939. Editions Karin, 2004. Ludwisiak, Waldemar Bronisław. “Zakazane piosenki—o premierze filmu i jego przypadkach.” Unpublished typoscript. Markowska, Elżbieta, and Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek, editors. Okupacyjne losy muzyków: Warszawa 1939–1945. Vol. 1, Towarzystwo imienia Witolda Lutosławskiego, 2014. Michalski, Dariusz. Powróc m ́ y jak za dawnych lat… Historia Polskiej Muzyki Rozrywkowej lata 1900–1945: vol. 1, Wydawnictwo ISKRY, 2007. ———. Piosenka przypomni ci… Historia Polskiej Muzyki Rozrywkowej lata 1945– 1958: vol. 2, Wydawnictwo ISKRY, 2010. Milewska, Hanna. “Roman Palester: Nieobecny usprawiedliwiony.” HiFi, October 2011, www.hi-fi.com.pl/sylwetki-muzyczne-lista/515-roman-palesternieobecny-usprawiedliwiony.html. Accessed 14 July 2014. Milewski, Barbara. “The Mazurka and National Imaginings.” Dissertation, Princeton University, 2002. Mos ́cicki, Tomasz. “Kabarety przedwojennej Warszawy (1910–1939).” Culture. pl, culture.pl/pl/artykul/kabarety-przedwojennej-warszawy-1910–1939. Accessed 11 January 2017. Naliwajek-Mazurek, Katarzyna. “Polish Composers in Occupied Poland.” The OREL Foundation, 7 June 2010, orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/­journalArticle/ polish_composers_in_occupied_poland/. Accessed 18 September 2016. “Nuty-155: Palester Roman oprac. muzyczne piosenki do filmu Zakazane piosenki.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. Orkiestra uliczna z Chmielnej. Zakazane piosenki. Polskie Nagrania Muza, 1970. Patek, Artur. “Ludwik Starski.” Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. 42, 2003–04, p.  369. See also Internetowy Polski Słownik Biograficzny. www.ipsb.nina.gov.pl/­ index.php/a/ludwik-starski. Accessed 2 May 2016.

136  Barbara Milewski “Pierwodruki.” NIFC, http://pl.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/first_editions/detail/ id/54. Accessed 3 November 2016. Pitera, Zbigniew. “Kiedy powstawał nasz pierwszy film powojenny.” Kino, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp. 16–22. Program for Klejnoty Pragi, 1933. mbc.cyfrowemazowsze.pl/dlibra/plain-­content? id=3166. Accessed 19 August 2016. Program for Prosto z Mostu!, 1933. mbc.cyfrowemazowsze.pl/dlibra/plain-­content? id=3167. Accessed 19 August 2016. Program for Z Całego Serca, 1933. mbc.cyfrowemazowsze.pl/dlibra/plain-­content? id=3168. Accessed 19 August 2016. Richie, Alexandra. Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013. Ringelblum, Emmanuel. Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War. Translated from the Polish by Dafna Allon, Danuta Dabrowska and Dana Keren, Northwestern University Press, 1992. Robotnik, no. 233, 7 September 1945. Newspaper clipping. “Zakazane piosenki III: Artykuły, noty, itd.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. “S-646 Zakazane piosenki – Film Fabularny Scenopis 1 wersja filmu.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. Silverman, Jerry. The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust. Syracuse University Press, 2002. Sowińska, Iwona. Polska muzyka filmowa (1945–1968). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ́ ̨skiego, 2006. S la Szaynok, Bożena. “The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Attitudes in Postwar Poland.” Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath, edited by Joshua D. Zimmerman, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 239–46. Talarczyk-Gubała, Monika. Wanda Jakubowska. Od nowa. Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2015. Tomaszewski, Mieczysław. Chopin: człowiek, dzieło, rezonans. Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne SA, 2005, p. 71 and pp. 532–34. ́ “WARSZAWIACY SPIEWAJA ̨ (NIE) ZAKAZANE PIOSENKI 2017 CAŁY KONCERT 01–08–2017.” YouTube, uploaded by ThePawello81, 2 August 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrcBn7wUKiw. Accessed 7 February 2018. Williamson, David G. The Polish Underground 1939–1947. Pen and Sword, 2012. Włast, Andrej and Kazimierz Oberfeld. “Warszawo Ma!” Gebethner and Wolff, 1928. Polona.pl, polona.pl/item/58860197/0/. Accessed 27 September 2016. Also Biblioteka Narodowa, Magazyn Muzykaliów, Mus.III.104.549 Cim, Warsaw. Wróbel, Piotr. “Double Memory: Poles and Jews after the Holocaust.” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 11, no. 3, September 1997, pp. 560–74. “Zakazane piosenki I – Recenzja.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. “Zakazane piosenki V – Ankiety.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. “Zakazane piosenki Varia.” Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. Załe ̨ski, Grzegorz. Satyra w konspiracji 1939–1944. 3rd (expanded) ed., Wydawnictwo LTW, 2011.

Hidden in Plain View  137 Films Cited 2 × 2 = 4. Directed by Antoni Bodziewicz, music by Roman Palester, produced 1945, but not released. Budujemy Warszawę. Directed by Stanisław Urbanowicz, music by Roman Palester, Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego, 1945. See Warsaw Rebuilds. Dwie godziny (Two hours). Directed by Stanisław Wohl and Józef Wyszomirski, music by Roman Palester, P.P. Film Polski, made in 1946 and released in 1957. Dzikie pola (Wild fields). Directed by Joseph Lejtes, music by Roman Palester and Marian Neuteich, Sola-Film, 1932. Ja tu rza ̨dze ̨ (I’m the boss here). Directed by Mieczysław Krawicz, music by ­Roman Palester and Władysław Dan, Lira-Film, 1939. Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape after battle). Directed by Andrzej Wajda, music by Zygmunt Konieczny, Film Polski and Polish Corporation for Film Production, 1970. Ludzie Wisły (People of the Vistula). Directed by Aleksander Ford and Jerzy Zarzycki, music by Roman Palester and Marian Neuteich, Legia-Film, 1938. Ostatni etap (The last stage). Directed by Wanda Jakubowska, music by Roman Palester, P.P. Film Polski, 1948. Pies ń iarz Warszawy (Singer of Warsaw). Directed by Michał Waszyński, music by Henryk Wars, Urania-Film, 1934. Piętro wyżej (One floor up). Directed by Leon Trystan, music by Henryk Wars, Urania-Film, 1937. Robinson Warszawski (The Warsaw Robinson). Directed by Jerzy Zarzycki, music by Roman Palester and Artur Malawski, Film Polski, heavily edited, retitled and released as Miasto nieujarzmione (Unvanquished city) in 1950. Schindler’s List. Directed by Steven Spielberg, music by John Williams, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, 1993. The Pianist. Directed by Roman Polanski, music by Wojciech Kilar and Fryderyk Chopin, R.P. Productions, Heritage Films, Studio Babelsberg, et al., 2002. Ulica Graniczna (Border street). Directed by Aleksander Ford, music by Roman Palester, P.P. Film Polski, 1948. Warsaw Rebuilds (English version of: Budujemy Warszawe ̨). Directed by Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski and Stanislaw Urbanowicz, music by Roman Palester, Warsaw Films, 1946. Zabawka (The toy). Directed by Michał Waszyński, music by Roman Palester, Falanga, 1933. Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden songs). Directed by Leonard Buczkowski, music by Roman Palester, P.P. Film Polski, 1947 and revised 1948. Original 1947 version received as DVD from Filmoteka Narodowa in 2016. Both versions are presently commercially unavailable.

6 Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepit’ko’s Voskhozhdenie (1977, The Ascent) Maria Cizmic If we understand historical films as a form of discourse (as Hayden White has argued), how should we understand the film score’s potential to shape cinematic interpretations of history? Depending on the situation, a film score can narrow or widen hermeneutic and emotional meanings on screen, and because of this, music can potentially play a significant role in shaping the discursive significance of past events for contemporary audiences. Such are the stakes of Alfred Schnittke’s score for Larisa Shepit’ko’s Second World War film Voskhozhdenie (1977, The ascent). Voskhozhdenie is open to multiple interpretations: On the one hand, official Soviet reception of Shepit’ko’s film emphasized the tension between a good partisan hero and a villainous Russian Nazi police investigator. On the other hand, Shepit’ko’s film operates within the framework of earlier thaw-era Soviet war films and presents a narrative that is overtly religious, that explores moral ambiguity, and that enables criticism of Stalinism. Shepit’ko adapted Voskhozhdenie from the acclaimed Belarusian writer Vasil’ Bykauˉ’s novel Sotnikauˉ (1970). Bykauˉ’s war fiction is well known for presenting impossible moral dilemmas, and Shepit’ko’s cinematic adaptation follows suit.1 Set in occupied Belarusia during winter, Voskhozhdenie follows two partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostiukhin), as they leave their starving group to find food. They chance upon some Nazi police and exchange fire—Sotnikov takes a bullet to the leg, and unbeknownst to him, he kills one of the enemy fighters. Eventually, both men along with a woman, Demchikha (Liudmila Poliakova), are captured. The moral dilemma of the story circles around choices that the two men make. Both Sotnikov and Rybak are interrogated by the film’s villain, a red fascist named Portnov (Anatoliıˉ Solonitsyn). Sotnikov is painfully aware of his own culpability when it comes to Demchikha’s capture and the uncertain fate of her children, who have been left behind. He tries repeatedly to save her, to offer his own death in place of hers. But, he refuses to collaborate at every turn, leading to his own death. Although Rybak is a good person in many ways—he repeatedly risks himself to help Sotnikov—he is driven by the need to preserve his own life, which leads him to join the Nazi police by the story’s end. Between complicity and death lies a field of moral disorientation.

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  139 Schnittke’s score is also multivalent. Over the course of Voskhozhdenie, more or less the same modernist-dissonant music represents environmental danger and corresponds to three characters’ points of view. In scoring these three characters (Sotnikov, Rybak, and Portnov) and their physical struggles, their attitudes toward death, and their respective moral positions, Schnittke consistently turns to music that sounds most like the modernism of Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti. Throughout Voskhozhdenie, audiences repeatedly hear layered, static, and long held pitches played by a difficult-to-discern combination of orchestral and electronic instruments. In several of his essays on music, Schnittke writes about Arnold Schoenberg’s Klang farbenmelodie and discusses composers for whom timbre became a central compositional focus, paying close attention to Ligeti and particularly to Polish sonoristic composers such as Penderecki. Schnittke’s reflections on timbre in relationship to both orchestral and electronic music resonate closely with his score for Voskhozhdenie, which foregrounds the quality of sonic texture over other musical elements, like harmony and rhythm.2 Early in the film, these moments are fairly quiet and short. As the film unfolds, the music gets longer, louder, and layers in more and more instruments and sounds until audiences hear loud dissonant screams. Schnittke’s electro-acoustic score frequently begins very quietly and crescendos both through an increase in amplitude and through layering additional sounds; after rising to a peak, the music either fades away or abruptly cuts out. Shepit’ko uses this musical shape to dramatic effect—correlating the music’s loudest moments with significant events on screen. In two important scenes—when Sotnikov is tortured, and when Rybak reacts to Sotnikov and the other prisoners’ execution—audiences hear Schnittke’s musical scream in place of the characters’ actual cries. This chapter examines the juxtaposition of virtually the same music with close-up and point of view shots of three characters who occupy very different positions in the film’s moral landscape, which leads to a closer look at the reciprocal nature of “added value” (Chion 5, 21). Not only does film music “anchor” the meaning of an image, as Gorbman argues (58), but when the same music underscores so many different characters and situations, we must take seriously that the images viewers see influence the significance of what they hear (in addition to the other way around). In key moments, Shepit’ko juxtaposes Schnittke’s dissonant music with close-up shots of different characters’ faces in order to shape audience identification and empathy. By employing this strategy with each of the central characters, Shepit’ko and Schnittke create musical continuity across situations that seem morally divergent. Schnittke’s score plays an important role in shaping Voskhozhdenie’s interpretation of the historical memory of the Second World War for its contemporary audience.

A Culture of Memory Shepit’ko’s films, Schnittke’s music, and Bykauˉ’s war fiction—independent from one another and in their convergence here—all figure prominently in the late socialist culture of historical memory, which developed among the

140  Maria Cizmic East European intelligentsia during the 1960s and 1970s and later expanded into mainstream media during glasnost. Katerina Clark considers the ways in which different historical moments were reimagined in order to model an understanding of the present. Clark writes that the Brezhnev era “showed an increasing interest in seeking historical precedents in various non-­canonical versions of the past” (298), an interest that grew throughout the late socialist period and could be seen across the political spectrum. By the time Gorbachev came into power, “his intelligentsia were essentially obsessed with the past…” (Clark 298). Clark’s comments point to the prevalence of this cultural preoccupation with history during late socialism, which is evidenced by both Schnittke’s polystylistic compositions and several of the films he scored.3 Clark also emphasizes the role of hermeneutics, explaining that during this time the Russian intelligentsia was obsessed with historical memory as a way to interpret their present. It is my purpose here to consider how Schnittke’s film music participated in this process of interpretation. Both of the films Shepit’ko is most well-known for—Voskhozhdenie and Kryl’ia (1966, Wings)—deal with historical memory. In fact, Kryl’ia is replete with musically accompanied depictions of remembering. Her first feature film, Kryl’ia tells the story of Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova), a former Second World War female fighter pilot, who now works as a school principal. Petrukhina is chronically at odds with the younger generation—personified both by her students and her daughter—and repeatedly loses herself in the past. On several occasions, Shepit’ko interrupts the narrative flow with shots that look like they come from a camera floating in the sky, accompanied by Roman Ledenëv’s score. These episodes turn out to be point of view shots of Petrukhina remembering the experience of flying. Not only does Petrukhina repeatedly fall into these reveries (which will eventually reveal her tragic love story), but diegetic events also call up memories: Petrukhina and a local waitress share stories of their past, dancing and singing a song from their youth; Petrukhina’s friends and former female pilots send her a recording they made of themselves singing a Second World War song.4 Although both Kryl’ia and Voskhozhdenie deal with the Second World War, they do so in very different ways: Kryl’ia depicts remembering and memories; Voskhozhdenie lacks any such backward reflection within its diegesis. Instead, Voskhozhdenie—as a whole—is a look back, a meditation on and interpretation of the nature of war. Intersecting with this cultural interest in historical memory is the more specific history of Russian war films. Denise J. Youngblood paints a complex picture of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the thaw opened up space for filmmakers to focus on the human consequences of war rather than overtly push a triumphant nationalism. Many movies strayed away from wartime heroics and gravitated toward the human consequences of war at home and on the battlefield. Films such as Letiat zhuravli (1957, The cranes are flying), Ballada o soldate (1959, Ballad of a soldier), Sud’ba cheloveka (1959, Fate of a man), and Ivanovo detstvo (1962, Ivan’s childhood), all coincided with and at times participated in the process of de-Stalinization. Even as the Brezhnev era brought an increase in the cult of

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  141 the Second World War, Youngblood explains that the mentality and cinematic approaches to war that arose during the thaw extended into the late 1970s, particularly with Shepit’ko’s films (7, 107–08, 118, 125–27, 165). As Youngblood writes, “In the late Soviet period, as the system was in decline, filmmakers often strayed ‘off message,’ telling stories about the Civil War and World War II that were complex and ambiguous” (4). These films focused on individuals “stumbling blindly through the waking nightmare of war” in absence of the state, the party, and the military high command (Youngblood 185–86). During the same historical moment, though, the Soviet cult of the Second World War had a huge impact on cinema. Brezhnev identified cinema as an important tool and used it, among other strategies, to fuel the cult of the Second World War in the absence of the cult of Stalin. Although elements of a cultural fixation on the Great Patriotic War existed earlier in Soviet culture, as Nina Tumarkin explains (110), by the 1970s Brezhnev consolidated the cult of the Second World War as a politically useful way to expand patriotism and militarism. This led to a number of massive, heroic, and patriotic war films during the 1970s; for example, Osvobozhdenie (1970, Liberation), made for the twenty-fifth commemoration of the Second World War, was released in five installments and ran for a total of eight hours (Youngblood 8, 108, 139, 140–43, 162–65). Both Kryl’ia and Voskhozhdenie align with the themes and strategies that Youngblood identifies as characteristic of the thaw sensibility as it extended into the late 1970s, as opposed to nationalistic films like Osvobozhdenie. In both of Shepit’ko’s films, she focuses on the individual repercussions of war. She dramatizes much suffering but no military glory, and elements of both films question the discourse of heroism. This view of Shepit’ko and her films was already in place during the 1970s—contemporary Soviet film critics identified Tarkovsky’s Ivanovo detstvo as an antecedent to Voskhozhdenie (Youngblood 183). And yet, as Jason Merrill argues, the film is open to multiple politically charged interpretations. Voskhozhdenie was a critical success; it was released in Soviet movie theaters and followed by positive reviews and interviews with Shepit’ko in prominent official publications, including Sovetski fil’m. Merrill explains that this official Soviet reception tended to either downplay or ignore the religious elements of the film. Instead, these reviews describe Voskhozhdenie as focused on the human condition, depicting a struggle between the ways in which fascism exploits human weakness versus the strength to resist, which stems from communism (Merrill 153–54). Shepit’ko and her co-screenwriter, Iuri Klepikov, added a speech not found in Bykauˉ’s original that supports such a reading of the film. After the night in prison, Sotnikov attempts once more to offer his death as a substitute for his fellow prisoners. In doing so he asserts his Soviet identity: I am Sotnikov. A commander of the Red Army. I was born in 1917, I am a Bolshevik. A party member since 1935. I am a teacher by profession. From the beginning of the war, I commanded an artillery battery, I fought against you bastards, it’s a shame I didn’t do more. Sotnikov is my name, Boris Andreevich. I have a father, a mother and a homeland. (Merrill 155)5

142  Maria Cizmic Voskhozhdenie seemingly provides clear moral anchors. On the one hand, Sotnikov avoids any sort of complicity with the enemy; on the other hand, Portnov is a collaborator. Shepit’ko portrays Sotnikov’s strength of character by melding communism and Christianity: Sotnikov appeals to Soviet ideals as he resists Portnov, and the more he resists the more he turns into a very clear Christ figure.6 Given Merrill’s account of contemporary Soviet reception of Voskhozhdenie, for some viewers, this moral framework anchored all the other complicating elements: the lack of military triumph, the Christian tropes, the overwhelming focus on physical suffering, and (as I will show) the depiction of moral crisis. By accounting for Voskhozhdenie’s debt to Dostoevsky, Merrill goes on to explain that the film could also be read as critical of totalitarianism generally, and specifically of Stalinism. Shepit’ko and Klepikov rewrote the interrogation scene between Sotnikov and Portnov by modeling it on the argument between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ in The Brothers Karamazov. In this scene, Portnov and Sotnikov debate human nature. Portnov, like the Grand Inquisitor, argues that there is no choice to be made between good and evil since people will all seek to save themselves. In analyzing Sotnikov’s response to Portnov, both here in the interrogation scene and in an alternate interpretation of the “I am Sotnikov” speech, Merrill argues that Sotnikov’s position is to assert his individual agency, that one can appeal to higher ideals in order to make choices between good and evil in the face of a totalitarian philosophy that justifies itself through dehumanization. With this in mind, Rybak exemplifies the dangers that arise when one loses a sense of higher ideals, and— echoing Portnov’s argument in this scene—Rybak joins the Nazi police in order to preserve his life (Merrill 159–61). Merrill notes that Shepit’ko left out explicit parallels Bykauˉ made between Portnov and Hitler as a way to make Portnov more generalizable (158–61). Although Merrill does not explicitly invoke Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), he argues that Portnov represents totalitarianism generally, encompassing both Nazi and Soviet regimes. In this interpretation, Portnov and Rybak ultimately collaborate with totalitarianism while Sotnikov resists all complicity.

Conscience and Complicity The way in which Voskhozhdenie brings together so many cultural preoccupations of its time makes it a prime example of what Philip Boobbyer identifies as a discourse of conscience. Boobbyer argues that the late socialist era was characterized by a “moral restlessness” (154, 168, 225). Although Soviet propaganda aligned truth-telling with party loyalty, the 1950s saw a rebirth of conscience as dissidents began to see politics as morally dubious (Boobbyer 36, 43, 65, 76). Over time this concern for morality extended more broadly to the intelligentsia and even to party officials who would later have a hand in perestroika. The term “conscience” represented a search for a new moral foundation for society. Being true to your conscience meant being true to yourself,

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  143 and therefore “conscience” seemed to reside at the core of the self (Boobbyer 2, 94–106). This sense of self was strongly spiritual, and invocations of spirituality could involve organized religion but was just as often an ecumenical, humanist spirituality that was invoked even by non-believers. This intersection of conscience and spirituality meant that dissidents and intellectuals could understand suffering the brunt of state sanctioned violence as a spiritual experience (Boobbyer 100, 106). Voskhozhdenie encapsulates the discourse of conscience. It presents the Second World War as a time of moral crisis: are you Sotnikov or Portnov? Where will Rybak fall on this spectrum of choices and behavior? Sotnikov’s heroism does not involve battlefield glory; instead, his heroism arises from his resistance to complicity and his adherence to integrity, which stem from his self. Even though Shepit’ko said she was not religious (Merrill 152), she revised Bykauˉ’s story by dramatizing Shepit’ko as a Christ figure and Rybak as a Judas, casting the second half of the film in distinctly spiritual terms. And in fact, it is Sotnikov’s experience of state sanctioned torture that begins his transformation into a Christ figure. Rather than seeing the film as “subversive” because of its overt religious themes, as Youngblood has claimed, the film’s use of Christian tropes is one element among several that place it squarely within the discourse of conscience during late socialism (182). At several key moments, the characters explicitly talk about “conscience” when they discuss the issue of complicity. In the interrogation scene, Sotnikov wants to save Demchikha because it is his fault that she is also a prisoner; Portnov intimates he might save Demchikha if Sotnikov provides information, which Sotnikov refuses to do. Portnov tells him: “You will have to trouble your conscience.” Sotnikov is trapped—either Demchikha will die and leave her children to an uncertain fate, which will be Sotnikov’s fault, or he becomes a collaborator with the Nazi police. Later, when both Rybak and Sotnikov find themselves in prison after their respective interrogation scenes, they have an extended conversation about conscience. Seeing that there is no way out, Sotnikov says, “The important thing is to be true to yourself.” Rybak calls Sotnikov’s adherence to principles foolish, and Sotnikov responds: “Then you go on living—without a conscience. It can be done.” Enraged, Rybak makes it clear that this mess is Sotnikov’s fault and passionately expresses his own will to live; he asks Sotnikov why he did not give himself up as soon as they were found: “Your conscience stopped you?” and a moment later, “My conscience … thinks!” Rybak criticizes Sotnikov for bringing up ideals at such a time and argues that his search for a way to survive comes from his conscience. The conversation comes to a close when Rybak asserts: “We need to survive” and Sotnikov asks “By joining the police?”7 From the exertion of the argument, an increasingly frail Sotnikov coughs up blood that lands on Rybak’s face as he falls back into Rybak’s arms, the two forming a gruesome pietà. The drama of Voskhozhdenie circles around the issues of choice, responsibility, and complicity—issues that figured in the discourse of conscience and served as a major concern for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his samizdat essay

144  Maria Cizmic “Live not by the Lie” (1973). Recalling Clark’s argument that interpretations of the past operated as reflections on the present, Shepit’ko stated in an interview that the war was still morally relevant, “when the construction of a new society requires one to make spiritual choices all the time,” and explained that Voskhozhdenie was meant to “answer modern day questions” (Merrill 149). The issue of complicity—couched in terms of conscience, spirituality, ideals, and integrity to self—seems to be at least one contemporary question that Voskhozhdenie addressed within the context of the Second World War. Even if Voskhozhdenie might provide “good communist” and “bad fascist” anchors that appealed to some film critics, other contemporary critics saw it as exploring moral ambiguity, conscience, and complicity. Vadim Sokolov praised the film for raising moral questions without passing moral judgment, and in Iskusstvo Kino Elena Stishova argued that the point of Voskhozhdenie was not to condemn Rybak but to help people understand that the “inhuman conditions of war put people in a place where they must choose between life and conscience” (qtd. in Youngblood 183–84). This view of the film rests in part on the complexity of both Sotnikov and Portnov. Even if Sotnikov succeeds in avoiding all complicity, he is also completely aware that he bears responsibility for the other prisoners’ deaths; he is both true to himself and completely at fault. Portnov may be a Nazi police investigator, but the fact that he attended the same university as Sotnikov and was a respectable communist party member before the war suggests that he has already traversed the same path as Sotnikov and Rybak. But, as Stishova’s review makes clear, Voskhozhdenie is Rybak’s story. Early in the film, both Rybak and Sotnikov are critical of the village elder (Serge Iakovlev), who is the Nazi police headman; by the end of the film, the village elder dies because he turns out to be a double agent for the partisans, and Rybak survives by joining the Nazi police. Shepit’ko seems to ask: How does a typical partisan, loyal to his country, who likes people and goes out of his way to take care of his fellow soldier, become a collaborator with the Nazi police?

Film Music, Empathy, and Identification Although there are many, multivalent ways in which music can function in cinema, conventional leitmotivic film scoring practice has historically correlated different musical themes to various characters, places, and ideas. With this in mind, one can imagine a film score that would have reinforced the official reception of Voskhozhdenie. Sotnikov could be represented by a folktype melody (one with a fair amount of pathos to express his suffering) that would encapsulate his strength of character. As the film’s villain, Portnov could have dissonant music. And to trace Rybak’s trajectory from being a good partisan soldier to a Nazi collaborator, an initial folk-type melody could undergo progressive modifications until it becomes grotesquely disfigured. But, Schnittke does not do this. Instead, he composes essentially the same modernist-­d issonant music for all three characters.

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  145 All the examples under examination here involve close-up shots of characters’ faces coupled with point of view and reaction shots. In describing what he calls a “scene of empathy,” Carl Plantinga builds from earlier work by Noël Carroll on point of view editing and emotion. According to Carroll, close-up shots allow viewers to see emotion on a character’s face, which then becomes more specific once a point of view shot reveals the cause of emotion. For Carroll, this visual structure essentially constructs a character’s interiority. In Voskhozhdenie, close-up shots of both Sotnikov and Rybak’s faces, coupled with point of view and reactions shots, convey each soldier’s internal emotional responses to war and to the very real possibility of death. In an attempt to understand the emotional components of identification, or “character engagement” as he calls it, Plantinga looks to psychology and neuroscience and argues that close-up shots of faces that last longer than necessary to convey a character’s emotion can become “scenes of empathy,” allowing viewers time to experience emotional contagion or affective congruence with the character on screen (239, 248). When music is coupled with a scene of empathy, then that music also participates in constructing interiority. More specifically, during a point of view sequence it seems logical to assume that what an audience hears—like what they see—comes from the character’s perspective or relates to the character’s field of perception (be it physiological or emotional). Schnittke and Shepit’ko repeatedly cement this impression by including environmental sounds with point of view shots and then editing the score so that it grows out of natural sounds. Jeff Smith argues that while music influences the affective significance of what happens on screen, narrative elements cue audiences to attribute those emotions either to a specific character or to the overall mood of a scene (156–59, 162). I would like to expand Smith’s observation to argue that visual elements—framing and editing—also cue an audience to understand that a film score relates to a character’s interiority (or not). In this way, Shepit’ko and Schnittke visually and musically construct Sotnikov and Rybak’s interior states. Typically, film music scholars argue for the ways in which music influences the meaning of what is on screen. Even though Gorbman’s “mutual implication” and Chion’s “added value” acknowledge that there is a two-way street between image and sound, they tend to emphasize the ways in which music and sound “anchor” (to use Gorbman’s adaptation of Roland Barthes’s term) the unstable meanings of the image (15, 58). Chion writes that added value “engages the very structure of vision—by rigorously framing it” (7). Even when it comes to recent film music scholarship that turns to the psychology and neuroscience of emotion, the impulse is to argue for music as the shaper of meaning. As an example, Berthold Hoeckner’s recent collaboration with Emma W. Wyat, Jean Decety, and Howard Nusbaum demonstrates that film music influences character likability, effects the certainty viewers have about a character’s thoughts, and effects the emotion attributed to a close-up of a character’s face (Hoeckner et al. 149–50).

146  Maria Cizmic Countless films certainly work in the ways described by Gorbman, Chion, and Hoeckner—including Voskhozhdenie. But, what happens when audiences hear similar music with close-up shots of different characters’ faces? As much as music shapes cinematic meaning, Schnittke’s score for Voskhozhdenie draws attention to the ways in which images prompt audiences to interpret and reinterpret what they hear. How does this musical sameness shape an audience’s knowledge of Sotnikov, Rybak, and Portnov’s interiority and their own sense of emotional engagement with these three characters?

Music and Sotnikov Rather than highlighting a possible distinction between the electronic and modernist music and the film’s natural and realistic setting, Shepit’ko and Schnittke create a high degree of continuity between the film score and the environment by editing the score in close relationship to ambient sound. During the film’s title sequence (at 00:00:53), and again when Rybak and Sotnikov set off to find food for their group (at 00:07:50), audiences hear the sound of wind, out of which Schnittke’s static, microtonal music grows. In these early instances, the music is not tied to any one character; but the score will soon take on Sotnikov’s perspective even as it maintains this link to nature. After Sotnikov and Rybak leave the village elder’s house, they soon hear the distant voices of Nazi police. In what follows, the pair tries to hide from the Nazis, but due to being sick, Sotnikov cannot run and must exchange gunfire with the enemy. Rybak successfully escapes but returns to help Sotnikov, and the two struggle extensively through the snow to find a safe spot among some trees. Throughout this portion of the film, Schnittke’s score returns four times consistently coupled with close-up shots of Sotnikov’s face. The fourth such instance is the most extensive and begins once the pair reaches safety, where Rybak helps Sotnikov lean up against a tree and then leaves in order to scout out where they are and what to do next (at 00:29:40). The sequence begins with a medium close-up shot of Sotnikov’s face through the ice-covered branches of a tree followed by a point of view shot from his angle. Beginning from what would be Sotnikov’s right, the camera slowly pans left across a tree trunk and then branches covered in crystals of ice and snow. The score returns here; the audience hears a quiet, electronic drone-like sound that vacillates up and down in pitch and is quietly mixed in with the sound of distant wind and chirping birds. The camera stops at a point that seems like Sotnikov must be looking straight ahead through layers of branches from close and distant trees. As the camera refocuses to show the flat disc of the sun more clearly through the branches, the music grows louder as it adds a dissonant cluster of higher pitches that have a cicada-like, scraping texture. The volume drops slightly when the camera cuts back to Sotnikov (Figure 6.1), who stares into the far distance, briefly closes his eyes, and then takes a stick and starts hitting the branches. Schnittke’s dissonant tone cluster of high- and mid-range pitches grows louder again and comes to a peak as

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  147

Figure 6.1  Close-up shot of Sotnikov as he stares at the snow-covered branches.

Sotnikov whacks the stick against the branches, causing the ice to crackle and fall. Diegetic and non-diegetic sounds coincide in a striking manner, quite literally as Sotnikov hits the branches faster and faster creating a percussive sound that contributes to the score’s crescendo. The camera cuts to a point of view shot of branches being hit and waving about, then back to Sotnikov through the branches as he stops, wide-eyed and breathing heavily. The camera edges in closer to him as the music reaches its loudest peak. Rybak returns to report that he found an empty cabin close by, the music quickly fading out. Visually, this whole sequence is securely anchored on Sotnikov. Viewers either see Sotnikov himself or they see what he sees. The sequence begins and ends with close-up shots of his face, and each point of view shot is framed by a close-up of him as well. The sequence fulfills much of what Carroll and Plantinga describe in order to create intimacy between Sotnikov and the viewer: the sequence as a whole lasts a while, allowing viewers time to feel affective congruence. And certainly, all the point of view images of snow and nature represent the overwhelming obstacle posed to Sotnikov by nature. But, the shots of snowy branches are perhaps not specific enough to indicate what Sotnikov is thinking, and in the ensuing conversation Sotnikov explains that he has come to accept the inevitability of his own death. Because viewers see what Sotnikov sees, it seems logical that what they hear also must come from his point of view, and the initial sounds of birds chirping and wind blowing reinforce this impression. By mixing in the score so that it emerges from environmental sounds, Shepit’ko and Schnittke connect the music to Sotnikov’s point of view as well—and yet the music’s orchestral and

148  Maria Cizmic electronic instrumentation marks it as clearly not natural. Since Sotnikov’s point of view engulfs this sequence and the music has no natural source, then it seems most likely that the score corresponds to Sotnikov’s psycho-­physicalemotional state. The tense and unsettled effect of Schnittke’s music takes on specific correspondences here: Sotnikov feels physical pain because he is ill, he has been shot, and he is extremely cold; he feels stress because of his dangerous situation; and he feels fear since he must face the likelihood of his own death. The images invite viewers to put themselves in Sotnikov’s position, and the music creates an uncomfortable, disoriented state, which an audience connects to Sotnikov’s physical and emotional condition. The music provides the emotional impact within the visual structure of identification.

Music and Rybak This music does not remain the exclusive expression of Sotnikov’s interiority and soon enough will correlate to Rybak’s point of view. The two protagonists make it to a nearby house, where they find Demchikha and her young children. Sotnikov and Rybak hide when a pair of Nazi soldiers shows up at the door, but Sotnikov sneezes and gives them away. The Germans take Sotnikov, Rybak, and Demchikha as prisoners of war, leaving her children behind. With hands tied behind their backs, the three prisoners are piled onto a horse-drawn sled—as this happens, Shepit’ko keeps her camera close to the prisoners, so much so that viewers hardly see the Nazi captors, and instead only know of their presence through sound as they talk, laugh, and even ask their prisoners for a smoke, switching between Russian and German. As they begin their journey, one soldier begins to whistle and then sing to himself.8 This singing continues as viewers see Rybak in a medium close-up shot (00:44:00) looking around and trying to loosen his tied-up hands. Rybak turns his head to look off into the distance, out of frame, and the camera cuts to a point of view shot, panning over white dunes of snow to reveal a distant dark figure running away. The singing stops as the camera cuts back to the German sharpshooter hopping off the sled. The camera then reveals what the Nazi sees—the dark figure frantically trying to climb up an embankment of snow. Although this man seems far from the sled, the audience can hear someone breathing very closely as the sled continues to move. This subtle aural discrepancy—a distant image coupled with what is presumably Rybak’s quiet and proximate breathing; the image of the German hopping off the sled coupled with the sound of its continued movement—is a clue that this occurrence is not real. Schnittke’s music enters with a low and quiet tone cluster, characterized again by a cicada-like scraping sound as it oscillates in pitch. In this instance, the film score emerges from environmental sounds, but now those sounds are produced by people—Rybak’s breathing and the sled rather than wind and chirping birds. Shepit’ko’s choice here indicates an impending narrative shift from a focus on environmental dangers to human threat, or a linking of the two.

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  149 The score gradually increases in volume as viewers see a series of shots. The Nazi raises his gun in preparation to shoot, followed by a closer view of the dark figure as he turns to look back—revealing that he is Rybak. Viewers see the sharpshooter fire his gun and then Rybak’s body being hit by bullets as the sound of gunfire echoes and blends in with the score—much like Sotnikov’s stick hitting the branches in the previous example. As Rybak turns his body against the snow, the score quickly crescendos and increases in dissonance as mid- and high-range pitches are layered in, sounding like synthesized strings. The score dramatically reaches its loudest point just as Shepit’ko cuts back to a close-up of Rybak riding on the sled, and a second later the music suddenly drops out leaving only silence. One of the captors asks Rybak, “What are you looking at?” and then urges the driver to go faster and resumes singing, all while the camera remains focused on Rybak’s horrified face. Given the naturalistic style of the film, this sequence can be confusing. Only with the final cut back to Rybak does Shepit’ko make it clear that the preceding scene had occurred in his mind’s eye. Shepit’ko uses Schnittke’s score to aurally perform Rybak’s snap back to reality, helping the audience to understand that the preceding scene had not been real. Much like the previous example, this scene creates a visual structure of identification by framing the scene with close-ups of Rybak’s face. But, unlike Sotnikov’s scene, here Shepit’ko visually depicts Rybak’s thoughts. The intervening sequence provides insight into Rybak’s psycho-emotional state as he considers the very real possibility of his own death. Schnittke’s music, with its dissonance and scream-like contour, makes palpable for the audience Rybak’s emotional, internal “scream” of horror. These two scenes present many parallels on the level of narrative, visual structure, and music. Despite such similarities, Sotnikov and Rybak come to opposite conclusions regarding death—Sotnikov accepts the probability of his own demise while Rybak registers horror. Their respective reactions to death will shape their consequent actions—Sotnikov will not collaborate and then die, and Rybak will collaborate and live. In this case, the microtonal tension of Schnittke’s music—and its scream-like contour—animates Rybak’s horror while imagining his own demise. And yet, by providing very similar music in these two scenes, Shepit’ko and Schnittke audiovisually connect the two characters rather than highlight their differences. A little later in the film, Portnov will also be musically connected to Sotnikov and Rybak.

Music and Portnov The ensuing sled ride divides Voskhozhdenie, setting apart the first half of the film in which the characters struggle most visibly with the environment, from the second half, which follows their imprisonment, interrogation, and execution. For a moment, Shepit’ko halts the film’s inevitable downward spiral to give the audience a moment of respite. The sled-ride montage depicts their journey by cutting between close-up shots of Sotnikov’s foreshortened head

150  Maria Cizmic lying on the sled, landscape panoramas, the locals, and the town they pass through on their way to the Nazi military camp. Schnittke’s film score further sets this montage apart from the narrative flow by momentarily leaving behind his electro-acoustic microtonality and composing music that is much more acoustic, melodic, and consonant. Played on a woodwind instrument, a melody gradually spins out from a small, bell-like motive that foreshadows the actual bells Schnittke will incorporate to underscore Sotnikov’s transformation into a Christ figure. Even though the interval of a second serves as a musical foundation for both Schnittke’s earlier microtonal passages and the music in this montage, the stark shift from dissonant to consonant and melodic music provides the audience a break from the film’s grueling events at the same time that it separates the two acts of the film. Once they arrive, Sotnikov is deposited inside a building, on the floor in front of a fire. In a moment, viewers will get their first look at the film’s villain, accompanied by a quieter version of Schnittke’s dissonant, drone-like score. Beginning with a shot of a warmly crackling fire (00:48:33), viewers quickly see a close-up of Sotnikov’s face as he lies on the floor looking into the fire, his face dirty, sweaty, bloodied. The sound of his strained breathing couples with the sound of the fire as Schnittke’s dissonant tone cluster quietly enters, this time mixing a group of mid-range notes with a few high, scratchy pitches, much like a tone cluster played on an electric organ. The camera pans out as Sotnikov rolls to his side, sees a pair of feet standing near him, and looks up to grasp the owner of those feet. Viewers then see a close-up of Portnov’s face, placidly tilted as he looks down at Sotnikov. Shepit’ko keeps the camera on Portnov for a moment, allowing the score to slightly crescendo and then fade out, at which point Portnov gives the faintest smile and asks quietly “Ty kto?” (“Who are you?”). Although this scene begins with Sotnikov’s point of view, what follows will not remain anchored in his perspective. Rather than returning to a reaction shot of Sotnikov, which might have more clearly signified that the close-up of Portnov was from Sotnikov’s point of view, the camera stays with Portnov, allowing viewers enough time to wonder about this new character: What is going on in his mind? Why is he so seemingly polite and concerned for his prisoner? Shepit’ko allows the camera to follow Portnov as he opens the door and calls over the sharpshooter, Gamaniuk, and chastises him for mistreating the prisoner. When the camera does finally return to Sotnikov, the shot conveys what Portnov and Gamaniuk see as they look down at him on the floor. In this shift from Sotnikov to Portnov’s point of view, the score accomplishes several different things. Because the sequence begins with a point of view shot from Sotnikov’s perspective, it can reflect Sotnikov’s own sense of unease and danger. But, as the camera stays with Portnov, an audience can link the music to him as well. The film score does not provide the same extensive construction of Portnov’s interiority as it does for Sotnikov and Rybak, since he is the film’s villain. Instead, the score takes on a meta-diegetic function, linking Portnov to the associations already built up around this music:

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  151 impending danger, the proximity of death, and emotional responses such as fear and horror. The repetitive use of such similar music throughout the film allows for the build-up of associations, and consequently in this moment, Schnittke’s music signals to the audience that despite his placid demeanor, Portnov is dangerous. Schnittke’s score wraps Sotnikov, Rybak, and Portnov in the same acoustic environment, implying that they all occupy the same field of moral crisis, even as they each make different choices.

Music of Moral Disorientation In all of these scenes, Schnittke’s use of a modernist and dissonant compositional style creates an unsettling effect. The combination of electronic and acoustic sounds makes it difficult for the audience to determine the source of these sounds. Schnittke layers pitches and overtones to build microtonal passages that—depending on the scene—may be principally dissonant but always leave the dissonance hanging without resolution. And although the repetitive use of similar music eventually creates a recognizable pattern, it is still difficult for listeners to predict the exact duration and behavior of each individual instance of the music since these passages are sustained and static in nature. The shared features across all these examples create a consistently unsettled, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and tense effect that, depending on how the music specifically functions in relationship to narrative, character, and photography, can take on various more specific meanings. Since such music returns under different circumstances in the film, we can start to think about the relationship between film score, images, and narrative as a two-way street. To the degree that Schnittke’s score contributes an uneasy mood to Voskhozhdenie, specific images prompt an audience to continuously reinterpret the film score’s significance. Is Schnittke’s music a meta-diegetic voice foreshadowing things to come? Does it express Sotnikov’s pain, fear, and ultimate acceptance of death? Does it express Rybak’s “scream” of horror? Does it mark Portnov as the presence of danger? Schnittke’s score accomplishes all of these things over the course of the film. That the same music can serve so many narrative purposes and provoke multiple emotions has significance for understanding Voskhozhdenie in its historical context. Schnittke’s music connects all these three characters despite their differences. The perpetual return of Schnittke’s ominous music underscores that all three characters are trapped in the same field of moral disorientation. The music resists the possibility of a simplistic good/bad reading of Voskhozhdenie and instead highlights the film’s discourse of conscience and morality by musically linking characters that narratively seem to occupy distinct moral positions. By depicting all these characters with the same music, Schnittke’s score de-emphasizes a potentially nationalistic reading of the film that would sacralize Russian suffering at the front while fighting the fascist enemy. Instead, it resonates with the evaluation of those contemporary critics who saw the film as a story about morality that does not judge Rybak but humanizes him.

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Two Musical Screams Two significant scenes in which Schnittke’s music replaces the sound of Sotnikov and Rybak screaming and crying are pivotal for each character. In one, Sotnikov suffers and screams because he adheres to his own ideals; in the other, Rybak suffers and cries because his desire to live has led to the death of others and his own complicity. And yet, by creating formal and sonic parallels between these two scenes, Shepit’ko and Schnittke again musically link the interiority of these two morally divergent characters. After Portnov and Sotnikov’s interrogation scene, a burly, uniformed man enters with his torture tools and viewers see the man place an iron brand in the fire. The dissonant film score quietly enters (00:57:05) and slowly increases in volume over the next shots of Portnov’s phlegmatic face and an increasingly frightened Sotnikov. Viewers see Sotnikov from behind the torturer’s right arm as he approaches with the brand; Sotnikov begins to struggle, and after another cut back to Portnov, viewers see Sotnikov from the shoulders up as the brand reaches his chest just below the frame. As Sotnikov opens his mouth to scream, the film score hits its loudest point, blocking out any other ambient sound in the room—a sonic, dissonant scream replacing the sound of Sotnikov’s screaming voice (Figure 6.2). Much like the scene in which Rybak imagines his own death, here Schnittke’s layered and dissonant mid-range tone cluster creates tension by adding some high squeaky sounds before what sounds like a backward cymbal crash punctuates the abrupt musical end. The music suddenly drops out as Shepit’ko cuts back to Portnov’s understated reaction shot. Visually and sonically, this scene mimics Rybak’s earlier imagined escape—except here what viewers see is all

Figure 6.2  R  eaction shot of Sotnikov while being tortured.

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  153 too real—and it perpetuates a visual and musical pattern that returns for the film’s final scene. After this scene, whenever the score returns in juxtaposition with Sotnikov, Schnittke includes the sound of church bells in the otherwise microtonal passages, dramatizing Sotnikov’s transformation into a Christ figure and spiritually inflecting his moral integrity. At the end of the film, Rybak goes to the outhouse and tries unsuccessfully to hang himself. All the while, the audience hears other Nazi police singing, Gamaniuk talking to the police in German and calling for Rybak in Russian. Once Rybak gives up his suicide attempt, viewers see an exterior shot of the outhouse as the door slowly creaks open and Rybak steps out (01:46:14). After a series of shots that intercuts a close-up of Rybak’s weary face with shots of what he sees around him, the camera settles back on Rybak and begins to move incrementally closer to him. Over this slow-moving shot, Schnittke’s score functions as a repository of all the other music heard throughout the film. As with Schnittke’s polystylism, generally speaking, the music functions as a well of memory. Audiences realize that all the events that have happened are registering their emotional impact on Rybak because they hear a collage of diegetic and non-diegetic music from those events. The score in this moment begins very quietly with the woodwind melody from the sled-ride sequence coupled with a quiet, low, dissonant orchestral tone cluster; the soldiers near the outhouse continue to sing and talk in German, their voices periodically become distorted with reverb; the military march music that preceded the execution scene fades in and out a couple of times; and the woodwind melody continues to grow louder. Shepit’ko eventually cuts away to a point of view shot of the camp’s open gate, and then returns her camera to Rybak, who is now more actively crying; the sound of his sobbing can be heard mixed into the score (Figure 6.3). The music grows louder as Schnittke adds the sound of bells ringing. The camera cuts back to the open door and moves through it to show the village just beyond, and viewers see a church in the extreme right of the frame. The orchestra crescendos, and as the camera is almost out of the door the music hits its loudest point; brass take up the woodwind’s motive, with more bells, drum rolls, and percussion. Since Rybak does not move from his spot by the outhouse, and the camera moves through the camp gate in the direction that he seems to be looking, this shot represents another moment of Rybak’s imagination. In one sense, this imagined move through the camp gate is another expression of Rybak’s desire for escape. But, this moment also visually and musically invokes religion. As viewers realize that there is a church just outside the military camp, they hear the woodwind motive (on its own reminiscent of bell-ringing) combine with the sound of church bells in a not-so-subtle reference to religion and—considering the discourse of conscience—to the related concepts of morality and truth. Shepit’ko returns to Rybak one last time as he drops to his knees, crying with his mouth wide open. Although the sound of his sobbing voice is present on the soundtrack, this voice is overwhelmed by the film score, which creates a parallel

154  Maria Cizmic

Figure 6.3  R  eaction shot of Rybak as he cries at the end of the film.

to Sotnikov’s torture scene—again the audience sees a character crying, and his voice is eclipsed by the loud, layered, multivalent dissonance of Schnittke’s score. Gradually, the score fades away to the sound of wind as Shepit’ko ends her film by returning to the same set of snowy landscape shots that began the film. In the previous examples, the score provided each scene with an affective jolt, which the audience is invited to continuously reinterpret in relationship to images, characters, and narrative. At the film’s end, viewers see Rybak’s vivid emotional response in an extended sequence of close-up shots of his face—but rather than relying on images, here Schnittke’s music recalls all the earlier events and thereby provides the “content” of Rybak’s emotional response. On the one hand, there are many differences between these two scenes. Sotnikov screams out in physical pain because he relentlessly adheres to his ideals; Rybak cries out in existential pain when the consequences of his choice to live at all costs sink in. Even though Sotnikov’s adherence to higher ideals is often linked to communist ideology, Sotnikov’s suffering increasingly takes on religious overtones not only through Shepit’ko’s visual and narrative choices but also through Schnittke’s inclusion of bell ringing in the score. This musical choice reaches its peak in Sotnikov’s execution scene, during which the intense accumulation of bells ringing coupled with Shepit’ko’s visual choices dramatize Sotnikov’s death as a form of transcendence.9 Rybak, on the other hand, has fulfilled Portnov’s account of human nature—Rybak abandoned any ideals in order to save his life. As all the events of the film take a heavy emotional toll on Rybak, Shepit’ko visually and musically ends her film by invoking religion as one source of higher ideals, morality, and truth that Rybak

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  155 lacked. Voskhozhdenie uses the war to explore a crisis of morality. Accordingly, at the film’s end one possible moral foundation lies just outside the camp gate, visually oblique but musically central.

Conclusion Despite these differences, the musical “screams” that recur throughout ­Voskhozhdenie—be it the first time Rybak imagines escape, or subsequently Sotnikov’s torture, or Rybak’s final cries—sound strikingly similar. In other words, their respective expressions and feelings of spiritual and physical pain sound the same. They all have Schnittke’s microtonal music at their core, they all begin quietly and crescendo to a sharp peak, and they all accompany close-ups of faces and point of view shots. From a narrative perspective, this musical repetition links Sotnikov and Rybak (and to a lesser extent Portnov) in the same world of moral crisis. In each instance—and particularly in the two screams—Shepit’ko and Schnittke provide audiences with insight into Sotnikov and Rybak’s interior emotional states, which, in turn, furnishes the groundwork for audience identification. By repeatedly providing visual and musical scenes of empathy for both Sotnikov and Rybak as they make their increasingly divergent choices, audiences are encouraged to identify with both characters. This, in turn, can shape one’s interpretation of historical memory. As Stishova wrote in Iskusstvo Kino, Voskhozhdenie does not condemn Rybak but aims to help people understand the “inhuman conditions of war.” As a result, the war was not a time of heroes and villains, winners and losers; instead, it was a time when average people struggled physically and morally without clear direction. Schnittke’s film score works in some ways like the sonic equivalent of snow in Voskhozhdenie. Visually, Shepit’ko dramatizes the characters’ physical and moral disorientation by increasing the contrast in outside shots, making the white of the land, sky, and clouds indistinguishable from one another thanks to the high-key lit black and white photography. This visual representation of physical disorientation is one representation of the film’s moral crisis. Even though snow is ubiquitous in the film and the music in the film is intermittent, through its musical sameness Schnittke’s score wraps the three central characters together, connecting them and highlighting the morally charged field in which all three are trapped. This link between the score and the environment is made concrete every time the score grows out of ambient, natural sounds. To a certain degree, Schnittke’s film score is part of the environment in which all the characters find themselves and registers the characters’ sense of physical and emotional pain. Schnittke’s score grows out of the environment only to permeate everything, including the film’s central characters, by eclipsing the sound of their voices. Replacing the sound of the human voice with music in the two scenes discussed above is a striking choice, and has many implications. The sound of music in place of Sotnikov’s voice can provide a bit of relief—in an extremely

156  Maria Cizmic naturalistic film, this moment of overt aestheticization provides a little (possibly welcome) distance between audience and screen. But, again and again, Schnittke’s score arises in point of view sequences meant to convey a character’s interior state. And with that in mind, the fact that both Sotnikov and Rybak cry out only to have both voices replaced by dissonant music connects the two, despite their different choices. This situation makes Schnittke’s music multivalent, but on a different axis from the historical-contextual implications of the film. The late socialist discourse of conscience, as Boobbyer describes it, put forward that conscience, integrity, and resistance to complicity (be it with fascist or communist totalitarian regimes) comes from a person’s interiority, from their sense of self. Sotnikov’s ability to resist originates in a staunch sense of who he is, whereas Portnov identifies people’s unremitting desire to live as inevitably necessitating any moral compromises to stay alive. But, when Shepit’ko depicts Sotnikov’s and Rybak’s interior points of view, Schnittke provides aesthetically similar music. Even if Sotnikov, Rybak, and Portnov each come to somewhat different decisions about their situation, the music underscores that they are all operating within and responding to the same environment. Rather than a reading of the film that would clarify who is heroic and who is a villain, Schnittke’s score connects all three characters into the same sonic world, the same world of moral crisis. In a film that can sustain multiple readings and interpretations, Schnittke’s score works against the official reading of the film and further implicates Voskhozhdenie in the discourse of conscience. By expressing the characters’ points of view with the same music, Schnittke unifies three characters who in other ways seem to occupy distinct moral positions. In unifying them, Schnittke and Shepit’ko emphasize a reading of the film that highlights moral crisis and disorientation rather than clear moral judgments. By extension, the music plays a role in interpreting the significance of historical memory, constructing the Second World War as a time (perhaps not so different from the film’s present) of moral disorientation, when questions of life and conscience, complicity, and loyalty, were not easily resolved.

Notes 1 Both Merrill (148) and Gimpelevich (6) make this point. In Bykauˉ’s novel, all the characters—Sotnikauˉ, Rybak, Dziamčycha, and Pyotra—are Belarusian. Much of Bykauˉ’s fiction was first published in Russian during his lifetime, which allowed for a wider readership. But, translation also involved a broader Russification. The Soviets frequently represented Bykauˉ as a Russian writer himself, and elements in his novels—like characters and names—also became Russian. Hence, in Voskhozhdenie, all the characters are Russian: Sotnikov, Rybak, Demchikha, and Portnov. Since my focus is on the film, I will use the characters’ Russian names. It is worth noting, though, that Bykauˉ figures in a long history of Belarusian resistance to Russian (as well as Polish) cultural domination. 2 In A Schnittke Reader, see: “Timbral Relationships and Their Functional Use: The Timbral Scale,” 101–07; “Klang farbenmelodie—‘Melody of Timbres’,” 113–19; “Timbral Modulations in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music  157 Celesta,” 201–10; “The Principle of Uninterrupted Timbral Affinities in Webern’s Orchestration of Bach’s Fuga (Ricercare) a 6 voci,” 211–15; and “Ligeti’s Orchestral Micropolyphony,” 225–28. 3 It has been my argument that Schnittke’s polystylism was part of this late socialist preoccupation with cultural and historical memory (Cizmic 30–66). Even a cursory glance at the more prominent films Schnittke scored situates his film music in this context as well. For example, Mikhail Romm’s final film, I vsë-taki ia veriu (1976, And still I believe,); Elem Klimov’s Agoniia (1981, Agony); and Aleksandr Askol’dov’s Komissar (1967, Commissar), based on Vasili Grossman’s short story. 4 There are a number of interesting articles on gender and Kryl’ia. See both Goscilo’s introductory chapter and Mikhailova and Lipovetsky’s chapter in Embracing Arms. Also see essays by Kaganovsky, Steans, and Makoveeva’s assessment of female Soviet filmmakers. 5 Merrill’s translation. 6 See Baumgartner’s examination of Schnittke’s score for Voskhozhdenie and its role in constructing the film as an allegorical passion story. 7 My translation. 8 See Daughtry (54–57) for a discussion of voices and foreign languages as a common sonic wartime experience. 9 Baumgartner (206–11) analyzes Schnittke’s score and his use of bells in terms of Voskhozhdenie as a passion story; he describes the music in Rybak’s final scene as “anti-passion music” (211).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. Harcourt, Inc., 1994. Baumgartner, Michael. “Partisanenparabel/Passionsmusik: Alfred ­Schnittkes Filmmusik zu Larissa Schepitkos Die Erhöhung.” Alfred Schnittke: Analyse—­ Interpretation—Rezeption, edited by Amrei Flechsig and Christian Storch, Olms, 2011, pp. 195–218. Boobbyer, Philip. Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia. Routledge, 2005. Carroll, Noël. “Toward a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies.” Theorizing the Moving Image, edited by Noël Carroll, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 125–38. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1990. Cizmic, Maria. Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. Oxford University Press, 2012. Clark, Katerina. “Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture.” Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Gene Kuperman, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 289–306. Daughtry, J. Martin. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford University Press, 2015. Gimpelevich, Zina J. Vasil Bykauˉ: His Life and Works. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indiana University Press, 1987. Goscilo, Helena. “Introduction.” Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War, edited by Helena Goscilo. Central European University Press, 2012, pp. 1–24.

158  Maria Cizmic Hoeckner, Bertold, Emma W. Wyatt, Jean Decety, and Howard Nusbaum. “Film Music Influences How Viewers Relate to Movie Characters.” Psycholog y of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 146–53. Kaganovsky, Lilya. “Ways of Seeing: On Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters and Larisa Shepit’ko’s Wings.” The Russian Review, vol. 71, July 2012, pp. 482–99. Makoveeva, Irina. “The New Century: Has the Russian Pandora’s Time Come?” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 247–71. Merrill, Jason. “Religion, Politics, and Literature in Larisa Shepit’ko’s The Ascent.” Slovo, vol. 18, no. 2, Autumn 2006, pp. 147–62. Mikhailova, Tatiana, and Mark Lipovetsky. “Flight without Wings: The Subjectivity of a Female War Veteran in Larisa Shepit’ko’s Wings.” Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War, edited by Helena Goscilo. Central European University Press, 2012, pp. 81–106. Plantinga, Carl. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 237–55. Schnittke, Alfred. A Schnittke Reader. Edited by Alexander Ivashkin and translated by John Goodliffe, Indiana University Press, 2002. Shnitke, Al’fred, and Dmitri Shul’gin. Gody neizvestnosti Alfreda Shnitke: Besedy s kompozitorom. Moscow: Delovaia liga, 1993. Smith, Jeff. “Movie Music and Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score.” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 146–67. Steans, Jill. “Revisionist Heroes and Dissident Heroines: Gender, Nation and War in Soviet Films of ‘the Thaw.’” Global Society, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2010, pp. 401–19. Tumarkin, Nina. The Living & The Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. Basic Books, 1994. White, Hayden. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5, December 1988, pp. 1193–99. Youngblood, Denise J. Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. University Press of Kansas, 2007. Films Cited Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a soldier). Directed by Grigori Chukhrai, music by Mikhail Ziv, Mosfilm, 1959. Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s childhood). Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, music by Viacheslav Ovchinnikov, Mosfilm, 1962. Kryl’ia (Wings). Directed by Larisa Shepit’ko, music by Roman Ledenëv, Mosfilm, 1966. Letiat zhuravli (The cranes are flying). Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, music by Mieczysław Weinberg, Mosfilm, 1957. Osvobozhdenie (Liberation). Directed by Iuri Ozerov, music by Iuri Levitin, Mosfilm, 1970–71. Sud’ba cheloveka (Fate of a man). Directed by Serge Bondarchuk, music by Veniamin Basner, Mosfilm, 1959. Voskhozhdenie (The ascent). Directed by Larisa Shepit’ko, music by Alfred ­Schnittke, Mosfilm, 1977. DVD: Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko. Criterion, 2008.

7 Fugue States Music, Memory, and Trauma in Alain Resnais’s Early 1960s Films* Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon For me, music is not an accompaniment to the film; it plays an integral part in it. It is not there to augment emotion, nor to dilute it, but to say a certain number of things that neither the image nor the actor can say…. As far as I’m concerned, I attach as much importance to the choice of music as that of an actor or cameraman. (Resnais qtd. in Garnett 279)1

During the decade of the 1960s, modernist French filmmaker Alain Resnais created four highly esoteric films—L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961, Last year at Marienbad), Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963, Muriel, or the time of return), La guerre est finie (1966, The war is over), and Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, I love you, I love you)—each of which have atonal, athematic film scores composed by four modernist European composers—Francis Seyrig, Hans Werner Henze, Giovanni Fusco, and Krzysztof Penderecki, respectively—and all of which engage with the existential themes of memory, trauma, and death. Given the contemporary post-war context of both the Second World War and the Algerian War—which ended in 1962—all four films deal with the post-traumatic effects of loss (both individual and collective), doing so not only in terms of subject-matter but also in their cinematic, audiovisual forms. Indeed, for film theoretician Gilles Deleuze, the ruined and discontinuous, destroyed and rebuilt spaces of post-war Europe generated a newly syncopated and disrupted cinema, what he refers to as a cinema of the “time-image” (116). It is unsurprising then that all four of Resnais’s aforementioned films and film scores fit Deleuze’s description of this new era in cinema, whereby causality and the logic of action and sequence have broken down, where the difference between virtual and actual, imagined and real, experienced and dreamed, is denied. By means of case studies on two films out of these four—on L’année * We would like to extend our gratitude to Phil Powrie and Ewelina Boczkowska for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this chapter, and to Tama L. Engelking for revising our translation of Jean Cayrol’s prose poems for Muriel.

160  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon dernière à Marienbad and Muriel ou le temps d’un retour—this chapter offers an exploration of the role of music, sound effects, and the voice in this new cinema of the time-image, examining how Resnais and his respective composers experiment with—and more often than not break with—audiovisual conventions, thus multiplying the possible narratives and interpretations of memory, trauma, and the past in these complex, modernist works.

Modernist Films—Modernist Soundtracks Before turning to the two individual case studies, it is significant to note that Deleuze’s writings on the modern cinema of the time-image (as opposed to the classical cinema of the movement-image) have resonance with similar themes in the critical discourse of music in the post-war period. Writing in 1963 in the journal Perspectives of New Music, for example, George Rochberg argued that one of the most important developments toward what he terms the “spatialization of music” was the liberation of sound material in music from what composer Roger Sessions calls “the musical train of thought”—a liberation from the process of establishing logical connections between melodic phrase shapes and the harmonic progressions, which support them (4). With this liberation comes the disappearance of a center or fixed tonality, a feature reminiscent of Deleuze’s emphasis on the lack of a central, fixed point as one of the defining features of the new cinema of the time-image (116).2 Likewise, Rochberg pinpoints the suppression of pulsation in new music as a development that radically affected the perception of time in music (5). As a result, the passage of events slows down, sometimes to the point of near immobility, and even where the rapidity of the projection of sounds tends to increase the speed of the passage of events, the perceptual sense of the movement remains essentially non-dynamic (5). Again, this description resonates with Deleuze’s writings on cinema of the time-image, in which our perception of time and its passing, and our ability to predict the development of events are loaded with uncertainty. This new cinema thus finds the means to represent not an image of time, but time as it is experienced subjectively: time as it is experienced in different “sheets of past,” different discontinuous layerings of past experiences (Deleuze 99). What is noteworthy for this study then is how these experiments with time in the contemporary domains of post-war cinema and music interact in the soundtracks of a director such as Resnais. Through the following analyses, we will argue that the director uses music as a Deleuzian mode of unfixing, whereby the soundtrack aids the disappearance of the film’s point of origin, with the effect that there is no clear linearity or chronology, no point from which to distinguish past, present, and future, or even—it seems—virtual and actual, imagined and real. Music can thus be posited as a key ingredient in Resnais’s complex “architecture of time,” a temporal structure, which— as Deleuze notes—goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time as past-present-future. Instead, it is time as a coexistence of distinct durations,

Fugue States  161 of levels of duration, where a single event can belong to several levels, where overlapping “sheets of past,” in Deleuze’s formulation, coexist in a non-­ chronological order (104). As we shall see, Resnais avoids the conventional, somewhat simplistic use of musical themes to denote time periods, and instead uses music to blur boundaries. Of course, with this architecture of time comes the complex nature of memory and here, too, music plays an important role in the mental functions, which Resnais’s intellectual cinema awakens, including the functions of recollection, forgetting, false recollection, and imagination (Deleuze 124). As Deleuze points out, music is especially important here because these mental functions are all loaded with feeling; as he puts it, “characters are of the present, but feelings plunge into the past … feelings become characters” (124). As well as engaging with the critical discourse of musical modernism on a theoretical level, Resnais also engaged with this domain in a more literal way, by consistently seeking out sympathetic contemporary composers, exemplified in his collaborations with Seyrig, Henze, Fusco, and Penderecki. While his choice of composers is of obvious interest, it is arguable that the revolutionary aspect of Resnais’s collaborations with these composers is not so much the preference of modern music per se, but rather the purposeful engagement with the methods and models of composing modern music, specifically in relation to the use of solo instruments, small ensembles, and—quite often—the implementation of a fragmented compositional style. What makes Resnais’s film music revolutionary in this period of film history is thus not the mere use of modern, atonal music alone, but precisely the specific ways in which he uses film music to engage with the overarching themes of memory, trauma, and fragmented subjectivity.

L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) In an international palace, a stranger meets a young woman and tells her the love story they lived the previous year. The woman denies this, the man confirms it and persists. Who is right? (Resnais qtd. in Pingaud 81)3 When L’année dernière à Marienbad was released two years after Resnais’s famed debut feature Hiroshima mon amour (1959, Hiroshima my love), viewers had arguably never experienced anything like it. Indeed, it has been described as one of the most difficult, hypnotic and original works of cinema (Wilson 67). The three nameless characters (referred to in the screenplay as X, A, and M and played in the film by Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig, and Sacha Pitoëff, respectively) meet in an opulent baroque chateau with an elaborate geometric garden, where the air is heavy with memory and imagination of what might have occurred the previous year, what might occur now: a murder, a rape, a love affair. What contributes to the film’s status as one of the most puzzling films ever made is undoubtedly its formalistic screenplay written by

162  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon celebrated nouveau roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. Experimentations with the reinvention of form, characterization, narration, and plot ­development— essential tenets of the new novel aesthetic—are all apparent in Marienbad. Indeed, James Monaco has referred to the film—along with Muriel—as a “nouveau roman film,” thus reflecting the importance of the contributions made by new novelists Robbe-Grillet and Jean Cayrol to Resnais’s works (8). Marienbad can thus be viewed as a filmic recreation of the new novel’s original literary experimentations: a project by two artists with resolutely modern preoccupations, at the crossroads between cinema and the novel, but a work which also calls on the aesthetics of the other arts, particularly theatre and, of course, music. Perhaps, nowhere is this more apparent than in the musicality of the film’s theatrical, stylized voiceover, and dialogue. In an interview with Parisian journalist Joan Dupont, Resnais confided that he is always in search of “special non-realistic language that has musicality” (qtd. in Jones par. 8). He adds that he has gone out of his way to find writers with distinctively musical voices, many of whom had little if any previous experience with cinema. Robbe-Grillet’s distinctly enigmatic narrative for Marienbad is perhaps the epitome of Resnais’s search for a musical language in his films. As Resnais described it, There is in Marienbad a structure of a musical poem, an incantatory value to the text which repeats itself, the tone of a recitative which corresponds to opera. At every moment, we have the feeling that the characters could stop speaking and continue their text in song. (qtd. in Prédal 30) Indeed, from the very outset, sound precedes the image. As the opening credits unfold, we hear the music and the all-important voiceover, spoken by the character X, in advance of the film’s opening shot. X’s voiceover, in fact, foreshadows the images to come as it hypnotically recounts in repetitive, detailed description the baroque décor of the palace we eventually see in the opening languid tracking shots, in which the camera floats almost ghostlike through the castle’s maze-like corridors to the rhythm of the voiceover’s measured delivery. Over and over, certain phrases return like refrains, describing the labyrinthine setting and the repeated meetings between X and A therein. Tellingly, as X’s memories of these meetings become unreliable, so too do his descriptions—ultimately, his phrases become fragmented into simple words, separated by pauses: “Empty rooms, corridors, rooms and doors, doors and rooms, empty chairs, deep armchairs, stairways, steps, more and more.” Moreover, the disjointed phrases of X’s voiceover and the unstable memories he struggles to establish effectively dictate the camera’s movements, which themselves become fragmented into more and more frequent rapid cuts, abruptly interrupting the smoothness of Resnais’s hitherto fluid tracking shots. Alluding to the influence of sound, music, words, and “the music of words” on Resnais’s imagination, Kent Jones goes so far as to dub Resnais “the Pierre

Fugue States  163 Boulez of cinema,” here referring to Boulez the conductor rather than Boulez the composer, describing Resnais as a brilliant impresario with a mission to attune our eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of modernism. But this “conductor” has always worked closely with his “composers” on shaping an object of which they are finally the co-creators. (par. 8) Yet, as musical as the language of Resnais’s films may be, the director acknowledges that language does not replace the role of music completely: Since we cannot use words in cinema the way they are used in theatre, and since the public does not react well to a language that is too musical, it seems to me that the music must complete what the words haven’t reached. I think I rarely use music to strengthen the emotion in a scene; no, music replaces the emotion in a scene. At some point the image is going to be almost neutral, and it’s the music that will provide the emotion. You can replace ten minutes of dialogue with three minutes of music and silent images. (qtd. in Thomas 254) Given that Robbe-Grillet’s style of narration bears comparison to modern musical compositions in terms of its highly non-linear structure, it is thus unsurprising that the writer included very specific instructions in his screenplay concerning the music he envisioned for Marienbad: serial music consisting of notes separated by silences, an apparent discontinuity of notes and unrelated chords. But at the same time, the music is violent, disturbing and, for the spectator who is not interested in contemporary music, it must be both irritating and somehow continually unresolved. (96) The choice of serial music—a disjointed, modernist style of composition in vogue among contemporary composers of the post-war era—is highly significant. For Robbe-Grillet, Marienbad called for a music as unwaveringly modern as his conception of literature: strictly serial music for a screenplay and a style of shooting, which are themselves serial in nature: repetitive, mathematical, meticulous, with nothing left to chance, not even the set design, as borne out by the castle with its ordered architecture, the garden with its straight pathways, the logic of the game of Marienbad, the mechanics of the waltz, the gun shots repeated at fixed intervals. Indeed, Robbe-Grillet even uses the term “series” to describe the sequences of the film (33). In his analysis of the film’s musicality, scholar Carl Therrien notes that the exterior shots, with the square windows of the castle and triangular bushes in the garden, are in some sense a visual representation of the mathematically organized musical score Robbe-Grillet had in mind for the film (par. 13).

164  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon Robbe-Grillet’s vision was one in which the words and the music would be equal in style, structure, and significance. Yet, unfortunately perhaps, these ideas never materialized. As Resnais admits, Alain Robbe-Grillet had given me an extremely detailed musical structure. Which I did not follow, it is true. I wanted to make a film where the organ would be used from one end to the other, where it would give a bewitching, hypnotic impression, and where it would escape the church’s idea, that it is an instrument made to talk about religious things. Then I clung to this idea. My first choice was Olivier Messiaen. I shot the film in the shadow of Messiaen, who very kindly refused saying that he could not write with precise timings, that he could not do a ballet never mind music for a film. To remain despite all that in this line of thinking, I therefore chose one of his students, Francis Seyrig, who worked with him under his direction. (qtd. in Thomas 258) Seyrig’s resulting solo organ score4 is indeed hypnotic, given that it plays almost uninterrupted throughout the film, the constancy of its presence feeding into the hermetic, confined world of both the film’s setting and its bourgeois characters. As Mervyn Cooke notes, the choice of the organ provides, at a basic level, an aural equivalent to the sumptuous baroque architecture of the palatial hotel in which the film is set (328). But it is arguably Seyrig’s use of atonality and an athematic structure which distances the instrument from its religious connotations and endows it with an eerie, dream-like unpredictability. Moreover, the lack of recognizable musical themes or recurring motifs means that the music transcends the boundaries of time, blurring the Deleuzian “sheets of past,” and thus perpetuating the film’s discourse on the unreliability of the narrator(s) and, by extension, of memory. An excellent example of the score’s athematic musical structure is heard during the sequence shown in Figure 7.1a–d, which comprises four consecutive scenes, each in different locations, with X and A dressed in different outfits (00:44:40). Throughout the sequence, despite the changes in time, location, and attire, the music remains continuous and unchanging, as if the organ score has been set on a loop, devoid of themes, tonality, structure, or resolution. The effect is highly disconcerting, making us constantly question our interpretation of the “events” in the film. Resnais himself asked Seyrig to avoid tonality for certain moments of Marienbad, but felt that music which steers completely free of tonality throughout would not work for the dramatic unfolding of the film (Thomas 260). This decision fits with the composer’s description of the music as a mixture of the modernity of the 1925 generation,5 to which he belonged; he also sets deliberately Wagnerian accents for the passionate element of the film (Leutrat and Liandrat-Guigues 152). It is perhaps the opening credits music, which is most reminiscent of Wagner, not least because it is the one moment in the score that respects Robbe-Grillet’s directions calling for “a romantic, passionate, violent

Figure 7.1  (a–d) Example of the athematic musical structure of Marienbad’s score.

166  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon burst of music, the kind used at the end of films with powerfully emotional climaxes” (17). True to the writer’s wishes, the credits open to the sound of a climactic cymbal clash followed by lush orchestral music—strings descending only to crescendo again for two subsequent climaxes, the final preceded by a sentimental clarinet melody, before the reassuring sound of trumpets takes over, heralding the finale. Yet, unexpectedly, this proclamatory ending is abruptly silenced with the cut to the title credit. The lack of synchronization between the all-important title and this moment of culmination in the music contradicts the rules of classical film music. For Therrien, this epitomizes the overall contrapuntal style of Marienbad’s music (par. 3). In the opening credits example, there is not only a dissonance between the image and the music, or lack thereof, but also between the music and its traditional role in a film. Opening credits music is conventionally annunciatory in its style, setting the tone of the film to come, whereas the kind of music we hear over Marienbad’s opening credits is more reminiscent of the music used to end a film.6 The credit music thus inverses the end and the beginning, setting up the enigmatic unpredictability of the film to come. Likewise, the cut in the music synching silence with the title credit creates an anempathetic effect,7 arousing a tension imperceptible in the image. By its very absence, the music is thus diametrically opposed to its conventional function of added value. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s calculated dissociation of the visual track and the soundtrack (as evidenced in the opening credits music and felt throughout Marienbad) is arguably a creative technique to shed light on the suggested filmic discourse of trauma and the inevitable psychological dissociation caused by traumatic events. In the case of Marienbad, a film left open to interpretations, one possible reading is that the characters of X and A are experiencing dissociation as a coping mechanism to reduce the overwhelming distress created by their shocking and transgressive shared traumatic experience—the rape of A by X, which, it is suggested, took place a year before the film’s action takes place and so is recalled in fragmented memories. This reading is supported by Robbe-Grillet’s original screenplay, which includes a brutal rape—a scene which Resnais refused to shoot and instead replaced with “repeated blanched shots [of A], arms outstretched, widely smiling, the camera each time approaching her rapidly” (Wilson 79). The disconnect we—as audio spectators—experience between the audio and visual tracks as well as in relation to our understanding (or indeed incomprehension) of the narrative thus replicates the dissociative traumatic experience of the film’s characters, who embody—in their words, their mannerisms, and interactions—amnesiac shock and denial. Audiovisual counterpoint is also found in the asynchronous editing of both the sound and the image. This counterpoint is borne out in the extended opening cue, during which the organ music competes with both diegetic dialogue and voiceover narration, often drowning them out completely. Later, the music even contradicts the image, such as during the concert scene (00:43:57). The music we hear on the soundtrack is fused with the movements

Fugue States  167 of the violinists we see on the image track; yet, what we hear is an organ, not violins. When we return to the concert scene later, the violinists’ movements are no longer in sync with the sound, and when the performers stop playing, the music continues. This dissociative audiovisual style, employed throughout Marienbad, thus results in an overall Brechtian alienation effect, which rejects all possibility for the spectator to anticipate or interpret, by means of the music, the action on-screen. One of the film’s most telling moments, thematically, visually, and sonically, takes place in the bar sequence, which shows the characters’ first real recollection of their shared traumatic experience (00:35:21). We see X and A at the hotel’s bar and hear X reminisce about how—according to him—they spent their time together last year. As the camera glides toward them in a forward tracking movement and comes to a standstill with both characters framed in a medium shot, X recalls: “At night especially, you did not like to talk.” It is this admission which triggers a memory presented in rapid cuts from the present setting of X and A at the bar to shots of A dressed in white in a white bedroom. X continues with an even more revelatory memory: “One night I went up to your room.” And from this moment onwards, complete silence envelopes the soundtrack as the jarring cuts continue until, eventually, the image track remains within the memory. At this point, a waltz is heard, played by the organ in a mechanical style—a waltz, which the characters danced to in an earlier past recollection. We see A in white, slipping on a shoe and—after looking ­upwards—breaking into laughter. Both actions refer to earlier memories evoked by X. Abruptly, the image cuts back to the present with a shot of a guest at the bar laughing, thus mirroring the memory and visibly triggering in both characters a traumatic recollection. This is evident not only in the expression on A’s face and the widening of her eyes but also in her physical reaction—she recoils from X, which causes her to bump into the aforementioned guest and drop the glass she is holding. On the soundtrack, we hear the noise of the glass drop, and with the following cut back to the memory, the soundtrack from the present continues—the crash of the glass and the din of the guests in the bar flows over into the recollection, where we see X approaching A in her bedroom and witness her recoiling from him once again, to the point that she knocks over a glass bottle on her dressing table. This, in turn, triggers a sudden cut back to the present, where we see a waiter gathering up the shards of broken glass (which fell from A’s hand in the previous scene) as X, A, and the other guests look on in complete silence. The complexity of this scene is noteworthy. Both Seyrig’s music and the sound mixing here engage with a visual technique coined by Deleuze as the “recollection-image” (46–50), used here to call up the film’s main theme: the discourse of trauma. In this sequence, Resnais removes the ambient, diegetic, and—most importantly—objective soundscape of the bar from the soundtrack for most of the recollection, thus placing us—the audio spectator—­ into the subjective reality of both X and A. Doing so also relays the intensity of the effect that the recollection has on the characters’ consciousness;

168  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon it overrides everything in the present, including sound. It is thus even more powerful when the sonic reminders of their time together last year intrude on the hitherto silent recollection. The sound of the waltz, the laugh, and the breaking glass all serve to trigger the traumatic aspect of the recollection— the reality of what really happened last year. Indeed, Bruce Kawin has noted that subjective sound has become a requisite for the presentational field (86). Sound, he argues, is a highly expressive aspect of the filmed world, and so it is as indicative of subjectivity to present what a character “hears” as to present what he or she “sees.” This scene is indeed a persuasive example of the power of sound in cinema, when used in conjunction with the image track, to access the workings of memory. For Youssef Ishaghpour, Resnais conceives of cinema “not as an instrument for representing reality but as the best way of approaching the way the mind functions” (182). Marienbad’s employment of audiovisual techniques such as counterpoint, dissonance, and an athematic musical structure are all in keeping with the director’s fascination with the workings of the mind, memory, and trauma. From the very opening credits and throughout the film, the sound and image tracks unfold independently in an unconventionally detached manner—the film’s audiovisual setup thus reflecting the psychological dissociation experienced by the main characters in relation to their shared traumatic experience. The combination of Seyrig’s looping, ever-present organ score with the cyclical repetition of Robbe-Grillet’s enigmatic words provides what Mervyn Cooke describes as an “ideal sonic ambiguity”—perfect for the open-ended nature of this puzzling modernist masterpiece whose multiple interpretations will no doubt remain limitless (328). Mirroring the film’s partial refusal of closure, the ambiguity of Marienbad’s soundscape ensures that our desire to possess any sense of the film is satisfied only in and through the film’s and, by extension, the music’s deferral and frustration.8

Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) Too much dead wood in our memory and the green wood extinguishes the fire. ( Jean Cayrol) Resnais’s next film, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour, deals with France’s recent past, the Algerian War, the defeat of 1940, and the German occupation during the Second World War. These events continue simmering under the surface of the ordinary bourgeois lives of the principal characters in the film, who all lived through at least one of these difficult periods. According to a description that precedes Jean Cayrol’s published screenplay, the female protagonist Hélène loses her fiancée in a sailboat accident before the Second World War. She consequently flees to Paris, where she meets Alphonse. The affair is short-lived, as Alphonse unexpectedly leaves her for another woman, Simone (Cayrol 25, 26, 29). The traumatic events of losing her fiancé,9 of being abandoned by her second, serious love-interest, of having experienced the bombing of her house

Fugue States  169 during the Second World War, and of having lived through the German occupation put Hélène in a mental state of voluntary amnesia by repressing these traumatic experiences.10 Hélène’s stepson, Bernhard, who is the other principal character and represents the younger generation, also suffers from trauma. Bernhard was conscripted to serve in Algeria. There he witnessed the torture, and most probably the multiple rape and mutilation of a young, local woman, presumably called Muriel, by an army unit of soldiers. The platoon was led by his army mate, the OAS-sympathizer11 Robert, who lives—like Bernhard and his stepmother— in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Due to having witnessed the traumatic torturing of Muriel, Bernhard manifests throughout the film the etiological markers of a patient suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).12

Music as a Persistent Reminder of Trauma and Repressed Memory In continuation with his musical experiments in Marienbad, Resnais uses the music in Muriel to emphasize the dissociative traumatic experience of the principal characters.13 The primary function of music in Muriel is therefore to activate a simulation of “repeated and unwanted re-experiencing” of past traumatic event (Ehlers and Clark 319). Such a release of a traumatic event “mainly consists of sensory impressions, rather than thoughts” (Ehlers and Clark 324)—hence Resnais’s preference of music rather than speech to convey the experience of a traumatic event. Without the music, the film presents itself not unlike a boulevard theatre play, telling the story of middle- and ­upper-middle-class characters in the French province. The dense dialogue distracts from the fact that these characters are suffering from severe repression of memory and from PTSD. The only cinematic device that provides access to these suppressed thoughts, that breaks the self-inflicted aphasia, is the music—­ which as in Marienbad is modernist and non-tonal. The music in Muriel assumes the function that Gregor Feindt, Félix Krawatzek, et al. describe as a sign that brings the absent past into the consciousness (27). The short, frequent musical cues are therefore a constant reminder to the audience that the main characters avoid addressing painful events that occurred to them in the past. Resnais commissioned a score in a strict modernist style from another composer of the 1925 generation—Hans Werner Henze.14 His score is heterogeneous. As in Seyrig’s score for Marienbad, there are no clearly defined leitmotifs or other recognizable themes. Apart from the two rather extensive opening and closing credit cues, there are four types of music in Muriel: Airs (aria-like interludes) sung by a soprano, short instrumental interludes, several occurrences of a single chord or a series of arpeggios played by harpsichord, mandolin, guitar, or harp,15 and two popular French chansons from the late 1920s and late 1930s, respectively. The short interludes and the single chords or arpeggios simulate how one experiences the unexpected arrival of a post-traumatic fugue state. Not unlike

170  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon the re-experiencing of the traumatic event, which is triggered by a “wide range of stimuli and situations”—many without a “strong semantic relationship to the traumatic event” (Ehlers and Clark 325), music suddenly and unexpectedly appears and disappears in Muriel, reminding the audio spectator of the tormenting memories that the protagonists are keeping repressed. To underline the dissociation of the visual track and the soundtrack, Resnais utilizes this sudden and brief aural effect several times during the course of the film by having the music begin and end within only one shot. Such a use of music is intended to prompt unexpectedly on the soundtrack past traumatic events, suppressed by the characters. These short shots appear unanticipated and are marked by hard sound cuts into the shot and once again into the next shot; these sound cuts not only call attention to the disjoint editing technique but also to the different, juxtaposed diegeses. For example, a very short, three-second shot of Françoise—Alphonse’s “false niece” (in fact his much younger mistress)—and Hélène’s companion, Roland de Smoke, leaving the office of the local paper ­together—inserted into a shot of Alphonse removing a stain from his jacket and a shot of Bernhard and his girlfriend, Marie-Do—features a short, repeated mandolin motif, accompanied by a harpsichord and celesta (01:26:05). The unsettling and disquieting mood of the mandolin motif clashes with the carefree and cheerful mood of Hélène and Roland. Resnais employs the same technique earlier in the film, in the second act,16 during a shot which is not in the published screenplay (Cayrol 88). The cue is here limited to only one single shot. Henze features in this seemingly, randomly inserted seven-second shot a lamenting solo oboe, accompanied by a harp ostinato (00:57:08). The music expresses something altogether different than Hélène leaving a pharmacy in the city center, then hesitating and turning back into the store. The dissociation between Hélène’s quotidian task and the pensive and mournful music is an indicator of Hélène’s self-inflicted amnesia that is briefly and unexpectedly annulled on the soundtrack. To emphasize the unforeseen irruption of these two sonic reminders of repressed, traumatic memories, both cues are very much foregrounded in the filmic context. They are mixed in on a relatively loud level and contain no ambient or Foley noises. They both represent how Resnais and his influential and experienced sound designer, Antoine Bonfanti, chose to present music on the soundtrack throughout the whole film. We either hear music (without noises) or dialogue but never both together, except in the few rare instances when music is serving to underscore the dialogue.17 Resnais uses this foregrounded music, like in Marienbad, to add a Deleuzian sheet (or sheets) of past to the narrative, which the images, dialogue, and noises are not depicting.

Henze’s Airs as Narrative Devices to Reveal Repressed Memories The most fitting examples in Muriel to demonstrate how music serves as a commentary on the principal subject of characters purposely repressing painful memories and exercising a self-imposed amnesia are the eight short,18 interspersed aria-like compositions written by Henze and based

Fugue States  171 19

on short prose poems by Cayrol. Even though these Airs together occupy only a fraction of the screen time (5:45 minutes total), they appear very prominent and noticeable in the context of the film.20 One of the many commentators, who has reflected upon the narrative function of the Airs, is noted German film music scholar Hans-Christian Schmidt-Banse.21 He observes that songs are an ineffectual genre for a film, but such complex textural compositions require attention, which the images do not offer to the spectators. On the contrary, their attention increases due to a futile effort of trying to understand the lyrics. Meanwhile, the images escape their attention. (129) We propose here an altogether different analysis of the narrative function of these Airs and assume that Resnais and Henze were very much aware of the effect that the Airs would have on their audience. Accordingly, in an interview during an episode of the RTF television program Discorama in 1963, Henze enlightens his interviewer, Denise Glaser, that … the arias that Madame Streich sings are not the interior voice of any of the characters. It’s an operatic voice singing an operatic aria and inserting itself into Resnais’s language as a lyrical symbol. (Supplement on The Criterion Collection DVD, 2:49) The remaining part of this chapter entails a discussion of how the Airs “as a lyrical symbol” fulfill four purposes. They bring to light sonically (1) characters’ individual repressed memories; (2) the collective repressed memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer and France; and (3) both together—the individual and collective repressed memories. In a further instance, they are juxtaposed with past popular songs, indicating pleasant memories versus Henze’s music as a signal for bringing forth repressed individual or collective traumas. The Airs blur the viewer’s distinction of events that happen in the past or present. Cayrol’s poetry refers to events in the past, while the images and screen action deny access to any of these events. Only the evocative music points toward these painful, repressed memories. Resnais, therefore, combines during the Airs two Deleuzian sheets of past: the banal, quotidian events of the present on the image track and delivered through dialogue, and the problematic, agonizing past that surfaces in the music and its lyrics. In terms of dramaturgical aesthetics, the Airs comply with the rules of the Brechtian epic theatre.22 Like a song in a Brecht play, the Airs provide commentary from outside of the diegesis, in this case exploring and circumscribing the tropes of memory and amnesia. One of Resnais’s own comments confirms his affinity to the understanding of music and audience in the Brechtian theatre, as already seen in Marienbad. The director wishes a spectator who remains lucid and does not identify with the characters. We have therefore sought to make the viewers take a step back, without cutting off their emotions, to arouse in them a state of uneasiness, anxiety,

172  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon disposed of triggering personal reflection. This aspect determined the choice of music…. (Resnais qtd. in P.B. 49; same quotation in Nicolas 103 and Lacombe and Porcile 124) Not unlike Brecht, Resnais seeks to achieve with music in Muriel a sensorial effect that alerts the sensibilities of the spectator. Hence, we must analyze these Airs—as poeticized, extra-diegetic commentaries on self-inflicted amnesia and obliviousness—by taking into consideration Cayrol’s lyrics, despite their unintelligibility on the film’s soundtrack. Resnais himself admitted in 1989 that “the fact that we can’t understand a single word was not intentional and in my opinion regrettable” (qtd. in Thomas 274).23 The unintelligibility of the lyrics could not only be attributed to Henze’s lack of knowledge of French24 but also to the fact that Henze set the text for a high coloratura soprano. Accordingly, composer François Nicolas notes that in ultra-high pitches “the consonants are shaved off, and the words become faded, incomprehensible” (108). In addition, Henze chose vocalist Rita Streich (1920–87) who was a German and Russian native speaker and not a contemporary music expert.25

The Airs as Indicator of Repressed Individual and Collective Memory Henze’s Airs refer to both Hélène and Alphonse’s sheets of past and the collective memory of the citizens of Boulogne-sur-Mer.26 Air III embodies one of the moments that Emma Wilson describes as “increasingly restless” (98). She argues that in sequences from the second and fourth acts, a sense of panic settles in. The montage during Air III shows time passing between the weekends creating “a collage of temporally unmarked incidents which the viewer finds increasingly hard to arrange in any narrative order” (Wilson 99). Air III consists of a series of non-related and non-continuous shots, which constitute a timelapse montage (00:51:00). In a dissociation of the visual track and soundtrack, a series of seemingly insignificant and harmless shots are accompanied by threatening, dark music, announcing an imminent danger. This looming threat is evoked by dominant percussion instruments, punctuating an alluded marching rhythm and featured by a leading trumpet and alternating high and low flute gestures in regular staccato notes. The voice finally enters forte to fortissimo with added reverb (the only Air with this effect) and large interval leaps—all means to emphasize the agitated and disturbing musical language. This poem contains the core narrative fragments of the film. The one that “got lost” was Alphonse, who left Hélène. He disregarded the letter she sent to him almost 25 years earlier. Now, it is too late to rekindle the old love affair. The second separation is imminent, as the trope of the departing train announces in the poem. In line with the dissociative audiovisual editing technique, Resnais purposefully avoids each possible correspondence between the lyrics and

Fugue States  173

Figure 7.2  W  oman in a traditional Picardy outfit juxtaposed with “Four Buildings.”

the image. He instead presents two sheets of past, the personal one of Hélène and Alphonse expressed in the lyrics and the collective one of the recovering Boulogne-sur-Mer from the numerous air raids during the Second World War shown on-screen. The sheet of past of Hélène and Alphonse’s story is presented in the lyrics and Henze’s somber music. The collective sheet of past is conveyed by a character who was just a child during the war—Françoise. Her act of browsing through a series of postcards reveals visually the different sheets of past of the city. One of the postcards combines two sheets of past: one layer of the past shows a young woman in a traditional Picardy outfit (Figure 7.2). The woman is juxtaposed with the background, showing the “Four Buildings” on Quai Gambetta, designed by the visionary urban planner Pierre Vivien and completed in 1956, just a few years before the film was shot. This postcard bears a stark contrast between the century-old tradition of the region and the emergence of modernism as a result of the rebuilding of the destroyed city, and with this act of rebuilding, effacing the past. With Françoise gazing at this postcard, three different sheets of past coincide: on the soundtrack, Hélène and Alphonse’s obscure past; and on the image track, both the vanishing tradition of the region and the rebuilt presence.

Popular Songs Indicating Fugue States versus Henze’s Music Indicating Collective Memory and Exposed Traumas In two instances in the film, Resnais juxtaposes a popular chanson from the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, with Henze’s music. The music triggers in these two instances very different memories, which Cayrol defines aptly in the

174  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon preface of the published screenplay. One memory is “some sort intolerable,” and the other one is the “defecting memory,” or “in more familiar terms,” both types of memories can be subdivided into “good and bad memory” (16). One of the two moments when Resnais uses music to invoke the two kinds of memories occurs with Air II bis followed by two 1930s chansons, Qu’est-ce qu’on attend (pour être heureux) (What are we waiting for to be happy?) and one unidentified song hummed by Hélène. By juxtaposing Henze’s Air with the 1930s chansons, Resnais pits the sonic allusion of repressed memories against the aural, nostalgic marker of pleasant memories of the characters. At the end of Air II bis, which reveals Resnais’s characteristic narrative strategy of disconnecting the image track from the soundtrack (00:55:34), the director breaks the oppressive mood and highlights positive memories of the past. A sudden, unexpected and harsh aural and visual cut depicts a promotion van with a roof loudspeaker, roaming the modern city streets of Boulogne-sur-Mer in broad daylight. The deafeningly brash roof loudspeaker emits part of the chorus of Qu’est-ce qu’on attend (pour être heureux) (00:56:04).27 Under these circumstances, the brief musical quotation of this chanson acts as a nostalgic memento of the “good, old times,” fleetingly interrupting the claustrophobic cycle of the present, which is dominated by repressed traumas. It also celebrates collective affirmations of happiness as lived during the times of the Front populaire and stands thus in stark contrast to the individual traumas.28 Resnais highlights the difference between collective and individual memories through the musical contrast between this jaunty tune and Henze’s earnest, modernist Airs and interludes. Immediately after the shot of the promotion van, Resnais continues to keep up the nostalgic mood, as Hélène, Alphonse, Bernhard, and Françoise sit at the lunch table with Hélène humming to Alphonse another popular 1930s chanson (00:56:08). He replies to her musical reference to “better times” with the suppressed shadow of a stifled, polite smile. This short sequence with uninterrupted music from Air II bis via Qu’est-ce qu’on attend to Hélène’s hummed chanson is remarkable. In just a little over 30 seconds of screen time, Resnais unfolds Alphonse and Hélène’s attempt at rekindling the past love affair as an effort, which is marred by their unaddressed, traumatized war experiences, and distorted by their reliving of the nostalgic memories before the war. The music refers to the repressed memories of Hélène and Alphonse, to the PTSD suffered by Bernhard, who we see on his Vélo Solex in the city center, as well as to the nostalgic, “good” memory of the Front populaire times just before the war—the time Hélène fell in love with Alphonse. These different sheets of past, expressed through both Henze’s Air II bis and the two popular chansons, represent the “coexistence of circles which are more or less dilated or contracted” (Deleuze 96). All these circles of the past—represented solely by music—are “infinitely contracted” into the presence with each sheet representing a “region with its own characteristics, its ‘tones’, its ‘aspects’, its ‘singularities’, its ‘shining points’ and its ‘dominant’ themes” (Deleuze 96).

Fugue States  175

The Chanson Déjà as Nostalgic Retrospection and Spark for Breaking the Silence In a second instance in the film, Resnais juxtaposes a popular chanson from the past with Henze’s music during the film’s denouement. Resnais again uses music to indicate the two layers between good memory and repressed memories. In this pivotal scene 15 minutes before the film’s end, the trauma is lifted and the repressed memories surface into the present of the film’s diegesis. The key narrative device that initiates the exposure of the self-imposed amnesia is music. Ernest, who—although not invited—joins a dinner party at Hélène’s with Alphonse, Bernhard, and others, unexpectedly begins singing a cappella the late 1920s chanson Déjà (01:42:06; Already).29 During his eerie rendering of the popular chanson, two Deleuzian sheets of past clash with each other. Alphonse, weary of old times, does not want to hear the song that he used to perform with Ernest on tour during the Second World War. Déjà evokes in him memories of an era, which he purposely represses. It is also not clear whether Ernest celebrates the “good, old times” with this nostalgic song as he almost whispers the lyrics in a ghostly manner with the words fleeting by as if ascending from a bygone world, or whether Déjà is just the prelude to the real message that he came to deliver. Déjà is suddenly interrupted, not by Ernest, but by a musical cue that features a frantic, intense performance by bongos and drum sets with the addition of loud, irregularly accented, dissonant, and repeated piano chords in the mid to low range. Ernest angrily accuses Alphonse of lying about his past. Resnais expresses Ernest’s wrath by alternating various shots of the “Four Buildings” with medium close-up to close-up shots of Ernest, accompanied by the deafening drumming. Ernest’s monologue appears fragmented. After each exterior shot of the “Four Buildings,” he begins a new thought, accusing Alphonse of yet another lie. In this monologue, Ernest violently lays bare all the repressed memories and traumas that have accumulated over the past 25 years and that have been skillfully unaddressed by the principal characters up to this point in the film. The percussion instruments, underscoring Ernest’s monologue, are particularly telling. In music therapy, “the drum was found to be an efficient instrument for coping with difficulties such as feelings of loneliness, harsh traumatic memories, outbursts of anger, and loss of control” (Bensimon et al. 46). According to a recent study by Moshe Bensimon et al., “drumming evoked associations which were connected to trauma…. Group drumming facilitated an outlet through ‘drumming out the rage’” (Bensimon et al. 46). In this sense, through his monologue, Ernest releases the anger he has felt towards Alphonse and Hélène, and which he has been storing within himself. Through his monologue, he is “able to regain a sense of control and increase self-confidence”—in the same way the participants of Bensimon’s study reclaimed self-confidence through drumming (Bensimon et al. 46).

176  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon

The Airs as Indicator of Individual and Collective Repressed Memories: Henze’s Final Air and the Allusion to Bach’s Aria “Erbarme Dich” Ernest’s monologue initiates a sudden evacuation of the principal characters out of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Hélène seeks shelter at Antoine and Angèle’s house, her friends from the past, “the custodians of her childhood, of her hopes, of her quarrels” (Cayrol 23).30 Alphonse spontaneously boards a bus to Brussels, while Bernhard is at large after having shot Robert, and Françoise takes the train back to Paris. After the four protagonists have disappeared, Ernest’s sister and Alphonse’s wife, Simone, enters Hélène’s apartment looking for Alphonse. She searches the premises for her husband with no success. The fact that all the principal characters have escaped after Ernest laid bare the repressed memories suggests that they continue to live with their self-­ inflicted amnesia even though the traumas have been released into the open. The principal characters escape from their memories; they are not willing to face the past. The closing Air, which dominates the soundtrack during the final scene, brings these repressed memories to the surface.31 Contrary to the other Airs, which are all written in a non-tonal language, the first section of Air V is set in C minor. A lead trumpet without mute, accompanied by a mandolin, opens the Air with a short instrumental interlude that resembles a baroque ritornello. When the soprano voice enters, the trumpet is replaced by a solo oboe that plays a counterpoint to the vocal melody. This whole first section of Air V is conceived in a 6/4-meter with a pulsating quarter-note arpeggio on the downbeat and fourth beat. Then, at “corps,” the strings introduce a dissolution of the clear pulse, and the texture liquefies into a dark descent with the vocal melody articulating a falling sequence. The soprano marks the very dramatic ending on the last word “soleil” with an unexpected, slow, descending glissando that disappears in a menacing, sustained tutti chord of the accompanying ensemble. What is the narrative function of Air V? Without the music, the film would end in the manner of a boulevard theatre play with a coup de théâtre. After the protagonists have all unexpectedly disappeared, a hitherto unseen character appears out of nowhere and walks unsuspectingly and naively through Hélène’s empty apartment calling her husband, before she realizes that he is not there. Consequently, we expect the curtain to drop. However, the addition of the very somber and fervent Air V, which Schmidt-Banse calls “passion music in pastoral 6/4 meter … and lamenting voice” (129), changes the meaning of this final sequence completely. Indeed, Air V adds to this final sequence a magnitude, dignity, and solemnity that appears—at first glance—much too dramatic and too laden with deep significance in relation to the mundane screen action of a woman looking for her husband. The reason why this final sequence indeed disseminates gravitas is expressed through a stylistic change in terms of the music and cinematography. Henze changes his preset compositional directives in the same manner as Resnais alters his predetermined cinematographic rulebook. This final long take is the only tracking shot in

Fugue States  177 the whole film. Here, time moves forward continuously and uninterruptedly, contrary to the previous, discontinuous presentation of events due to the disjointed editing style. Henze also introduces an unexpected paradigm shift by abandoning the non-tonal idiom and by presenting a new style that recalls the core characteristics of Johann Sebastian Bach’s aria “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion.32 This subtext delivers the key to understanding the final sequence of Muriel. While the lyrics of Air V refer to the past desires, dreams, and actual deeds of the four protagonists and recapitulates as a summarizing statement the life trajectories of the four leading characters, the text of the Bach-influenced aria provides access to another dimension. This is the only time in the film that Henze takes sides with the four protagonists and shows sympathy for their misguided intentions, failed dreams, and cruel fates. The music emphasizes the futility of Simone’s trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and of her hope that she can reunite with her husband. The past, however, has caught up with her husband as well as with Hélène and Bernhard. Their repressed memories are no longer repressed, the self-inflicted amnesia is abrogated and their traumas have been exposed by Ernest’s cruel outbreak. The four protagonists have become victims of the past times through which they had lived. Each of the principal characters remembers his or her own sheet of past. Air V, therefore, enlarges the confined space of Hélène’s apartment to that of the collective memory of France. The individual sheets of past coincide here with the sheets of past of a whole nation. The title of Bach’s aria, “Have mercy, my God,” can thus be read in this new context as an empathetic, repentant, yet imaginary cry of help from the people of France, who kept on repressing in the early 1960s the collective memory of their questionable past deeds during the German occupation and during the recent times of the war against Algeria. Naomi Greene describes this collective state as a “pervasive climate of bad faith, of amnesia and repression, that governed French memories of the Vichy past throughout the 1950s and 1960s” (37). Henze’s concluding Air with its allusion to Bach bestows the final sequence of Muriel with the very meaning that Resnais and Cayrol intended with the screenplay and mise-enscène, a critique of de Gaulle’s France, which denied coming to terms with the recent past. This final Air is a prime example of the function of music in Muriel, which simulates the unbearable and ceaseless exposure to PTSD by “acting out” the trauma and by laying bare the repressed memories. Music, however, does not offer to the audio spectator any solution, solace, or comfort. It does not mend the unhealed, mental wounds of the protagonists. In that sense, music takes on the function that Emily Tomlinson observes in Muriel as “history [that] becomes ‘traumatized’, compulsively acted out, but [is] not ‘worked through’” (qtd. in Wilson 105). Music in Muriel is therefore a constant sonic reminder of the repressed past—agonizing in its appearance, but not acting as a healing agent. ****

178  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon Resnais integrated Henze and Seyrig’s scores into Muriel and Marienbad with a similar narrative function in mind. Both scores are complicit with the images in effacing the film’s point of origin, which obstructs a clear sense of linearity, blurring the viewer’s distinction of events that happen in the past, present, or future. In both films, music is thus a key device in Resnais’s complex architecture of time, in which time coexists as distinct levels of duration, and in which a single narrative event can belong to several temporal layers. The lack of recognizable musical themes and recurring motifs is a feature of both scores and signifies that the music transcends the boundaries of time. In Marienbad, the music supports the unreliability of the narrators’ voiceovers and, by extension, their memory. Resnais achieves this oneiric state by having the music remain continuous and unchanged, despite visible transformations in time, location, and attire, and by employing asynchronization between the music and the image tracks in order to replicate the characters’ dissociative traumatic experiences. In Muriel, the music, as a constant reminder of the unbearable events of the past, simulates the agonizing and ceaseless consequences of PTSD and replicates the trauma by bringing the repressed memories to the surface. The music refrains from offering any solace or comfort to the traumatized characters and therefore does not mend the unremedied, mental wounds of the protagonists. Our proposed approach to an analysis of the music in Marienbad and Muriel in this chapter, based on Deleuze’s concept of sheets of past, could be extended in a future study to Resnais’s other 1960s films, La guerre est finie and Je t’aime, je t’aime, with scores by Giovanni Fusco and Krzysztof Penderecki, respectively. Resnais and his composers continued to experiment with music in these films as a powerful cinematic device in terms of both the independent unfolding of music and image in a detached manner and the employment of an asynchronous editing technique for both music and image. Their break from audiovisual conventions resulted in some of the most original aesthetic concepts of film music in post-war European cinema. Also in these films, music takes on the function of a sonic reminder for memory, trauma, PTSD, amnesic shock and repressed memory, and reinforces the narrative intention of disorienting the viewer by blurring any clear temporal distinction of past, present, and future. Resnais’s original, imaginative and unorthodox use of music in his films will certainly remain a focal point for future film music scholarship.

Notes 1 All translations are ours unless indicated otherwise. 2 Deleuze writes: “The first novelty in Resnais is the disappearance of the center or the fixed point” (112). 3 The reprinted English translation here is taken from Wilson 70, note 7. 4 The film’s organ score is unsurprising, given Resnais’s initial choice of Olivier Messiaen to score the film. Alongside his appointment as principal organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris from the 1930s to the 1970s, he composed many works, which are now considered centerpieces of contemporary organ literature.

Fugue States  179 5 The “1925 generation” included, among others, composers Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), Iannis Xenakis (1921–2001), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), Luciano Berio (1925–2003), Luigi Nono (1924–90), Jean Barraqué (1928–73), and Morton Feldman (1926–87). 6 Confirming this is the fact that further into the film, we hear the opening credits music again, this time as closing music for the play within the film entitled “Rosmer.” 7 Michel Chion coined this term to describe music or sound, which exhibits conspicuous indifference to the scene it is juxtaposed with (see Audio-Vision 8–9). 8 This idea is based on Keith Reader’s analysis in his article “Another ­Deleuzian Resnais: L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Conflict between Sadism and Masochism.” Studies in French Cinema, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–58. 9 Jean Cayrol’s following description confirms the death of Hélène’s fiancé was traumatic for her: “[S]he came out of a short religious crisis, which was triggered by the thrown back body of the young man onto the beach” (26). 10 Naomi Greene notes, “Resnais’s women, in particular, display what Kai ­Erickson describes as the classic symptom of trauma—that is, the ‘continual reliving of some wounding experience’” (32). Greene refers to the work of sociologist Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 183–84 (see Greene 200). 11 OAS stands for Organisation armée secrète, a Secret Army Organization that attempted to undermine Algeria’s independence from France between 1961 and 1962 (about the presence of the OAS in Muriel, see Kreidl 90). 12 His anti-social behavior of suddenly walking away from the dinner table or in the middle of a conversation are manifestations of “impaired executive function and emotion regulation” and of “memory and concentration deficits, poorly controlled emotional responses, irritability, and impulsivity” (Shalev et al. 2463). 13 See Resnais’s comment: “the music is in contrast with the banality, is rupturing the mundane of the image track” (qtd. in P.B. 49). 14 Resnais follows in Muriel the film music aesthetic Hanns Eisler and Theodor W. Adorno propagate in Composing for the Films, a concept the director was most probably introduced to during his collaboration with Eisler on Nuit et brouillard (1956, Night and fog). Eisler advocates for the use of contemporary music in fiction films, for non-tonal music can express a certain mood in a short period of time and does not require a large-scale formal structure as sonata and rondo form in tonal music (Eisler and Adorno 38–39). 15 Commentators, interpreting Muriel, have repeatedly puzzled over the narrative function of these very short cues of which ten appear in the first 50 ­minutes of the film and only two more subsequently. These arpeggios and chords are stingers: a means of “punctuating dialogue” or “emphasizing psychological shock” (Neumeyer, Buhler and Deemer 87). They are “audible metaphors of particular psychological states and as such greatly aid in reading expressions, especially facial ones” (87). The three harpsichord chords in the café of the Hôtel des Voyageurs work in this manner (00:08:17). Alphonse whispers to Françoise whether she has got any money. With the first chord, Françoise opens her handbag. Hélène interferes and offers to pay, an action which is stressed by the second harpsichord chord. Hélène closes the door to the café, when the third chord appears. All three chords are followed by an enigmatic facial expression by either Hélène or Françoise in a medium close-up shot. 16 We refer here to the subdivision in Cayrol’s screenplay into the classical French five-act structure. The beginnings and endings of an act are not always as

180  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon

17

18

19

20

21

22 23 24

clear in the finished film as they are in the published screenplay. On The Criterion Collection DVD, Act 1 begins at 00:02:48, Act 2 at 00:49:14, Act 3 at 01:03:13, Act 4 at 01:24:58 and Act 5 at 01:33:07. Michel Chion’s following observation originates perhaps from the fact that the music can be heard isolated, in the foreground and prominently on the soundtrack: “In such a way that—at several moments—we have the impression of hearing in parallel with the film excerpts of a concert that lead us to mentally visualize the performers. This can perhaps be unsettling for the viewer only insofar as it is not clear that this mental visualization is intentional and that it is aesthetically ‘relevant’ to the film project” (Chion, Musique au cinéma 378). The numbering from Airs I to V in the published screenplay does not add up to the eight vocal compositions we hear in the film. Except of Airs IV and V, the other Airs are repeated or split up. The first verse of Air I occurs towards the beginning of the film (00:04:55) and the second verse over three minutes later (00:08:34). Air II is heard first toward the end of the first act (00:46:27) and again as Air II bis shortly after the beginning of the second act (00:55:34). Air II bis is based on the same lyrics as Air II, but consists of different musical material in comparison to its first occurrence. Finally, the two compositions entitled Air III are different. Air III bis (01:10:13) has different lyrics and music than Air III (00:51:00). Virtually every commentator, who discusses the music, explores the nature of these Airs within the filmic context. Film scholar Michel Marie investigates how the Airs draw the spectator’s attention to the disjointed montage that Resnais intends to achieve with his rapid editing style (58–61). Composer François Nicolas notes that due to the difficulty of understanding the lyrics, the sung music breaks apart from the lyrics, thus offering uniformly a “song without words” in place of Cayrol’s prescribed “words with song” (121). For him, the indecipherability of the lyrics “results in a clear disjunction between song and lyrics…, so that when the Airs arise …, the words efface themselves, and the music takes over” (121–22). On the other hand, musicologist Jürg Stenzl understands Henze’s Airs as “lyrical insertions” (303). He suggests that the “prose poems” are “remarkably descriptive” and touch upon such subjects as love, time and ephemerality. For this reason, the poems should be intelligible, perhaps through added subtitles (Stenzl 303). On The Criterion Collection DVD release however, the Airs are not subtitled. Virginia Palmer-Füchsel highlights several correspondences between the Airs in Muriel and Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos (1963, based on a poem from Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry collection Les illuminations, 1886) (113). Even though these Airs appear as a stylistic abnormality within the context of a fictional feature film, Henze’s eight vocal miniatures are far from the ultramodern style of contemporaneous vocal compositions such as Pierre Boulez’ Pli selon pli (1957–58) and Luciano Berio’s Circles (1960). Henze’s musical language is more conventional and recalls the vocal works of the Second Viennese School. Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935) comes to mind with its characteristic vocal gestures in the high register of the coloratura soprano. John Kreidl applies Brecht’s “distancing effect” to his reading of the whole film (128–31). James Monaco (92) and Roy Armes (130) were both mistaken about Resnais’s intention of having the words of the Airs being non-intelligible. That was not necessarily the case. See the French television interview on The Criterion Collection DVD release, in which Henze speaks fluent French, albeit with a German accent.

Fugue States  181 25 Henze’s Airs were among the only performances of contemporary music ­Streich had undertaken. She specialized in such parts as Zerbinetta and Sophie in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Der Rosenkavalier, and the Queen of the Night and Susanna in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Le nozze di Figaro (Rosenthal and Blyth). 26 Resnais inserts Air III during the following passage of Cayrol’s screenplay: All the following scenes rush by very fast. To a certain extent, they form a casual synopsis [of the events] of the past week. A resume and at the same time a topography of the city.… All scenes represent together [the events of ] several days. They are, to a certain extent, exemplary. (84) 27 This chanson was made popular by Ray Ventura and was written in 1938 by the prolific songwriter and successful film composer Paul Misraki with words by André Hornez for the musical film Feux de joie (1939, Fires of joy). The film stands as an emblematic testimonial for the entertainment industry of the short-lived time of the Front populaire. 28 We are grateful to Phil Powrie for this observation. 29 Paul Maye (music) and Paul Colline (words) wrote Déjà for the revue En pleine jeunesse (In full youth). The show premiered at the café-chantant Concert-Mayol in December 1928, starring Marie Dubas, who recorded Déjà in early March 1929 (Pathé, matrix no. 201617-1). Cayrol and Resnais did not lift the text for Muriel from either the printed sheet music (Les Éditions Raoul Breton, 1929) or from Dubas’s recording, as it was not released until 1977 (Marie Dubas: 30 ans d’humour et d’émotion, 2 LPs, EMI 2C 134-15406/07). They used the lyrics from Paul Colline’s 1931 recording (Pathé, X 94062, matrix no. 203084-A) and compressed the three stanza-refrain structure to Stanza 1–Refrain 1, followed by Stanza 2–Refrain 3. 30 The screenplay describes Hélène’s escape as a return to an “intact past, to the realm of her childhood” (Cayrol 135). 31 Commenting on the supremacy of the music in this final scene, Geneviève Guétemme observes, “when the memory is missing, the city falls asleep, the actors leave, the music remains” (36). 32 Hartmut Lück interprets a short passage of Henze’s cantata Being Beauteous (mm. 142–46) as an “allusion to Bach’s alto aria ‘Erbarme dich’ [Have mercy, my God] from the St. Matthew Passion.” Lück reads this passage in connection with Arthur Rimbaud’s poem as a religious image of “suffering, dying and the Ascension of Christ as hope in the whole worldly comprehension of life” (47). Indeed, Henze based this short passage in Being Beauteous on the opening material of Air V.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., and Hanns Eisler. Composing for the Films. The Athlone Press, 1994. Armes, Roy. The Cinema of Alain Resnais. Barnes, 1968. Bensimon, Moshe, Dorit Amir, and Yuval Wolf. “Drumming through Trauma: Music Therapy with Post-Traumatic Soldiers.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, pp. 34–48. Cayrol, Jean. Muriel. Éditons du Seuil, 1963 (Published screenplay). Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, with a foreword by Walter Murch, Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. La musique au cinéma. Fayard, 1995.

182  Michael Baumgartner and Orlene Denice McMahon Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Athlone Press, 1989. Ehlers, Anke, and David M. Clark. “A Cognitive Model of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 38, no. 4, 2000, pp. 319–45. Feindt, Gregor, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Pestel Friedemann, and Rieke Trimçev. “Europäische Erinnerung? Erinnerungsforschung jenseits der Nation.” Europäische Erinnerung als verflochtene Erinnerung: Vielstimmige und vielschichtige Vergangenheitsdeutungen jenseits der Nation, edited by Gregor Feindt, Félix Krawatzek, et al., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2014, pp. 11–36. Garnett, Tay. Portraits de cinéastes: Un siècle de cinéma: 42 metteurs en scène répondent à un questionnaire. Rennes: 5 Continents and Paris: Hatier, 1981. Greene, Naomi. Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema. ­Princeton University Press, 1999. Guétemme, Geneviève. “Décélération et mémoire: Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour de Resnais et Cayrol (1963).” The Irish Journal of French Studies, no. 14, 2014, pp. 23–37. Ishaghpour, Youssef. D’une image à l’autre: La représentation dans le cinéma d’aujourd’hui. Éditions Denoël/Gonthier, 1982. Jones, Kent. “Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite.” The Criterion Collection, 23 June 2003, www.criterion.com/current/posts/291-hiroshima-mon-amourtime-­i ndefinite. Accessed 7 November 2018. Kawin, Bruce F. “The Mind’s Eye.” In Post-War Cinema and Modernity, edited by John Orr and Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, pp. 76–88. Kreidl, John Francis. Alain Resnais. Twayne Publishers, 1978. Lacombe, Alain, and François Porcile. Les musiques du cinéma français. Éditions Bordas, 1995. Leutrat, Jean-Louis, and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues. Alain Resnais: Liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. Cahiers du cinéma, 2006. Lück, Hartmut. “Literarische Bilderwelten: Zu Henzes früher vokaler Kammermusik.” Hans Werner Henze: Musik und Sprache, edited by Ulrich Tadday, MusikKonzepte: Neue Folge: Band 132, Edition text + kritik, 2006, pp. 27–50. Marie, Michel. Muriel d’Alain Resnais. Clef concours–Cinéma, Éditions Atlande, 2005. Monaco, James. The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. Alain Resnais. Oxford University Press, 1979. Neumeyer, David, James Buhler, and Rob Deemer. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. Oxford University Press, 2010. Nicolas, François. “L’étrangeté familière de Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963) (d’un nouage borroméen entre images, mots et musique).” L’art du cinéma, Musique & cinéma, nos. 57–60, summer 2008, pp. 95–144. Palmer-Füchsel, Virginia. The Solo Vocal Chamber Music of Hans Werner Henze. Ph.D. dissertation, Technische Universität Berlin, 1990; published by TU ­Berlin, 1993. P.B. “Le dossier du mois: Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour.” Cinéma, vol. 63, no. 80, November 1963, pp. 30–64. Pingaud, Bernard. “Alain Resnais à la question.” Alain Resnais, Premier plan: Hommes œuvres problèmes du cinéma, no. 18, Lyon: Société d’études, de

Fugue States  183 recherches et de documentation cinématographique (SERDOC), 1961, pp. 36–89 (Interview). Prédal, René. “Alain Resnais.” études cinématographiques. Nos. 64–68, 1968, pp. 3–184. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Last Year at Marienbad. Translated by Richard Howard, Evergreen, 1962 (Published screenplay). Rochberg, George. “The New Image of Music.” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 2, no. 1, Autumn-Winter 1963, pp. 1–10. Rosenthal, Harold, and Alan Blyth. “Streich, Rita.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 24, 2001, p. 569. Schmidt-Banse, Hans Christian. “Gegen die Bilder mit den Bildern: Zur Filmmusik von Hans Werner Henze.” Hans Werner Henze: Politisch-humanitäres Engagement als künstlerische Perspektive, edited by Sabine Giesbrecht and Stefan Hanheide, Festschrift zur Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Osnabrück an den Komponisten. Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1998, pp. 125–39. Shalev, Arieh, Israel Liberzon, and Charles Marmar. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 376, no. 25, June 2017, pp. 2459–469. Stenzl, Jürg. Musik/Film: Konstellationen zwischen Claude Debussy/Dudley Murphy und Hans Werner Henze/Alain Resnais. Et+k, Edition Text + Kritik, 2016. Therrien, Carl. “Musicalité dans L’année dernière à Marienbad.” Artifice. www.­ webbynerd.com/artifice/dossierarchives/63.htm. Accessed 7 November 2018. Thomas, François. L’atelier d’Alain Resnais. Flammarion, 1989. Wilson, Emma. Alain Resnais. Manchester University Press, 2006. Films Cited All films listed below are directed by Alain Resnais unless indicated otherwise. Feux de joie (Fires of joy). Directed by Jacques Houssin, screenplay by André Hornez, music by Paul Misraki, Florida Films and Films Derby, 1939. Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima my love). Music by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, Argos Films, Como Films, Daiei Studios, Pathé Entertainment and Pathé Overseas, 1959. Je t’aime, je t’aime (I love you, I love you). Music by Krzysztof Penderecki, Les Productions Fox Europa and Parc Film, 1968. La guerre est finie (The war is over). Music by Giovanni Fusco, Europa Film and Sofracima, 1966. L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last year at Marienbad). Music by Francis Seyrig, Cocinor, Terra Film, Cormoran Films, et al., 1961. DVD: Studio Canal Collection Classique, 2005. Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the time of return). Music by Hans Werner Henze, Argos Films, Alpha Productions, Éclair, et al., 1963. DVD: Spine #824, The Criterion Collection, 2016. Nuit et brouillard (Night and fog). Music by Hanns Eisler, Argos Films, 1956.

8 Re-Sounding Trauma Sonic Flashbacks in the Films of Jan Troell* Alexis Luko

A close-up of an ear. Robert tosses and turns, plagued by harsh sounds echoing in his head: a braying donkey, the clink of coins, the bang of pans, laughter, a cat’s meow, and the lash of a whip. As he writhes in pain clutching his ear, sounds of the past torment him for almost a minute before visuals materialize on the screen. Then, through a series of five flashback sequences, disembodied sounds ultimately merge with images, revealing that the brays, bangs, lashings, clinks, and meows are the sonic stuff of multiple traumatic memories. As Robert’s ear bleeds, each individual echo of the past intersects simultaneously to form a torturous soundscape. This aurally rich and visually haunting flashback scene springs from Nybyggarna (1972, The new land), a film by Swedish director Jan Troell (b. 1931). Often mentioned in the same breath as compatriots Bo Widerberg, Alf Sjöberg, and Ingmar Bergman,1 Troell is recognized today—at least in Scandinavia—as one of the greatest living filmmakers. Troell, considered a cinematic “auteur” and the “last surviving Old Master of Swedish cinema” (Kenny), also works as a cinematographer, writer, and editor on many of his films.2 In his early career, he directed short films and documentaries before gaining notoriety in Sweden and abroad with award-winning feature films Här har du ditt liv (1966, Here is your life), Utvandrarna (1971, The emigrants), and Nybyggarna (1972).3 His narratives chronicle the struggles of real people, particularly those from Swedish history. His interest in realism, natural light, wildlife, and capturing beauty in everyday moments is readily apparent in his 14 narrative films, 5 documentary feature films, and 22 short films. Troell is often lauded by critics for generating on-screen poetry with gorgeous visuals that radiate with dynamism, aesthetic beauty, and spiritual depth.4 As a filmmaker who “paints” lyrical images, it is no wonder that he claims to feel most at home with a camera in his hand (Marlow). At times, Troell works as an image improviser, acquiring footage by walking around a set between takes to catch actors unaware so as to capture impromptu moments of unscripted movie magic.5 But the visual dimension of his filmmaking merely defines a single aspect of his style. One might say that he also “paints” with music and sound effects. I argue that Troell’s soundtracks are responsible * My thanks to Ewelina Boczkowska, Michael Baumgartner, and Campion Carruthers, who provided invaluable critiques on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Re-Sounding Trauma  185 for producing some of his greatest cinematic moments. Little scholarship on Troell exists, and accordingly, this study is but a modest initial attempt to understand his sonic style. What better place to begin, therefore, than with his earliest feature films, Här har du ditt liv and Nybyggarna, both of which have an aspect in common: the most significant sonic events are encountered in flashback sequences. Flashback scenes in these films shift between different points of view, narrative and aural states of present, past, and future, with overlapping layers of foreground and background music, dialogue, and sound effects. When the forward-moving plot trajectory dissolves, remembered music and sounds carry symbolic weight, underscoring individual and collective memories— particularly those involving trauma. Throughout this chapter, the bleeding ear will serve as a thematic leitmotif, representing Troell’s preoccupation with the role of sound in triggering and fueling flashbacks to memories of trauma, shame, and guilt.

Sonic Flashbacks and Narrative Codes What exactly is a flashback? Though cinema has used music to accompany flashbacks since the silent film era,6 theorists rarely examine the aural dimension of flashbacks, favoring instead discussions of the visual and narrative dimensions.7 Maureen Turim describes a classic flashback as an “image in the present dissolv[ing] to an image in the past, understood either as a story-­ being-told or a subjective memory” (1–2).8 The “flash” of the flashback is suggestive, of course, of a transitional visual cue, whether an intertitle, a dissolve, or an extreme close-up. But, just as often, there is also a transitional aural cue, a dreamy harp arpeggio, voiceover, sound effect, or a sonic fade-out. Troell has made heavy use of the flashback throughout his career and has managed to avoid such clichés by developing his own distinctive sonic flashback language. Film music theory has taught us to use (and misuse) terms put forward by Gérard Genette, who theorizes narrative temporality and establishes vocabulary for variations in narrative structure: “diegetic” (for a narrative event that is part of the diegesis); “extra-diegetic” or “non-diegetic” (for a narrative event external to the diegesis); and “meta-diegetic” (for a narrative event embedded within the diegesis in a flashback or story-within-a story context).9 The limitations of diegetic/non-diegetic categorization are noted by scholars such as Robynn Stilwell, Jeff Smith, Alexander Binns, Anahid Kassabian, and Ben Winters.10 These limitations are even more pronounced when conceptualizing the role of sound and music in a flashback. Take the bleeding ear example from the introduction, where the sound effects heard by Robert are part of a set of multiple flashbacks, or one flashback layered from various points in time. Is it appropriate, or indeed helpful for the purpose of conceptualization, to refer to sound in this case as occupying a “meta-diegetic” space? Using such terminology tends to prove impractical as it reduces analysis to a narrative/ temporal framework and does not adequately describe potential complexities of soundtrack design. As we shall explore below, in the bleeding ear sequence,

186  Alexis Luko Troell blurs the boundaries between diegetic and non-diegetic planes by employing multiple points of view, sonic flashbacks and unique sonic flashforwards within flashbacks, overlapping different subjectivities, along with the sounds of the past, present, and future. A more nuanced approach to sonic flashback theory can be found in ­Roland Barthes’s five narrative codes: (1) hermeneutic, (2) proairetic, (3) semic, (4) symbolic, and (5) cultural. According to Barthes, these codes are interwoven into narratives and help conceptualize how interest and tension are maintained in a story. The five codes provide different “windows” of interpretation suggesting that, rather than one single narrative, there are multiple “voices” to listen to throughout a story. The hermeneutic code does so by presenting unanswered questions and maintaining a type of enigmatic narrative state in which a story is not fully explained and/or the truth is avoided until all is revealed (e.g., detective stories).11 The proairetic code generates suspense by referring to plot events that imply further narrative action, anticipating something else that is going to happen. Consistent with Barthes’s semic code is a story that suggests meaning through correlations in the narrative. In this way, the semic code does not “tell” but rather “shows” through abstract corresponding signs. Here, a flashback to the past might offer new meaning that connects to a present person, place, or object. The symbolic code animates antithesis, binary oppositions, and psychological conflicts, whereas the cultural code reflects common knowledge shared by communities (e.g., historical, scientific, mythological). Barthes posits that there are multiple ways to interpret a text, and that plurality of meaning is to be uncovered through reading and re-reading. By extension, there are multiple ways to interpret a film, and plurality of meaning can be discovered through watching, rewatching—or, indeed—listening, and relistening. Let us turn to examine the bleeding ear example, in context, to better understand how Jan T ­ roell, Swedish master of the flashback sequence, uses sound in groundbreaking ways. How are Barthes’s interwoven “voices” or codes expressed musically in Nybyggarna, and what can these voices elucidate in terms of narrative meaning?

Nybyggarna (1972, The New Land) Based on Vilhelm Moberg’s four novels about Swedish emigration in the mid1800s, the two-part epic film comprised of Utvandrarna and Nybyggarna successfully garnered international recognition for Jan Troell. It was heralded by critics as “Sweden’s answer to The Sound of Music” (Björkman 57–66), a “magnificent epic” (Changas 29), and “one of the great achievements of poetic naturalism in the history of film-making” (Young 263). Dialogue throughout is sparse and in its stead, we find an eclectic mix of avant-garde, folk, and improvised non-diegetic music, composed by Erik Nordgren for Utvandrarna and by Bengt Ernryd and Georg Oddner for Nybyggarna.12 Part I, Utvandrarna, depicts the life of a couple living in nineteenth-century southern Sweden. Troell cast none other than Max von Sydow (Karl Oskar Nilsson) and Liv Ullmann (as his wife Kristina), a familiar twosome who had

Re-Sounding Trauma  187 already established on-screen chemistry in Ingmar Bergman’s Vargtimmen (1968, The hour of the wolf), Skammen (1968, Shame), and En passion (1969, The passion of Anna). Threatened by poverty, starvation, and religious intolerance, Karl and Kristina decide to travel across the sea to America to seek out a new life. Part II, Nybyggarna, is set in Minnesota between 1850 and 1890 as the family adapts to their new way of life. They are portrayed as honest and humble hard-working farmers who dedicate themselves to the needs of their family, their land, their community, and to God. An intermediate plotline (and one that is the focus of the present discussion) involves Karl Oskar’s brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) and best friend ­A rvid (Pierre Lindstedt).13 Both young men weather the trip from Sweden with Karl, Kristina, and their children, but shortly after arriving in A ­ merica, upon ­Robert’s insistence, they abandon the family to pursue gold in ­California. Robert later returns to Minnesota alone, his pockets overflowing with bank notes. Because he remains silent and uncommunicative, Karl and Kristina become increasingly suspicious. Two “enigmas” thus present themselves at the level of Barthes’s hermeneutic code: (1) the whereabouts of Arvid and (2) how ­Robert acquired so much wealth. The flashbacks reveal answers to these questions. Troell’s plot unfolds chronologically, with the exception of a series of five flashbacks (totaling over 30 minutes of footage) depicting how, in their trek westward, the two young men encounter one calamity after another. One night, after the boys take up work as mule drivers for Mario Vallejos, one of their mules goes missing and, worried about being punished for their negligence, they set out to find the animal. They soon become lost in the desert, somewhere along the deadly strip between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. As night becomes day and the blazing sun beats down with increasing intensity, they encounter a near-dry poisoned riverbed, where Arvid drinks the tainted water and proceeds to die a painful death. Vallejos later finds Robert lost and dehydrated. He tends to his wounds, feeds him, and brings him back to life, permitting the two men to continue their trek westward. Later, when Vallejos contracts yellow fever, Robert remains dutifully by his side, feeding him and keeping him company. On his deathbed, Vallejos gives Robert a purse full of gold coins. After a humiliating attempt to use the coins at a local brothel, the naive young man decides to go to the moneychanger where, in exchange for his coins, he unwittingly accepts a stack of counterfeit bank notes, or wildcat money.

Sonic Flashbacks in Nybyggarna Though almost completely void of dialogue (characters are seen mutely moving their lips), and accompanied only by sound effects and improvised percussion, these flashbacks are arguably the most memorable and sonically rich scenes of the film.14 Visually, Troell employs avant-garde editing, hard cuts, strobe effects and, for the desert-scene flashback, essentially alternates

188  Alexis Luko between one memory and another by sewing a few frames of one scene together with a few frames of another. As explained by Troell in an interview: I actually took three frames from one scene and then cut in, with a tape splice, three frames of another, so you had two scenes running in time without superimposing them…. To create a feeling of fever and drama and danger when they’re walking in the desert…. The difference is that the eye gets those two things so rapidly, because I only use two, three or four frames each. You get a very special rhythm. (Sragow) Sonically, Troell emulates this visual approach, but his use of music and sound effects is more complex, as it involves the overlap of several disparate sonic memories, each one more laden with guilt and shame than the next. During these flashbacks, Troell churns out sounds like a hurdy-gurdy man, feeding our ears with a banquet of “musicalized” sound effects. Many of the sounds are disassociated from on-screen sources. Michel Chion might call such disembodied sounds acousmêtres (9), and David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson might call them “sound flashforwards” (261) but, as I argue throughout this chapter, flashback sounds require distinct flashback terminology.15 I call these sounds sonic flashback enigmas—sound effects embedded within flashbacks, without visual cues and with qualities that are mysterious and difficult to identify. I use the term sonic enigma because of its obvious link to Barthes’s hermeneutic code. As explained by Barthes, some flashback enigmas are encountered at the beginning of a narrative, followed by the unfolding of the story, until the mystery of the flashback is finally understood. Other flashbacks are presented immediately prior to a climactic revelation. Still other narratives might present a series of flashbacks, or sonic flashback enigmas, in order to develop a conundrum and delay resolution. It is the latter type that is encountered in Nybyggarna. For the transition into and out of flashback #1 (see “flashback transition” in Table 8.1), we encounter the close-up of Robert’s ear, a clue from the outset of a privileged focus on the sonic realm. The flashback also concludes with a close-up of his ear, but this time it is a bloodied ear, suggestive of how sound plays a role in instigating psychological torment.16 The source of Robert’s hearing troubles may be traced back to Sweden, to a scene in Utvandrarna, when he is found slacking off at work and his boss gives him a blow to the side of the head (at 00:35:03). What ensues is a sonically noteworthy moment involving a piercing high-pitched tone in counterpoint with Robert’s heartbeat, part of a traumatic event that provides his final motivation to leave Sweden for America. In the flashback sequence of Nybyggarna, aural memories torment Robert for around a minute before visuals of the flashback emerge. What are the disembodied sounds that haunt him? The first sounds include a braying donkey, laughter, a whip, and a meow.17 Because so many of the sound effects in the

Re-Sounding Trauma  189 flashback transition are disassociated from visual cues, they exist as mystery sounds or sonic flashback enigmas. Sonic flashback enigma 1 sounds like a haunting whine, but if we flashforward within the flashback sequence to flashback #2 (at 01:45:30), when finally matched with a visual source, we realize it is the bray of a donkey. Flashforward to flashback #3, and we ascertain why Robert is haunted by this sound: when their donkey escapes, it is his idea to search through the desert for its whereabouts, and it is because he misjudges the unforgiving landscape that Arvid dies in. Similarly, the laughter heard in sonic flashback enigma 3 (at 01:33:08) resolves itself in flashback #5 when it is linked to the women at the brothel who laugh at Robert’s sexual naivety (Table 8.5, 02:10:34). Here, the laughter not only serves as a sonic flashforward but also as a sonic flashback to Utvandrarna (00:20:34–00:20:46) when a group of girls laugh derisively at Arvid because of his alleged “interactions” with a heifer (earning him the rather unsavory moniker, the “Bull of Nybacken”). The girls’ mockery is what convinces Arvid to leave Sweden and, as was the case with Robert’s incident with his Swedish boss and the boxing of his ears, the girls’ laughter launches a remarkable sonic sequence, this time involving a chromatically descending orchestral music cue, a percussive ostinato, sounds of Arvid’s pocket watch being wound (00:21:08) and a musicalized tick-tock accompaniment, sounds that—as we shall see below—are also featured prominently in Nybyggarna. Troell’s sound effects connoting trauma (the heartbeat, tick-tock, and laughter) assume symbolic status (Barthes’s semic code), resurfacing in both films and common to both Arvid and Robert’s pain. The flashbacks of Nybyggarna also introduce two musicalized sounds—the beating of a drum (first heard as sonic flashback enigma 2) and the jingle of coins. These sounds function symbolically, acquiring meaning and emotional power upon repetition. It is in this way that the soundtrack engenders an alternative narrative for the film—one that reflects the heavy weight on Robert as he struggles with guilt over the fate of Arvid, sexual humiliation at a brothel where he is laughed at, and shame when confronted by his brother Karl, who expresses unyielding disappointment and frustration with Robert’s “lies.” Sonic flashback enigma 2 is a drumming sound introduced in flashback #1 and repeated in flashbacks #2 and #3. It is derived from a sequence in which Robert and Arvid joyfully celebrate the start of their westward adventure by drumming on their new gold pans (Table 8.2, 01:40:21). The gold pan drumming is later replaced by non-diegetic “musicalized” percussive sounds (01:40:33) that serve as a relentless ostinato accompaniment to flashbacks 1, 2, and 3. The drumming acts as a sonic motto (corresponding with Barthes’s semic code), carrying symbolic weight, resulting in a fantastically energetic and anxious score that beautifully mirrors the boys’ excitement about joining the gold rush, Robert’s angst-filled memories, and the visual rhythm of the flashback scenes. The drumming recurs multiple times over the course of the film; it swells and fades, rhythmically fluctuates, changes tempo, and at rare

190  Alexis Luko moments it is silent. Like much of the score, the drumming sequences were improvised. In an interview, Troell explained how he developed the idea: When I was editing, my close friend Georg Oddner watched a cut of that scene, and, while sitting at the edge of the table, started pounding with his fingers—he very often did that, because he was a jazz drummer. I was fascinated by how that pounding added something. I told him, “You have to do the music for those spots in Robert’s flashback dreams.” We put him in a dubbing studio with a drum set and he just improvised while watching the film, and I did the final edit afterwards. (Sragow) As Robert and Arvid move westward, the percussive sounds play a role in underscoring emotion and ratcheting up tension when the young men stumble upon an ominous gravesite (01:41:24), a pile of bones (01:51:40), and a warning about the poisoned water (01:52:47).18 The sonic drumbeat motto starts again (01:50:05) when Kristina discovers Arvid’s watch concealed under Robert’s pillow, allowing her to conclude that the young man is dead. The drumbeat segues to flashback #3, transporting the viewer to the desert where Arvid is polishing his pocket watch. Meanwhile, different narrative layers of the past and present overlap as the ostinato drum motto blends with the tick-tick of the watch. Later in the same flashback, before Arvid drinks the poisoned water, the entire soundtrack is silenced (­Table 8.3, 01:52:25). After drinking, the musicalized percussion, comprised of light drumming synchronized with the watch, now represents Arvid’s failing heartbeat.19 Through flashbacks 1–3, therefore, the metamorphosing drum motto accompanies Arvid and Robert, interweaving both their memories of the music-making on their gold pans, the pocket watch (as heard by Arvid in the past and Robert in the present), Robert’s heartbeat in Utvandrarna when his hearing is first damaged, and Arvid’s failing heartbeat in Nybyggarna. Throughout Nybyggarna, Troell constantly juxtaposes diegetic and non-­ diegetic planes (what I call diegetic/non-diegetic juxtaposition), thus aligning with Barthes’s symbolic code—through antithesis—at the level of sound itself. For example, in flashback #1 (at 01:36:55) when Robert says to Arvid, “All will be right once we get to California,” the phrase is inserted diegetically, but half a second later it is repeated in a non-diegetic whisper. The same occurs with Arvid’s repeated plea to Robert “Let’s turn back” which is first heard diegetically and then returns as non-diegetic dialogue. In this context, one might imagine that the diegetic rendering reflects the soundtrack as it was heard in the past, whereas the non-diegetic dialogue comprises the “voices” (in the present) in Robert’s head that haunt his psyche and expose his current feelings of guilt over Arvid’s death. Another example of diegetic/non-diegetic juxtaposition is encountered as Robert and Arvid march through the desert in flashback #2, where Troell alternates between heard and muted diegetic sound effects, and non-diegetic drumming and silence (diagonal shaded cells in the tables indicate where parts of the

Re-Sounding Trauma  191 soundtrack are muted or silenced). The technique is used again in flashback #3, where tension builds as Troell feverishly alternates between sounded and muted diegetic sound effects and non-diegetic drumming. Here again, Troell’s avant-garde filmmaking is on display as he not only sews together “Scene A” and “Scene B” (discussed in the quotation above) but also juxtaposes sound and silence, thus using varied sonic and visual layers to superimpose two different memories. For flashbacks #4 and #5, a new ostinato—the sound of coins jingling— prevails as the main sonic motto. As with the drumming motto, the coin jingle is transformed from mere sound effect in flashback #4 (at 02:03:21) to musicalized sound (at 02:03:25) and serves as an ostinato to flashback #5 (Tables 8.4 and 8.5). As shown in Table 8.5, the coins are heard throughout flashback #5, alternating between diegetic and non-diegetic planes. At 02:07:30, the diegetic coin sounds and non-diegetic musicalized sounds intersect briefly as Robert builds up his courage to visit the brothel. The coins serve as a trigger for ­Robert’s psychological trauma because (1) they are what he collects from the hands of a dying man (making Robert feel guilty about failing to earn this money honestly), (2) they are used to pay for his first sexual experience with a prostitute (ending prematurely in laughter and embarrassment), and (3) they are traded in at a currency exchange for bank notes, which Robert discovers are counterfeit, but only after he has proudly presented his earnings to Karl and Kristina. In a film with such an epic scope and sweeping visuals, in which characters demonstrate resilience and strength through silence, the sonic quality of these flashback sequences provides emotional soul and psychological insight into the suffering of these early Swedish settlers. Throughout the lengthy flashback sequences of Nybyggarna, the visual patchwork created by Troell’s experimental editing through the sewing together of different scenes is echoed by a soundtrack that juxtaposes sound and silence, diegetic and non-diegetic effects, and sounds from multiple memories. These flashbacks replicate Robert’s own thought process as he imagines past events through sound, connecting the dots between different life events as he copes with Arvid’s death. This complex aural and visual web based on the memory of Robert permits the viewer to see and listen to Robert’s traumatized memories at a variety of different levels, as the present and a number of different “pasts” all meld together into one experimental cinematic tapestry.

Här har du ditt liv (1966, Here Is Your Life) Jan Troell’s first feature-length film, Här har du ditt liv also includes a number of remarkable flashback scenes, indicating that his penchant for story-withina-story frameworks was part of his cinematic style from the beginning of his career.20 The film is based on Romanen om Olof (The novel of Olof), a book by popular twentieth-century Swedish novelist and Nobel Prize recipient, Eyvind Johnson (1900–76). Beyond directing Här har du ditt liv, Troell also served as editor, cinematographer, and co-writer. About a boy from northern Sweden named Olof Persson (played again by Eddie Axberg), the film is a

192  Alexis Luko “coming of age” bildungsroman set during First World War. After leaving home in search of independence, we follow the trajectory of Olof’s life between ages 13 to 18 as he matures into manhood. For the first part of the film, Olof is a silent observer, listening carefully to his elders and the stories they tell, acquiring various skills as he navigates through a series of different occupations—as a log driver on a log jam, a machinist at a lumber mill, an usher in a town movie theater, and a projectionist for a traveling film company. It is not until the second half of the film that Olof finds his voice, engaging on a path to adulthood as he learns how to pursue his dreams and how to assert himself intellectually, sexually, and politically. In Här har du ditt liv, Troell has a visual flair that strikes a balance between documentary and avant-garde style, depicting the rugged wilderness of Sweden and rural working-class life while espousing a French New Wave aesthetic, including freeze frames, instances of handheld camerawork, and jump cuts.21 The film’s narrative is modern in design, flowing unapologetically with nary an explanation of how Olof departs from point A to arrive at point B. Troell’s loose narrative approach results in many moments of Brechtian alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in which cinematic continuity is disrupted, forcing viewers to connect the dots themselves. Action in Här har du ditt liv is predominantly captured through the eyes— and indeed, the ears—of Olof himself. The film, after all, reads like a series of flashbacks, which presumably represent Olof’s personal look back at the formative years of his life. As aptly put by Stig Björkman, “Här har du ditt liv … functions on a personal plane as a reminder of time gone by, as memories of a lost youth” (58). Though, unlike Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol or Isak Borg of Bergman’s Smultronstället (1957, Wild strawberries), we never meet an old-man-Olof, there is a sense that the film’s narrative is constructed from a mature personal point of view.22

Sonic Mottos and the Här har du ditt liv Introductory Flashback Montage Här har du ditt liv opens with an avant-garde cinematic sequence that bathes the film, from the outset, in audiovisual poetry. This sequence introduces sonic mottos that later recur at significant moments in the plot (often as commentary on Olof’s flashbacks). The sonic mottos provide linkages between important life events, suggesting how Olof—and, indeed, the viewer—might extrapolate meaning in his life-path by connecting certain dots in his trajectory. The first such sonic motto assumes the form of a merry folk-style working song for accordion that accompanies Olof throughout the film and acts very much like the “Promenade” from Mussorgsky’s Scenes from an Exhibition. This and other music of the film is by Erik Nordgren, a composer whose name often arises in the context of Swedish cinema as he served as resident music director at Svensk Filmindustri from 1953 to 1967 and scored 13 of Ingmar Bergman’s films.23 Olof’s “promenade” was previously composed by Nordgren as a folk melody, nicknamed the “Marshland Waltz” for Troell’s short

Re-Sounding Trauma  193 film titled Uppehåll i myrlandet (1965, Interlude in the marshland).24 Nordgren and Troell liked the tune so much that they decided to reuse it for the opening of Här har du ditt liv. Peter Cowie has linked the tune for accordion and flute to Olof’s so-called “dance of life—punctuated by setbacks but always pressing forward in eager anticipation of the next turn in the road” (“Flashback: Erik Nordgren” par. 4). It is Nordgren’s longtime study of Swedish traditional music that provides a sense of folk-like authenticity to the soundtrack. The second motto is a bird—not only through its visual manifestation but also through sonic representation as both a solo flute tune and a tweeting bird sound effect. For the first frame of the film, as the opening credits appear, chirping is heard along with a still photograph of a bird soaring through the sky. Though the viewer does not know it yet, the visual of the bird in flight is actually a flashforward taken from a romantic scene (depicting Olof’s first pangs of love) later in the film. The sound effect is quickly followed by “musicalized” birdsong, taking the form of a modernist piece for solo flute with flutter-tonguing. The music is heard in tandem with the flap of wings as the film speed suddenly normalizes when the bird bursts from a single freezeframe into a choreographed dance. Then, in the style of stop-animation photography, the bird’s movements are aborted mid-flight, and again captured in freeze frame as the modernist flute piece continues. There is a sudden musical shift when the modernist score is jarringly interrupted by a second sonic motto—Olof’s folksy “dance of life” tune. After a few more freeze frames, the film speed normalizes, the bird takes flight, and the film begins. Here, right from the outset of the film, Troell challenges visual and aural continuity by crudely juxtaposing two different styles of music in quick succession through an abrupt sonic shift (Barthes’s symbolic code). An abrupt sonic shift occurs when music and/or sound effects jarringly make a hard stop (sometimes mid-note) followed by the immediate introduction of new music and/or sound effects. Troell’s penchant for interrupting cinematic continuity by employing abrupt sonic shifts often serves to juxtapose the world of imagination with the world of rationality. This is, in fact, a stylistic marker for Troell, who has a knack for blending his love of fact and fiction, documentary and narrative styles. His critically praised 1988 documentary Sagolandet (Land of dreams) about Swedish society, hyper-rationality and the death of dreams is a case in point, challenging the boundaries of the documentary genre by digressing from interviews and excerpts from Swedish everyday life into imaginative scenes of fantasy, intermingled with personal home video footage of his daughter. After the opening credits, there is a flashback montage embedded with a number of nested flashbacks, depicting the events leading up to Olof’s departure from his foster parent’s home. As Björkman observes, The introductory episodes are short, shorn off. Only the essence of events is left. Here Troell is employing … poetical abbreviations. The whole of the introductory sequence has the character of memory images recalled in glimpses, filtered through time and wistful feelings of something long since fled…. (58)

194  Alexis Luko At the outset, birdsong and the scream of a train’s whistle are heard as Olof marches resolutely toward the central station with his foster mother in tow. The montage quickly shifts forward to Olof on the train, then suddenly backward to Olof at the revelatory moment he decides to leave home, then forward again to Olof on the train with a voiceover of his foster mother imploring him to stay: “Couldn’t you stay for the summer; the gun would be yours. Unless you’d prefer an accordion like the lineman’s boy. We could subscribe to an illustrated magazine. Or find a correspondence course in English. In case you’d like to go to America.”25 While his foster mother speaks, Olof’s thoughts flashback to happy days with his foster family—firing a gun and cross-country skiing. She asks: “I had hoped you’d stay another year…. Haven’t you been comfortable?” Then, the film flashes backward again to a private moment in which Olof screams, “To hell with it. I don’t want to be comfortable!” As Olof chooses a new life of “discomfort” away from his foster home, the flashback sequence ends and the flutter-tonguing flute piece resumes, accompanied by the return of the image of the bird (now colorized green in an otherwise black and white film) soaring through the air to the flute accompaniment. What can we make of these juxtaposed sonic mottos (invoking Barthes’s symbolic code through antithesis)? The folk tune motto is often heard as a work song and/ or as a transition piece when Olof is en route to the next job; it might be seen to represent real-world practicality. The beautiful bird motto, on the other hand, typically interjects in non-work situations, when Olof allows his mind to wander, and therefore stands as a symbol of his internal world of imagination and free-thinking. For example, the bird tune for flute returns later in the film when Olof discovers a dead moth and brings it to “life” by animating it in mock-flight by zipping back and forth on a rolling dolly with the moth above his head. The flute tune is also heard when, peering through a shop window, Olof imagines himself dressed as a gentleman in a new hat, when he has his first sexual encounter (00:01:59), and when he declares time off from work to swim, read (at 00:01:25), and discuss politics with a friend (00:01:57). Near the end of the film, as a news reel plays, signaling 11 November 1918, the end of the First World War, the flute tune is heard in counterpoint with La Marseillaise (02:44:37). Neatly summed, Troell presents the three main narrative threads of the film interwoven as juxtaposed sonic mottos, with the flute tune representing imagination (interiority), the “dance of life” tune signifying work (practical day-to-day happenings), and tunes such as La Marseillaise (and other parade tunes) symbolizing war (world events).

Sonic Flashback 2 During Olof’s stint at the logging camp, he meets August (Allan Edwall) who tells a story that takes on the form of what is arguably one of Troell’s most exceptional flashback scenes. What makes it so remarkable? First, in a film that is almost exclusively black and white, the flashback radiates in a burst of

Re-Sounding Trauma  195 color with a haunting beauty reminiscent of a Tarkovskian aesthetic avant la lettre.26 Second, the flashback is layered with a story-within-a-story-within-astory structure. It constitutes a flashback (from Olof’s point of view) embedded within a flashback (from August’s POV) embedded within another flashback (from the POV of August’s wife) embedded within at least three other flashbacks. Close examination of this flashback scene highlights the multiple layers of narrative and sonic events and how they interrelate. At the outset of the scene, August laments how life is “like butter on a griddle” as he launches into a sad story about the death of his wife and children. He explains how a disease mysteriously struck his children, making their “bodies... all twisted, as if wrung by an invisible hand.” As August begins to tell the story, the sonic aspect of the flashback prefigures the visuals. The viewer is confronted first with a sonic flashback enigma (00:23:01), giving rise to questions: Is this the wind? A singing kettle? Sizzling butter on a griddle? A squealing airhorn? A bomb falling from the sky? August provides a clue as to the source with a reference to an ominous whirlwind that has bewitched the farm.27 This sonic flashback enigma becomes increasingly important as it is heard three more times—twice during the flashback sequence (from August’s memory) and once (from Olof’s memory) when Olof witnesses August blown to pieces in a dynamite explosion on the logjam. Furthermore, the blast seems to be a reminder from Troell, the auteur, about world events and the sounds of a collective memory. The film’s narrative, after all, is set in the shadow of the First World War, and news reels (including a scene in which bombs are being mass produced in a factory), shots of wartime journals, pamphlets, and newspaper articles serve as frightening reminders that, not so far away from Sweden, bombs are indeed exploding and lives are being lost. As the visuals of the flashback come into focus, the Russian-doll storywithin-a-story-within-a-story approach raises many questions about whose flashback we are witnessing. As the flashback begins, there is a shift from a memory seen from August’s perspective to a memory seen from his wife’s perspective. But might this telescoping perspective really spring from Olof’s perception of the perspectives of August and his wife? Or does it reflect a collective memory? In any case, the flashback begins with a shot of August’s wife with a kerchief on her head, outdoors in a golden field collecting water as the menacing wind blows (00:24:09). At another point, the sound of the wind picks up and, in synchrony with a sudden blast (the sonic enigma described above) she falls to the ground with her pail of water (00:25:40). But it is not just the sound of wind and the blast that make this scene so noteworthy. Near the opening of the color flashback, in counterpoint with the wind, three organ chords are sounded (00:24:21). August’s wife sees or imagines she sees (or is it that August or Olof imagines she saw?) the ghosts of her own children running through the tall grasses. She shouts mutely (00:24:36), and as the wind climaxes, it fuses into a Nordgren organ chorale composition (00:25:06), lending the scene a pseudo-religious tone. As she

196  Alexis Luko flashbacks to happier days when her children were alive, instead of her peasant garb, she dons a crisp white dress as she frolics with her children in a golden wheat field in a scene that sparkles with magic and joy. Once the blissful memory dissipates, August’s wife falls to the ground in a despondent slump and is then awoken from her reverie by a fly (00:25:50), the sound of which fuses with a rustic dance-tune playing on a 78-rpm shellac record (00:25:58)—the soundscape of the next flashback. Here, an old-style gramophone plays near a sleeping man in a hammock. There is a close-up of the mystery man’s ear (00:26:09), further confusing the boundaries of whose aural memory we are privy to. When August’s wife stumbles upon him, she smiles widely. Johnson’s novel hints that there is underlying guilt in her smile, suggestive of infidelity. And, reading between the lines, one might infer that it is because of this “betrayal” that the family is punished by the supernatural winds. This gives way to yet another cheerful flashback from simpler times, presumably from August’s perspective, as he peers through a window of his home to witness his wife as she spins around wildly with her children to the accompaniment of the same rustic tune (00:26:53). When the tune ends (00:27:46), dead air and static on the revolving shellac record (reminiscent of the buzzing fly and the wind) accompanies the scene, followed yet again by the squealing blast sonic enigma (00:27:59). To the accompaniment of the crackling static of the record, August closes the door of a wooden box containing his dead wife. The rustic tune picks up again (00:28:22) as she sways lifelessly in her white dress in a hammock (linking back to the mystery man) and, while the tune fades away, the image dissolves to a snow-drenched scene washed in a bright white light as her coffin is being pulled by a sled through a windy snowstorm. In this remarkable flashback scene we have, first, the blast-sound, which is symbolically conceived as a “sound object” of sorts that is collectively shared and represents, through its enigmatic qualities, a variety of things: the wartime bombs (from humanity’s mass historical memory), dynamite that kills August (from Olof’s personal memories), the sound of an ominous wind (from Olof’s imagination and August’s memories), and sizzling butter (referring back to August’s metaphor). Second is the seamlessness of Troell’s sonic transitions from the sound of wind to blast, and from wind to organ chorale to buzzing fly to gramophone. These merged sonic events (Barthes’s semic code) blend and mix organically, mirroring the visual blending of images throughout the flashback sequence.28 The sound of the blast fuses with the sound of the wind, the fly, and gramophone as the aural point of view of Olof, August, and August’s wife intermingle polyphonically in the same narrative. This soundscape, based on aural memories, prompts the viewer to question: are Troell’s flashbacks subjective, objective, historical? Are they told from a dependable point of view? These sounds function in more momentous ways than mere illustrative sound effects. Rather than being associated with fixed objects and fixed temporal planes, the sound effects simultaneously inhabit diegetic, non-diegetic, extra-diegetic, meta-diegetic, and past, present, and future, and even multiple

Re-Sounding Trauma  197 points of view. These sonic events are mystically linked in a manner suggestive of a collective consciousness. As is the case with Robert’s flashbacks in Nybyggarna, Olof’s sonic memories also recall pain. For Robert, the sounds that terrorize his bleeding ear are highly personalized and have a diegetic origin, emanating from his own experiences, and reflect his struggles as he grapples to make sense of his own guilt over the death of his friend Arvid. For Olof, flashbacks featuring non-diegetic juxtaposed sonic mottos (i.e., the worksong and the modern flute piece) represent an internal battle waged between his work responsibilities on the one hand, and freedom and imagination on the other hand. In terms of diegetic sound effects, Olof’s flashbacks mix soundscapes that are not only personal but also borrowed (from August and his wife’s memories), and communal (from war). These soundscapes intermingle so that similar sounds come to represent different memories from different points of view. As sonic memories interlink, the viewer is encouraged to create metaphorical connections between emotionally painful events that form part of a collective cinematic consciousness. **** “I have always been nostalgic,” Troell recently confessed in an interview with Peter Cowie (Interview with Jan Troell 00:04:28). Troell’s brand of nostalgia expressed through his characters via the flashback is consistent with nostalgia’s Greek etymology, not so much of “homecoming” (nostos), but predominantly of “pain” (algos). Protagonists experiencing flashbacks in Troell’s early films experience guilt, trauma, and remorse through sonic memories that are as vivid as their visual recollections. In this way, viewers can listen to the sonic plane of Troell’s films for enriched insight into his characters’ psyches. When sound effects and music take on particular symbolic significance in flashback scenes, interpreting them according to Barthes’s narrative codes provides a “window” into their cinematic meaning. Three of the codes are particularly relevant to Här har du ditt liv and Nybyggarna: (1) The hermeneutic code, which is associated with sonic flashback enigmas, (2) the semic code, linked to sonic flashback mottos and merged sonic events, and 3) the symbolic code, connected to abrupt sonic shifts, diegetic/non-diegetic juxtaposition, and juxtaposed musical mottos. While certain flashback sound effects are meant simply to replicate actual sounds of past experiences, others are “musicalized” and varied in each new cinematic context. At times, Troell’s sonic mottos spring from shared and/ or collective memories, thus allowing sounds to be reheard from different points of view, dissipating lines between the diegetic worlds of different characters’ aural memories. At other times, Troell reminds us of how sound is reinterpreted poetically by one individual’s memory, as it cuts across diegetic and non-diegetic boundaries. The recollection of pain is often expressed in sonic terms, offering psychological insight into the minds of Troell’s protagonists. When recalled by multiple characters, sounds represent a collective consciousness, resonating with a communal mysticism that transcends words.

198  Alexis Luko Similarly, for scenes involving flashbacks within flashbacks, Troell offers the possibility of linking together disparate memories, and establishing thematic associations between them through sound. Nybyggarna and Här har du ditt liv are fascinating studies of memory, of how we remember our own personal stories of trauma and those of others— perhaps even how we collectively create a sense of shared history (through emotional, psychological, visual, sensual, intellectual, olfactory, and/or aural markers) and how different painful memories interlink to generate meaning and life lessons. One might even say that Troell explores trauma by “sculpting time” in the Tarkovskian sense, by exploiting the potential of the flashback, simultaneously looking—and indeed listening—backward and forward, and interpreting and reinterpreting painful memories with his sonic paintbrush. Table 8.1  F lashback No. 1: Sonic Events (Nybyggarna 01:32:45–01:37:29)

Table 8.2  F lashback No. 2: Sonic Events (Nybyggarna 01:39:55–01:48:13)

Table 8.3  F lashback No. 3: Sonic Events (Nybyggarna 01:49:25–01:56:37)

200  Alexis Luko Table 8.4  F lashback No. 4: Sonic Events (Nybyggarna 01:59:28–02:03:31) Time

01:59:28

01:59:41

Nondiegetic Percussion Diegetic Sound Effects Dialogue

02:00:32

Gongs; wood blocks (slow)

Wind

02:01:10

02:02:55

02:03:21

Cresc. (as man dies of yellow fever) Sound of coins spilling from purse

Sound of Robert preparing coffin; nailing

Wind; stream; footsteps

02:03:25 Non-diegetic musicalized sound effects on percussion, emulating sound of coins

Muted woman shaking her head; sign reads: “Danger! Keep Out! Yellow Fever”

Table 8.5  F lashback No. 5: Sonic Events (Nybyggarna 02:05:52–02:11:55) Time

02:05:52

Non diegetic Percussion

Musicalized sound of coins

Diegetic Sound Effects

Wind

Dialogue

Time

02:06:32

02:07:30

02:07:49

Ambient noise inside a bar

Musicalized diegetic sound of coins that Robert is nervously playing with while he looks out of window in counterpoint with musicalized percussive sound of coins dropping

Muffled sound of voices

02:09:34

02:07:59

02:08:50

Musicalized sound of coin Robert was playing with (at 2:07:30)

02:10:34

Nondiegetic Musicalized Sounds

02:09:10 Light percussion in sync with approach of prostitute

02:10:49

02:11:10

Percussion Musicalized sound of coins

Tempo accel.

Creak of floorboards; door closes in brothel

Sudden stop

Muted laughter and conversation

02:11:15

02:11:19

02:11:21

02:11:28

02:11:39– 02:11:55

Percussion

Musicalized sound of coins

Tempo accel.

02:09:33

Sound of match being struck

Laughter outside

02:10:38

02:09:24

Accel.

(Robert exchanges coins for bills) Diegetic Sound Effects

Dialogue

All sound effects heard

Sonic Enigma #3 Revealed: laughter of women

Sound of coins being stacked

Sound of bills rustling as they are put into Robert’s wallet

Sound of drawer closing

Sound of cart as Robert leaves town Muted dialogue

Notes 1 Troell worked as a cinematographer for Bo Widerberg on Barnvagnen (1963, The baby carriage) before becoming a director. Vernon Young acknowledges “the phenomenal excellence maintained by four overlapping film artists of international importance since the Swedish film’s rebirth in the early Forties” (263). 2 Referring to his “emigration films” (Utvandrarna and Nybyggarna), Tytti Soila calls Troell an “auteur”: “The emigration films may justly be called auteur

Re-Sounding Trauma  201 films, even if Moberg [the author] was still alive…. Troell not only directed these films: he scripted, photographed and cut them. It is remarkable, however, how Troell’s touch has changed the focus of the book without any objections from Moberg” (217). 3 Prizewinning films include Här har du ditt liv (1966), Utvandrarna (1971), Nybyggarna (1972), Zandy’s Bride (1974), Sagolandet (1988, Land of dreams), Il capitano (1991, Il Capitano: a Swedish Requiem), Hamsun (1996), En frusen dröm (1997, A  frozen dream), Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick (2008, Everlasting moments), Dom över död man (2012, The last sentence). 4 Critics have noticed Troell’s amazing attention to movement in his films. Vernon Young has observed: [Troell] is inordinately alive to anything that moves or is moved: an animal, a swing, a flower-stem snapped by the passing blast of an express train; a boat limping into dry-dock; an infant writhing with colic; an oakleaf loosened by the chemistry of autumn; snow that kills in the ear and ripens the seed…. (263) 5 This is corroborated by Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann who views Troell first and foremost as a photographer: [H]e wanders around with his camera, and picks what is true, what you didn’t know about the scene. For an actor this is very inspiring: you have complete freedom, and you know that there is a painter there taking the best of you, and you will see the best. (Wexman and Ullmann 73) 6 In the days when piano accompanists provided the soundtracks for films, Ernö Rapée issued the following warning to musicians accompanying flashbacks: If the flash-back [sic] is not of extreme length and the scene preceding the flashback is of such character that it will hold attention even during the flashback, I would not advise changing the music but would advise bringing it down to “ppp.” (Hubbert 89) 7 See Bordwell and Thompson, who differentiate between sounds from the present (“simple diegetic”) and sounds from the future or past (“displaced diegetic”), imagined sound (“internal diegetic”) and objective sound (“external” diegetic) (254–62). Also see Enseign and Knapton, who refer to “auditory flashbacks” (21). On the voice in flashbacks, Michel Chion writes about flashback voiceovers. He terms the “I-voice” as the voice that “speaks from a point where time is suspended” (49) and characterizes it as closely miked, creating “a feeling of intimacy with the voice” (51), and dry and lacking reverb. On sound in flashbacks, Chion proposes “subjective internal sound” for mental voices and memories (76). 8 Significant to Turim is the difference between “personal archives of the past” related to individual memory, which may or may not be reliable, and the “shared and recorded past” of history. 9 Genette also offers tools to analyze literary flashbacks that take into account: (1) “portée” (how long ago the past event occurred); (2) “amplitude” (duration of the event in years, minutes); and (3) “duration” (actual length of the flashback). Claudia Gorbman (“Narrative Film Music”) borrows the terms from Étienne Souriau (237) and Genette (183–203). See also Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. 10 Genette uses the terms “analepse” for movement to the narrative past (i.e., flashback); “prolepse” for movement to the narrative future (i.e., flashforward); “interior analepse” for movement to the narrative past within the narrative timeline; and “exterior analepse” for movement to the past outside

202  Alexis Luko

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21

the temporal period of the rest of the narration. On limitations of diegetic/ non-diegetic definitions see Stilwell; Smith; Binns (127–40); and Kassabian (42). On the notion of “intradiegetic” sound, which is sound that occupies narrative space but is not necessarily heard by the characters, see Winters 224–44. On enigmas, see Bordwell 778–79. I had the occasion to interview composer and jazz musician Bengt Ernryd (who plays the B3 Hammond organ in Nybyggarna), who explained that after 40 years he has no scores or sketches in his possession. He recalls watching the film several times before composing the music and explained that much of the score was improvised: “We did a lot of the music in two weeks in the film mixing studio—always playing to the pictures and improvising too…. All music was recorded in the film mixing room together with the pictures and Jan” (personal interview, 3 November 2016). Actor Eddie Axberg, who plays Robert, also served as the sound technician and mixer for both films. As the opening credits roll in Nybyggarna, Karl Oskar fells a tree to build a homestead for his family in Minnesota to the accompaniment of a modal tune on bass clarinet that breathes thoughtful strains of melancholy and hope. The tune also accompanies scenes in which Karl Oskar is farming or Kristina is doing domestic household chores. Variations of the tune return throughout the film, heard first on the clarinet and later the tin whistle and Hammond organ with changes of harmony, tempo, and rhythm. In an interview with Peter Cowie to celebrate the newly released special edition of The Emigrants on The Criterion Collection label, Troell expresses admiration for Erik Nordgren’s score, which features four pieces representing the four seasons. This is music that Troell describes as “immobile,” void of “a narrative that one has to follow,” and composed in “keys that harmonized with each other so that, at the editing stage, you could fade one into the next one” (qtd. in Cowie, “Flashback: Erik Nordgren” par. 8). Troell’s concern with mixing and with aural transitions between musical cues is notable and, as revealed below, this is an approach to mixing also encountered in Här har du ditt liv. On sound flashforwards also see Herman 247. In Moberg’s book, Robert’s ear occupies such a prominent position that it becomes a protagonist onto itself. Over the course of many chapters, it speaks to Robert and torments him with the sounds of memories of the past. These sounds do not comprise a “sound bridge” as the sounds and the visuals of the next scene are unconnected. See Buhler, Deemer, and Neumeyer 92–98. The flashback has an oneiric aesthetic, enhanced visually by the strobe effect and aurally by the drumbeat. It is reminiscent of the humiliation scene of Ingmar Bergman’s Gycklarnas afton (1953, Sawdust and tinsel), which also has a surreal look and percussive accompaniment replete with canon fire. On silencing certain parts of the soundtrack see Paul Théberge, who uses the term “diegetic silence” to refer to the phenomenon of silencing certain parts of the soundtrack (66). The European release of Här har du ditt liv was a lengthy 167 minutes. The film was condensed dramatically to 110 minutes for American distribution. The newest release by The Criterion Collection restores the film to its original length. There are a number of avant-garde, comical sonic “gags” in Här har du ditt liv worth mentioning. For example, Troell plays with the dialogue in a most unexpected context—at a funeral—where “Pelle from Småland” (played by Max von Sydow) delivers the eulogy for Olof’s father. As the camera pans

Re-Sounding Trauma  203

22 23

24 25

26 27 28

over to focus on von Sydow, he breaks the fourth wall and stares brazenly into the camera lens. His voice is heard but his lips do not move. In another scene, Olof is in the proprietor’s office of the Röda Kvarn movie theatre when the sound of a saw suddenly “cuts” through their conversation. The viewer is left asking many questions about the origin of the sound as there is no visual indicator of a saw nearby. The saw sound is repeated when Olof and the proprietor gawk at the severed hand of a sculpture in the office. Besides a sonic gag, the saw sound also serves as a sonic flashback—a reminiscence of the sawmill job that Olof has just recently quit—and also as a sonic flashforward to an amusing moment when Olof uses a small outdoor saw to trim the damaged end of his necktie. The book by Eyvind Johnson, which the film is based on, is in the third person. Nordgren composed music for Bergman films including Såsom i en spegel (1961, Through a glass darkly), Jung frukällan (1960, The virgin spring), Sommaren med Monika (1953, Summer with Monika), Sommarnattens leende (1955, Smiles of a summer night), Det sjunde inseglet (1957, The seventh seal), and Smultronstället. Interlude in the Marshland is restored and included on The Criterion Collection’s release of Här har du ditt liv. The dialogue is a closely miked voiceover. The disconnect between voice, the ambient sounds of the outdoors (footsteps, birdcall, train), and the freeze frame family-portrait style visuals of Olof’s mother and brother suggest that this montage is cobbled from Olof’s memories. The switch to color is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), released the same year as Här har du ditt liv, and also of Stalker (1979). In Eyvind Johnson’s novel, the wind itself is viewed with superstition as it is comprised of the spirits of dead children. The merged sonic events mirror merged visual events.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975. Binns, Alexander. “Desiring the Diegesis: Music and Self-Seduction in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai.” Cinemusic? Constructing the Film Score, edited by ­David ­Cooper, Christopher Fox, and Ian Sapiro, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 127–40. Björkman, Stig. The New Directors: Film in Sweden. Tantivy Press, 1977. Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 774–82. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 3rd ed., ­McGraw Hill, 1990. Buhler, James, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2010. Changas, Estelle. “Review of The Emigrants.” Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, Winter 1972–73, pp. 28–30. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1999. Cowie, Peter. “Flashback: Erik Nordgren.” The Criterion Collection, 23 July 2015, www.criterion.com/current/posts/3636-flashback-erik-nordgren. Accessed 14 January 2017.

204  Alexis Luko ———. Interview with Jan Troell. Supplement on the DVD, Here Is Your Life, spine # 766, The Criterion Collection, 2015. Enseign, Lynne Naylor, and Robyn Eileen Knapton. The Complete Dictionary of Television and Film. Stein & Day, 1985. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Édition du Seuil, 1972. Gorbman, Claudia. “Narrative Film Music.” Yale French Studies, no. 60, Cinema/ Sound, 1980, pp. 183–203. ———. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indiana University Press, 1987. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Hubbert, Julie, editor. Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History. University of California Press, 2011. Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. Routledge, 2001. Kenny, Glenn. “The Last Sentence.” Review on Roger Ebert.com, 20 June 2014, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-last-sentence-2014. Accessed 14 January 2017. Marlow, Jonathan. “The Art of Filmmaking: Jan Troell.” 20 June 2014, www. fandor.com/keyframe/the-art-of-filmmaking-jan-troell. Accessed 14 January 2017. Moberg, Vilhelm. The Settlers: The Emigrant Novels: Book 3. Translated by Gustaf Lannestock, Borealis Books, 1995. Smith, Jeff. “Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 1–25. Soila, Tytti. “Sweden.” Nordic National Cinema, edited by Gunnar Iverson, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, and Tytti Soila, Routledge, 1998, pp. 142–232. Souriau, Étienne. “La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie.” Revue internationale de filmologie, vol. 2, nos. 7–8, 1951, pp. 231–40. Sragow, Michael. “Interview: Jan Troell.” Film Comment, 4 March 2016, www. filmcomment.com/blog/interview-jan-troell/. Accessed 14 January 2017. Stilwell, Robynn. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 184–202. Théberge, Paul. “Almost Silent: The Interplay of Sound and Silence in Contemporary Cinema and Television.” Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, edited by Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, University of Illinois Press, 2008, pp. 51–67. Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. Routledge, 1989. Wexman, Virginia Wright, and Liv Ullmann. “An Interview with Liv Ullmann.” Film Acting, special issue of Cinema Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, Autumn 1980, pp. 68–78. Winters, Ben. “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music & Letters, vol. 91, no. 2, 2010, pp. 224–44. Young, Vernon. “Hands across the Sea.” The Hudson Review, vol. XXV, no. 2, Summer 1972, pp. 263–69.

Re-Sounding Trauma  205 Films Cited Andrei Rublev. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, Mosfilm and Tvorcheskoe Obedinienie Pisateley i Kinorabotnikov, 1966. Barnvagnen (The baby carriage). Directed by Bo Widerberg, Europa Film, music by Jan Johansson, 1963. Det sjunde inseglet (The seventh seal). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1957. Dom över död man (The last sentence). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Gaute Storaas, Filmlance International AB, Film i Väst, Filmpool Nord See, et al., 2012. En frusen dröm (Frozen dreams). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Lars Åkerlund and Sebastian Öberg, Athenafilm, Det Danske Filminstitut, Film i Skåne, et al., 1997. En passion (The passion of Anna). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, Svensk Filmindustri and Cinematograph AB, 1969. Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and tinsel). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Sandrews, 1953. Hamsun. Directed by Jan Troell, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Det Danske Filminstitut, Merkur Film A/S, et al., 1996. Här har du ditt liv (Here is your life). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. DVD: spine # 766, The Criterion Collection, 2015. Il capitano (Il Capitano: a Swedish Requiem). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Lars Åkerlund and Sebastian Öberg, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bold Productions, FilmTeknik, et al., 1991. Jung frukällan (The virgin spring). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1960. Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick (Everlasting moments). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Matti Bye, Blind Spot Pictures Oy, Filmpool Nord, Final Cut Productions, et al., 2008. Nybyggarna (The new land). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Bengt Ernryd, Lars August Lundh, Georg Oddner, and Nils Parling, Svensk Filmindustri, 1972. DVD: spine # 797, The Criterion Collection, 2016. Sagolandet (Land of dreams). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Tom Wolgers, Bold Productions, SVT Drama, and Svenska Filminstitutet, 1988. Såsom i en spegel (Through a glass darkly). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1961. Skammen (Shame). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, Cinematograph AB and Svensk Filmindustri, 1968. Smultronstället (Wild strawberries). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1957. Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1953. Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a summer night). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1955. Stalker. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, music by Eduard Artemev and Ludwig van Beethoven, Mosfilm and Vtoroe Tvorcheskoe Obedinenie, 1979.

206  Alexis Luko The Sound of Music. Directed by Robert Wise, music by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Robert Wise Productions and Argyle Enterprises, 1965. Uppehåll i myrlandet (Interlude in the marshland). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Erik Nordgren, AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1965. Utvandrarna (The emigrants). Directed by Jan Troell, music by Erik Nordgren, Svensk Filmindustri, 1971. DVD: spine # 796, The Criterion Collection, 2016. Vargtimmen (The hour of the wolf). Directed by Ingmar Bergman, music by Lars Johan Werle, Svensk Filmindustri, 1968. Zandy’s Bride. Directed by Jan Troell, music by Michael Franks, Warner Brothers, 1974.

Part III

Nostalgia, and the Impossible Returns Home

9 Decomposing Heroism Rolf Wilhelm’s Music for Radetzkymarsch (1965) Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

Carl Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, the hero of Joseph Roth’s most renowned novel Radetzkymarsch (1932),1 lives an unheroic life and dies an unheroic death. While approaching a well between the eastern frontlines of the First World War to get water for his comrades, Trotta recalls a musical piece familiar to him from his youth: He heard the shots before they were fired and also the opening drumbeats of “The Radetzky March.” He was standing on the balcony of his father’s house. The army band was playing down below. Now Nechwal [the band leader] raised the black ivory baton with the silver knob. Now Trotta lowered the second pail into the well. Now the cymbals clashed. Now he lifted the pail high. (Roth, Radetzky March 320) After three steps back to his comrades, Trotta gets hit by the fatal bullet, and his blood seeps into the ground. In these final moments of the hero, the matter-of-fact protocol interspersed with inner monolog not only recalls the Radetzky March but also evokes, with bitter irony, the heraldic colors black, silver, gold, and red of the doomed Habsburg Empire. “Lieutenant Trotta,” Roth resumes laconically, “died holding not a weapon but two pails” (Roth, Radetzky March 320). Critics agree that Radetzkymarsch is a novel about the decline and downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the reign of Franz Joseph I (1848–1916). Remarkably, Roth tells this story in the form of a family saga touched by only two major historical events half a century apart: the battle of Solferino (1859) and the First World War. While Roth keeps the grand schemes of history in the background, he takes great care to let the Radetzky March recur at key moments of the story, a leitmotif of sorts whose transformations suggest an almost symphonic quality. After a promising “exposition” and a turbulent “development”—one might recall the master plot of a Beethovenian symphony in Scott Burnham’s compelling analysis—the march takes a rather Mahlerian course as it follows the novel’s trajectory per astra ad inferi, from a forceful, optimistic entrance through struggle, decline, and nostalgia to banalization and disintegration. In the end, like a surreal accompaniment of a soldier’s

210  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch inglorious death, all that remains of Trotta’s musical alter ego is fragmented recollections. When Michael Kehlmann adapted the novel for the screen in 1965, cinemagoers in Austria were well-familiar with monarchy films, which had blossomed in the 1950s—a genre prone to escapist kitsch that enjoys some popularity still today thanks to the Sissi trilogy (1955–57). Genre conventions of the monarchy film (Kaiserfilm) are looming in the background of Kehlmann’s Radetzkymarsch, being subverted on every level, including its score. The script offered, of course, a great opportunity for the composer Rolf Wilhelm to carry out musically what Roth already had embedded in the book. Yet, Wilhelm not only elaborated the idea of the Radetzky March as a narrative device but also intensified it by “decomposing” the march on a level of refinement that only an outstanding, conservatory-trained film composer could achieve.2 In order to understand how this piece of all military marches could serve, in retrospect, as the title of an epos about an empire and its decline, we will examine the march itself and its reception as a process of intermedial and semantic transformations: from a march to the Radetzky March to Radetzkymarsch. More specifically, we will examine how the march transforms from a composition in honor of field marshal Radetzky in 1848, into the unofficial anthem of the Habsburg Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, then into a literary leitmotif and mythical emblem of the empire after its downfall in the First World War, and finally into Radetzkymarsch, a musical allegory at the early stage of a revisionist perspective on Austria’s past in the mid-1960s.

At Home in Sissi Land: Austrian Monarchy Films after the Second World War In the early 1950s, the Viennese film industry reinvented Austria—a happy empire beloved by its people for the fatherly benevolence of its monarch, the splendor of its balls, the gentle manners of its soldiers, the seductive beauty of its women, and above all the charming ingenuity of its music. Since many stereotypes, plot devices, and musical conventions of monarchy films recur in Radetzkymarsch, although with sinister overtones, we shall take a closer look at this genre first. After the Second World War, when the country was under allied occupation and attractive men were in short supply—many being crippled, missed in action, imprisoned, dead, impoverished, politically compromised and deprived of power—Austrian cinemas presented a wealthy and pacified empire with plenty of respectable, handsome, and well-off men. The formula of monarchy films, often promoted as women films, turned out to be very successful at Austrian box offices but rarely abroad. It was a typically Austrian genre for “the setting that most suggested Austria as a distinct entity from Germany in film was not 1918 and the troubled First Republic, but the Habsburg World” (Dassanowsky 188). Maria Fritsche convincingly argues that light-hearted and peaceful imageries of the golden era before the First World War played a crucial role after 1945 when most Austrians were eager

Decomposing Heroism  211 to present themselves as Hitler’s “first victim” (66). This was not just a matter of public sensitivities but a crucial argument in the negotiations between the government and the Allies about the country’s sovereignty and permanent neutrality which resulted in the Austrian State Treaty (1955) and the pullout of all occupation troops. In this tense political climate, monarchy films constructed a distinct Austrian identity as far removed as possible from the nation’s recent entanglement in war, oppression, and racism. In fact, a particularly striking convention of monarchy films is the total absence of war, in spite of the fact that most of them feature military officers in leading roles as well as posh soldiers marching, singing, dancing, drinking, and philandering all day and night. As such they reveal more about the nation’s post-war mood and desires than about the period of their settings. Celluloid Austria in the 1950s was a land of Alpine panoramas, luxurious palaces, clean cities, and cozy villages. Presenting a heavy dose of eye and ear candy, monarchy films are historical costume dramas with close ties to operetta, comedy, and Heimatfilm. They take place in the period of Prince Metternich and Emperor Franz Joseph I, the century between the Vienna congress and 1914, without ever mentioning the Great War and the collapse of the empire. Their plots rely heavily on stock characters and revive clichés and plot devices of sentimental Habsburg operettas, screen comedies, and pulp fiction that flourished after the First World War when Roth penned ­Radetzkymarsch.3 Often a funny couple accompanies and mirrors the unfolding love story of hero and heroine. Misunderstandings, schemes, all too human quirks and vices prompt many comical situations. Dancing peasants, loyal servants, singing soldiers, fiery and tipsy Hungarians, Prussians with questionable manners but good hearts, down-to-earth Bavarians, and loyal Czech servants populate Agfacolor sceneries under the paternal auspices of the Kaiser. All the more remarkable is the absence of Jews in the multi-­ cultural idylls of monarchy films in the 1950s as opposed to Radetzkymarsch. Like a deus ex machina, Franz Joseph routinely rescues his troubled subjects and sometimes literally commands the happy ending of their story, for example, in Kaisermanöver (1954), Die Deutschmeister (1955), Kaiserwalzer (1953), and Der Kaiser und das Wäschermädel (1957). Adopting conventions of film operettas and musicals, most monarchy films start with potpourri overtures introducing two or three main themes. The music tends to be short-phrased as it redundantly follows action and cuts. Most scores feature diegetic marches, dances, and songs that pause the course of action intermittently. A handful of waltzes by the Strauss family, the ­Radetzky March, and the Habsburg anthem (“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” God save Emperor Franz) serve as signature tunes of a golden era on the silver screen. Some of the diegetic pieces assume a structural function, comparable to Hollywood “theme songs” recurring at the beginning, end, and turning points of the plot.4 It is not uncommon that the original score picks up motifs from these pieces in order to provide coherence, atmosphere, expression, and musical commentary, for example, in Kaiserwalzer, Kaiserjäger (1956), Die

212  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch Deutschmeister, Der Kongreß tanzt (1955), Kronprinz Rudolfs letzte Liebe (1956) and also, but with unusual sophistication, in Radetzkymarsch, as we will show below.

A March for Count Radetzky Watching monarchy films from the 1950s, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the nineteenth century must have been the most gemütlich period of ­Austrian history. 5 They are funny and charming, but in the view of a historian, profoundly dishonest; this period would not provide a perfect backdrop for operettas. The young emperor came to power in 1848 in the midst of insurgencies throughout the empire, including the capital, which pushed the monarchy to the brink of collapse (Sked, Decline and Fall 140). The court had to flee twice from the rioting in Vienna. A constitution granted to appease the unrest in early 1849 was suspended in 1851. Rising nationalist forces in Hungary and Italy threatened the cohesion of the multi-ethnic empire. In 1853, a Hungarian nationalist attempted to kill the emperor in Vienna. Franz Joseph survived and ennobled one of his officers and a Viennese butcher who had overwhelmed the assassin. (This event might have inspired Roth to begin his saga with the ennoblement of Carl Joseph’s grandfather who saves the emperor’s life on the battlefield of Solferino.) After the Hungarian revolt had been crushed and its leaders executed, the province remained under Austrian military jurisdiction until 1856. The emperor and his minister of the interior established a neo-absolutist regime firmly grounded on the military, loyal aristocrats, centralist administration, and censorship. The obvious choice would have been to begin Radetzkymarsch in 1848–49, when Radetzky secured Habsburg’s control over its Northern Italian territories and probably its very existence. However, Roth chose the battle of Solferino in 1859—a devastating defeat of the Austrians that marked the beginning of the decline of Habsburgian power south of the Alps. Moreover, it was a public disgrace of the emperor who had rushed to the front to take over supreme military command. Seven years later, a bloodbath at Königgrätz sealed the decline of Austrian power in the north and Prussia’s rise to hegemony in what would eventually become the German Reich. Internal tensions between different parts of the multi-ethnic empire were running high and would eventually lead to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. For a few decades, however, the imperial government, police, and military managed to maintain a state of “well-tempered discontent” (Höbelt). As if he had guessed in 1856 the conventions of monarchy films, the music critic Eduard Hanslick pointed out that: These peaceful conquests, achieved by our army with the clarinet instead of the bayonet, are, indeed, not the least ones. Many times, the Austrian army entered the hearts of entire peoples on the wings of Harmoniemusik.6

Decomposing Heroism  213 Without a few bayonets in the front lines, however, Austrian clarinets would not have won the hearts and minds, and in the mid-1850s it was obvious that Radetzky had played a key role in the counter-revolution. At this point, the aged field marshal could already look back on a distinguished military career, having joined the army in 1784, fought in the Napoleonic Wars and promoted important military reforms (see Sked, Radetzky 32–69). Yet, it was his triumphs late in life that made him famous all across Europe. Friedrich Grillparzer’s ode “Field Marshal Radetzky” was among the first poems published in ­Austrian newspapers that glorified his achievements: Glück auf, mein Feldherr, führe den Streich! Nicht bloß um des Ruhmes Schimmer, In deinem Lager ist Österreich, Wir andern sind einzelne Trümmer.

Lead on, Commander, lead our cause! ʻTis more than glory beckons, Austria is united in your camp, While we are scattered fragments.7

Grillparzer struck an anti-revolutionary chord that soon resounded in patriotic festivities. On 31 August 1848, a “victory celebration for the glory of the brave soldiers in Italy, and for the support of those wounded in war”8 (qtd. in Lang 246) took place in Vienna’s Wasserglacis. The event featured three military orchestras providing a musical framework for the celebratory unveiling of a portrait of the victorious field marshal (see Lang 246–47). Among the conductors was Johann Strauss Sr. who presented his march in honor of Radetzky to an enthusiastic public. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Radetzky March gained widespread popularity and accumulated political overtones of conservatism, military splendor, and patriotic sentiment. Following its initial success, it was widely disseminated in various editions arranged for salon, domestic and military music. Regimental bands played it regularly at open-air concerts with free admission all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just like the ones Carl Joseph enjoys in his youth and remembers in his final moments. Highlighting its political and cultural significance, the piece was included in the first Austrian collection of regimental marches in 1895, which was to preserve the memory of famous victories, glorious regents, and military leaders.9 Radetzky’s enduring fame did not solely rest on the popularity of Strauss’s march, of course. Other musical and literary homages like poems, short stories, memoirs, and anecdotes as well as portraits, lithographs, commemorative coins, and monuments perpetuated his role as “savior of the empire” and thereby constituted what Laurence Cole called a veritable “Radetzky cult” (63).10 Unsurprisingly, his legendary victory was re-celebrated at the beginning of the First World War for the patriotic mobilization of society. At this point, the Radetzky March had become an unofficial imperial anthem, not a national one, for A ­ ustro-Hungary was a brittle, multi-ethnic construction threatened by nationalism. It was re-­ issued in collections of military marches, even texted with propagandistic lyrics (Lang 251–54). Still today the march is an indispensable highlight, the third encore, of the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic.

214  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

The Radetzky March in Roth’s Novel Strauss’s march recurs throughout the literary oeuvre of the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, beginning in 1927 with Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without end) to the posthumously published Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (The tale of the 1002nd night). In Radetzkymarsch, however, its treatment is most thoroughly refined as a narrative leitmotif involving nostalgic reminiscences as well as parody and fragmentation. Around this time, Roth turned away both from the leftist polemics of his journalistic work and the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s by engaging with Austria’s imperial past. A common view held by literary critics is that his later novels sought to establish a “Sehnsuchtston” (nostalgic mood of longing) for the stable social order of the monarchy. As Hartmut Scheible argued, Roth fled from the grim realities of the 1930s into a nostalgic projection (see 56–66). This claim seems odd considering the fact that the story of the fictitious Trotta family is not one of success but one of doom. Indeed, failure looms in the background from the outset in 1859 with the disaster at Solferino. Death and decay are lurking around every corner in Carl Joseph’s life. The only times of happiness in the novel are the summer vacations in his hometown in Moravia. The idyllic setting is filled with sounds of clattering hooves, warbling larks, and marching tunes, one of which seems all too familiar: Every one of these outdoor concerts—they took place under the Herr District Captain’s balcony—began with “The Radetzky March.” Though all the band members were so thoroughly familiar with it that they could have played it without a conductor, in the dead of the night, and in their sleep, the kapellmeister nevertheless required them to read every single note from the sheets…. The rugged drums rolled, the sweet flutes piped, and the lovely cymbals shattered. The faces of all the spectators lit up with pleasant and pensive smiles, and the blood tingled in their legs. Though standing, they thought they were already marching. (Roth, Radetzky March 19–20) The first time that Roth alludes to Strauss’s Radetzky March, it invokes—on a slightly humorous note—a time of stability and steadiness as evinced by the Sunday routine of the regimental band and the meticulous care of the Kapellmeister keeping every note “in order.” The performance has its enticing effect on the audience, thus foreshadowing events to come. Shortly hereafter the Radetzky March echoes in Carl Joseph’s daydreams with the same effect. Already here it is associated with the heraldic colors red, gold, silver, and black that would recur in the death scene as we noted above. Yet, the young Trotta pictures with childlike naiveté a glorious sacrifice in His Majesty’s service: It would be best to die for him amid military music, easiest with “The Radetzky March.” The swift bullets whistled in cadence around Carl

Decomposing Heroism  215 Joseph’s ears, his naked saber flashed, and, his heart and head brimming with the lovely briskness of the march, he sank into the drumming intoxication of the music, and his blood oozed out in a thin dark-red trickle upon the glistening gold of the trumpets, the deep black of the drums, and the victorious silver of the cymbals. (Roth, Radetzky March 23–24) Carl Joseph’s heroic ideals begin to crumble when he is confronted with the death of his love affair, Mrs. Slama, and of his friend, the Jewish regimental doctor Max Demant, both of which he feels responsible for. Like a nostalgic refrain, the march accompanies his progressive alienation from the military as the glory of dying heroically reveals itself as illusionary: On those long-vanished Sundays when Carl Joseph had stood on his father’s balcony while Herr Nechwal’s military band had intoned “The Radetzky March,” it would have been a bagatelle to fall and die. The cadet at the Imperial and Royal Military Academy had been intimate with the notion of death, but it had been a very remote death. (Roth, Radetzky March 98) The piece is also subject to parody and disintegration. When the officers knock on the door of Frau Resi’s brothel, the piano inside instantaneously begins to “tinkle” the Radetzky March. Since there is no war to fight, the men succumb to dull amusement. On the night before the fatal duel between Max Demant and the anti-Semitic cavalry captain Tattenbach, the “tinny strains of a pianola” lead Carl Joseph to a local bar where he finds his friend. Anticipating the tragic course of events, the march now becomes fragmented while the portrait of Franz Joseph I as Carl Joseph perceives it begins to dissolve: In the taproom, the pianola blared away again—a potpourri of familiar marches, among which the opening drumbeats of “The Radetzky March,” distorted by hoarse crackling but still recognizable, boomed at specific intervals. In the greenish shadows that the lampshade drew across the whitewashed kitchen walls, the familiar portrait of the Supreme Commander in Chief in the sparkling white uniform surfaced between two gigantic pans of reddish copper. The Kaiser’s white uniform was densely flyblown as if riddled by minute grapeshot, and Franz Joseph’s eyes, undoubtedly painted china blue as a matter of course, were snuffed in the shadow of the lampshade. (Roth, Radetzky March 101) Roth’s novels seem suitable for filmic adaptation due to their clear dramatic structure, poignant characters, and atmospheric density.11 This holds especially true for Radetzkymarsch. Kehlmann’s script follows the book quite closely and takes most of its musical cues from the novel, including popular songs, operetta, folk tunes and The Internationale, to characterize different social milieus. The attentive reader will notice that the Radetzky March is a motif that

216  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch periodically recurs at turning points of Carl Joseph’s life. It would have been a simple task to reconstruct this process with diegetic film music. Rolf Wilhelm went beyond such a straightforward solution; in his score, the march becomes a companion, rather than an accompaniment, that survives even the hero.

Two Marches for Habsburg: Rolf Wilhelm’s Film Score Except for Carl Joseph’s death, the Radetzky March does not function as a musical reminiscence in actual flashbacks. Instead, we find a wide spectrum of quotation, caricature, fragmentation of, and subtle allusions to, the piece throughout the score from its beginning to the very last measure. The opening scene condenses the first chapter with Joseph von Trotta’s rescue of the emperor and his subsequent ennoblement, military promotion, and awarding of the Military Order of Maria Theresa. The opening lines of the novel, accompanied by a full orchestral version of the Radetzky March, are told in voiceover narration over a historical lithograph depicting the battle of S ­ olferino. It is the first in a collage of battle depictions including Franz Joseph on horseback. Superimposed upon the lithographs are diegetic images of the decoration ceremony. Axel Conti’s and Gernot Roll’s adaptation of the novel for television from 1995 starts more realistically by reenacting the battle in gruesome detail. However, we consider Kehlmann’s version superior precisely because it avoids realism in favor of a sanitized narrative and images, as they could have inspired Carl Joseph’s adolescent fantasies about his future heroism. After all, his grandfather had earned his and his ancestors’ ennoblement on the battlefield and would be recognized henceforth as the “Hero of Solferino.” And yet, he had complained to the emperor himself about the hyperbolical aggrandizement of his feat in schoolbook anecdotes. “People tell many lies,” His Majesty shrugged off Trotta’s grievance (Roth, Radetzky March 10). Apparently, patriotism and truth have a bad start in the novel. This is the reason, we presume, why Wilhelm’s music commences heroically with the familiar orchestral rendition of the Radetzky March by Leopold Weninger and quotations of the Kaiser hymn only to get off track soon in a rather weird direction: a snare drum announces the officer who solemnly recalls the heroic deed, and awards Trotta his medal and title. The extreme close-up of his walrus moustache has a comical effect underscored by the music which now dwindles to a tin soldier’s march with two piccolo flutes and a rudimentary accompaniment of percussion, clarinets, and bassoon. Already the circus-like arrangement of the Radetzky March mildly thwarts the conventions of a proper Kaiserfilm. In a similar manner, Radetzkymarsch first evokes, then foils another generic scene of monarchy films. In Kaisermanöver, two jealous officers fight a duel at dawn about love and honor, which the unhappy lady cannot avert. While these moments come dangerously close to tragedy, no one gets hurt because the mean challenger is drunk and his noble opponent fires into the clouds.

Decomposing Heroism  217 In Radetzkymarsch, the two dueling opponents are cavalry captain Tattenbach and Max Demant—equally unfit for military service as Carl Joseph and his fellow in misery and sole confidant. One night, Carl Joseph feels obliged to walk home Demant’s wife from the opera. As they pass the casino, the officers see them. When the drunken Tattenbach later makes suggestive remarks in front of Demant, calling him a Jew at that, the doctor has to demand satisfaction. Trotta, desperately and to no avail, tries to avert the duel. Kehlmann’s mise-en-scène of the atavistic ritual creates a dreamlike, almost surreal atmosphere: at the break of dawn, Tattenbach and his men, wearing black suits and bowler hats, await the opposing party on a foggy field (­Figure  9.1). In a carriage drawn by two black horses Max Demant drives up. Bleak and foreboding music sets the tone of the scene. Violins I play D on the open D string and violins II C♯ on the detuned open D string, thus creating a piercing vibratoless sound (Example 9.1). When the carriage arrives, piano and harp introduce an ostinato tritone figure in an extreme low register (E b -A). The entry of the head motif of the Radetzky March is marked by a cut (medium shot) to the duelists with their seconds about to pace off the distance. The motif is fragmented and played softly and slowly in chromatic notes by two horns, trombone, and snare drum. When Demant walks to his spot, the tension between D and C♯ increases as flutes, oboe, trumpet, and vibraphone perform a crescendo. The distorted opening motif of the march enters again and slowly fades out while Tattenbach removes his jacket and hat. (The following part of Wilhelm’s music did not make it into the film.) In this uncanny silence, only the warbling of birds that had been present from the beginning of the scene comes

Figure 9.1  S  creenshot “Dueling scene.”

218  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

Example 9.1  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 9 “Duell,” mm. 3–16.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

to the foreground. It bestows an aura of serenity on Max Demant, who, as he confides to Carl Joseph beforehand, has decided to take off his glasses in spite of his nearsightedness. In line with Roth’s well-conceived dramaturgy of this sequence, the film does not present the outcome of the duel immediately. When the shots are fired, the camera cuts to the horses next to the drill ground where Carl Joseph’s regiment—unaware of the gunfire—does their morning exercises. Restlessly, he leaves the ground to find out what has

Decomposing Heroism  219 happened. Wilhelm’s score fades back in at m. 57 with the eerie D/C♯ in the strings when Trotta enters the woods. Percussions pick up the anapest rhythm of the march tune ♪ ♪ ♩in an implied triple meter with bitonal staccato chords in low brass and woodwinds chromatically ascending from F minor and D major. The head motif is thus metrically displaced on purpose. Indeed, already Strauss plays with metric shifts of the anapest in his march: The upbeat position in the main part and the closing da capo is driving forward with more energy than the weaker downbeat position in the intro and the trio. The film score makes use of this playful idea to destabilize the head motif for the first time when Trotta loses his only friend. With a drawn-out crescendo, the anapest gradually locks back into its original metric position. Eventually, Trotta receives the news: “Both! There was nothing one could do.” Continuing and intensifying the metric shift of the anapest, the music of the closing titles of part I evokes a feeling of inevitable doom. After his friend’s death, Carl Joseph initiates his transfer to the infantry. A melancholic Ruthene folk tune, sung by Ukrainian men in the barracks, sets the mood for the second part, which depicts Carl Joseph’s life at the far Eastern boarder of the empire. Wilhelm’s musical epilogue follows immediately after the song, leading the signature motif of the Radetzky March to a violent climax (­Example 9.2). Here, too, the anapest is on the downbeat and obsessively repeated with a long crescendo. Set in E minor, it is introduced by lower strings over a steady ostinato of the gran cassa (military bass drum) and the fundamental in double basses and piano. Successively, violins, flutes, and oboe join in expanding the ambitus of the motif by pushing it to the fifth (B-A♯-B) and then up to the octave. ­poignant brass chords over the unyielding ostinato bass foreshadow the downfall of the hero. Noticeably, the Radetzky March is not the only march that undergoes a transformation for the worse in both the novel and the film. Close to the end, count Chojnicki, a friendly acquaintance of Carl Joseph, holds a festive ball at his palace. Tension is running high: the diversity of the guests mirrors the fractured society of the empire as a whole—an explosive mix that eventually would trigger the war. When the news arrives about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive successor to the throne, Hungarian officers openly celebrate. Carl Joseph is outraged and points a gun at his comrades. In this moment, party guests enter the room, cheerful and tipsy. Someone shouts: “The heir to the throne has been assassinated.” Another one tumbling into the ballroom calls for “the funeral march” meaning, of course, Chopin’s funeral march. The following scene is so strikingly similar to the funeral march in Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony that we hypothesize that Roth used it as a model. The well-known third movement begins with the canon Frère Jacques arranged as a funeral march with a slightly grotesque air (double bass solo in high register); after a while the mood tips over, measure by measure, into a jolly dance.

220  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

Example 9.2  W  ilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 10 “Schluss 1. Teil,” mm. 1–2; 11–15.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches ­Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012. Printed with ­permission by Helga Wilhelm.

In a similar manner, Chopin’s funeral march turns into a jaunty dance in the ball scene at the palace: Gradually the bands accelerated the beat, and the legs of the walkers began to march. The drummers drummed incessantly, and the heavy sticks began pelting the drum like lively young drumsticks. The intoxicated drummer struck a silver triangle, and Count Benkyö pranced for joy. “The bastard’s gone!” the Count yelled in Hungarian. But everyone understood him as if he had spoken German. Suddenly a few guests began to hop; the

Decomposing Heroism  221 bands boomed out the Funeral March faster and faster. In between, the triangle smiled, sharp, silvery, and drunk. (Roth, Radetzky March 300) In the film, the ordered commemoration of the assassinated crown prince transforms into a brisk dance expressing Hungarian pride and unabashed joy in musical terms. Rolf Wilhelm arranged this transition and, eventually, disintegration of the orchestra—piece by piece. Like a character variation, his cue changes Chopin’s march into a czardas with its typical slow introduction (lassú) followed by a furiously swirling dance ( friss). Example 9.3

Example 9.3  W  ilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue “Trauermarsch bei Chojnitzky,” mm. 15–28.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches ­Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

222  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch shows this transition. Note the stringendo, portamenti, accents, staccati, Roth’s above mentioned “smiling triangle,” and the fast oom-pah accompaniment in the Allegro. It is the trio part where the bizarre celebration and the music dissolve: part by part prematurely ceases when Chojnicki’s loyal servants collect the instruments from the musicians. The effect is comparable to Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, only much more chaotic. Wilhelm precisely notated the haphazard manner of this dissolution with red fine symbols (Figure 9.2). In doing so, he deliberately cut off each individual part at a different place, continued the accompaniment until close to the end and had the leading melody grotesquely disappear early, except for a lonely flute. In the film, the bare rhythm even continues beyond the score when the dancers keep on stomping the czardas without the orchestra. Images and music symbolically anticipate how the Habsburg Empire enters the war with great pride and stiff etiquette until nationalistic fervor would shatter everything to pieces. Thus, at the climactic turning point of the story—the peripeteia—the Mahlerian distortion of ­Chopin’s march may be understood as an inverted mirror of the distorted Strauss march. The latter disintegrates from disciplined optimism to confusion and resignation, the former degenerates from solemn mourning to a cynical celebration of death. As mentioned before, nobody goes to war in a monarchy film of the 1950s. A laid-back maneuver in Kaiserjäger is as close to war as it gets, and even this military exercise looks like carefree outdoor games. Radetzkymarsch does start with a war (the battle of Solferino), and it leads to the war that ended the Habsburg era. Roth’s account of Carl Joseph’s death, in contrast to his boyish daydreams, is utterly sober and banal, as we pointed out at the beginning. We shall now examine the genesis of the music for this scene based on the composer’s screening notes, that is, the earliest stage of the creative process. Wilhelm’s notes include short descriptions of the events, timings and a few musical ideas (Figure 9.3). The number 16 on this page matches cue 16 in the final score and was crossed out, probably after Wilhelm had finished this part. “Lohner beginnt mit Schritten (Lohner starts walking) … 21 getroffen (hit) … 26 liegt (down) … 28 Soldaten (soldiers)” and so on indicates the timing of the action (Helmuth Lohner is the actor in the leading role.) On the upper right side of the sketch, we see presumably Wilhelm’s very first musical ideas: a drum roll, the use of double bass, violins, and a high-pitched dissonance (G-A b). Vague and dissonant sounds in extreme registers are typical patterns of film music to create an eerie sense of an imminent but invisible threat. The autograph score shows how Wilhelm realized his initial conception of the cue (Example 9.4): we find the drum roll ppp and a high-pitched major seventh (A-G♯) in cello and violin flageolets; the piano repeats a four-note ostinato (C-D b-E-E b) and the harp a tritone (E-B b) in a low register. Most audible is the snare drum with the anapest rhythm of the Radetzky March in an irregular and increasingly dense pattern. This is similar to the metric

Decomposing Heroism  223

Figure 9.2  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, autograph, “Trauermarsch bei Chojnitzky,” mm. 36–40.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

irregularities of the same motif in the duel scene before Trotta’s only friend loses his life. After seven measures, the orchestra bursts into a fff chord followed by a highly dissonant chromatic slide downward. The moment is marked 21” in the score, clearly synchronized with the deadly shot. However, this passage was deleted in the final cut and replaced by repetitions of measures 3–7.

Figure 9.3  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, screening notes, cue no. 16 “Tod Karl Josef Trotta.” Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

Example 9.4  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 16 “Tod Karl Josef Trotta,” mm. 1–8. Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

Decomposing Heroism  225 The soundtrack picks up the score again in m. 13 with a series of stumbling chords whose upper parts (violins and trumpet) display a peculiar resemblance with both Strauss’s introduction and the beginning of Chopin’s funeral march ˆ This reading would confirm our interpre(melodic pattern: 1ˆ – 1ˆ – 3ˆ – 2ˆ – 1ˆ – 1). tation of Chopin’s march in Wilhelm’s arrangement as a musical mirror of the distorted Radetzky March. While the cut may seem crude, we prefer the released version over Wilhelm’s original score, which has been recorded uncut and perfectly fits this scene.12 In the film, Trotta’s quiet and unspectacular death between two buckets of water comes closer to Roth’s antiheroic commentary. Returning to the original score then, Trotta’s last moments are accompanied by a series of brief superimposed flashbacks and a surreal combination of musical fragments. The film slightly deviates from the novel at this point suggesting that the hero relives his life. The divergence of narrative time and narrated time (as experienced by the protagonist), that is, the idea of reminiscences which capture an entire lifespan within a few seconds strikes us as a powerful narrative device—recall Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—that lends itself to film composition. Wilhelm assembled a clash of “musics” à la Ives (Example 9.5), starting with a high-pitched, polytonal canon of Strauss’s introductory melody in the oboe (m. 17, F major), flute (B b minor), piccolo (G b major), glockenspiel (F major), and harp (C b major). The entrances follow in quick succession (stretto) in an implied (insert here 43 )—a metric shift that unhinges the march like in the duel scene (see above p. 223). In m. 20, the snare drum sets in with the rhythm of the march tune (main part), which is taken up canonically by the oboe, flute, and piccolo. Simultaneously, brass and clarinets underneath perform a little canon of the Kaiser hymn quasi organo in a solemn chorale style starting at m. 21.13 This complicated and bizarre construction suggests two points: first, the different metric positions of the anapest in Strauss’s original intro, march, and trio of his Radetzkymarsch inspired Wilhelm to derail the march metrically in the context of death. Second, Wilhelm’s orchestration recalls his tin soldier caricature of the Radetzky March in the opening scene as both arrangements use military percussion, glockenspiel, and high winds. If this musical reference implies a commentary—and why, after all, does Roth allude once more to the Habsburg colors?—it would be a cynical one: “A dream come true.” In any case, the cue betrays close reading of an alert composer. Even after Carl Joseph’s death, his musical alter ego leads a short, spooky afterlife. The Radetzky March motif reappears and further deteriorates when the emperor dies and finally after the death of Carl Joseph’s father. He takes a carriage to Schönbrunn, the emperor’s residence, where a small crowd has gathered awaiting the Kaiser’s death. When Franz von Trotta departs, the lower strings reiterate the anapest rhythmically augmented in a descending passage, and the flutes repeat it no less than 88 times like a spinning top or a mechanical clockwork running down (Example 9.6). Wilhelm assigned this perpetuum mobile to two alternating flutes in order to create a continuous motion without

226  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

Example 9.5  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 16 “Tod Karl Josef Trotta,” mm. 17–27.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches ­Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

noticeable breathing. Only when Franz von Trotta reaches Schönbrunn, the flutes run out of breath in a written-out, but not explicitly indicated ritardando. The pitiful end of the Radetzky March, which entered the story in shining armor, certainly matches the depressing mood of the scene. Wilhelm’s score achieves this effect by “decomposing” another distinct feature of the march itself which contributed no little to its popularity:14 the growing melodic ambitus has a propelling drive as the intervals of Strauss’s tune expand from diminished thirds—a chromatically compressed turn at the beginning—to sevenths in the A section and sixths in the trio. Strauss even increases the effect by restraining the expansive force with persistent tone repetitions in the

Decomposing Heroism  227

Example 9.6  Wilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 19 “Fahrt nach Schönbrunn,” mm. 1–5; 23–25.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

intro, before the repeat, and again in the intro of the trio. Three times the march accumulates and releases melodic pressure. Although the trio, which is based on the “Tinerl” dance song, is gentler (as usual) than the main part, its yodel leaps and the octave shift in m. 7 have a similar expansive thrust. This notable feature is gradually undone in Wilhelm’s increasingly claustrophobic music. In Example 9.6, the figure E b -C♯-D rotates in the smallest possible melodic circle, and it is clearly derived from the head motif of the march with its acciaccatura. Strauss’s Radetzky March expands and occupies musical space, Wilhelm’s “decomposition” of the march withdraws. The seemingly ceaseless motion of the two flutes in a tiny circle is also a musical expression of Franz von Trotta’s state of mind who is walking around wobbling his head since the notice of his son’s death. At the same time, the circular motion creates an eerie atmosphere in this cue (approaching the dying Kaiser) that resonates with other key moments both in the novel and in the film. In the beginning, the military band performs the Radetzky March in a wide circle on the market place under the balcony of Carl Joseph’s father, and the camera spins in a 360-degree tracking shot around the ensemble and the conductor at its center. The motif is echoed again when the nobility at Chojnicki’s palace solemnly walks in a circle to the funeral march. Even Roth’s syntax creates a circular effect through an inverted repetition: Both military bands played “Chopin’s funeral march. A few guests were walking around in

228  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch a circle, in a circle, in time with the funeral march.”15 And when the march accelerates to a czardas, the dancers swirl in intertwining circles like spinning planets orbiting a star. Circles and circular movements can be an expression of movement that is getting nowhere and thus a symbol of time running out. When Chojnicki coldly predicts the end of the Habsburg world, Carl Joseph’s father, slightly tipsy, cannot focus the hands of his watch. “It was as if they were rotating so quickly around the white circle of the dial that there were a hundred hands instead of the usual two.” Roth even puts the Kaiser in the center of a rapacious clockwork using a similar chiasmus as in the description of the ball at Chojnicki’s palace: “The emperor was an old man. He was the oldest emperor of the world. Death walked around him in a circle, in a circle and reaped and reaped.” Franz von Trotta comments the impending death of the emperor with the same rhetorical figure when he steps out of the carriage at Schönbrunn: “The Kaiser cannot outlive the Trottas! the district captain thought. He cannot outlive them! They saved his life, and he will not outlive the Trottas” (Roth 328). Whether Wilhelm was aware of the symbolism of circles or not, he decided to reduce the march to a minimalistic paradox: a figure that moves and does not move until it dies. This could be the end of the march, had Wilhelm not added the head motif pizzicato and piano in the last measures of his final cue (Example 9.7) when the story comes to an end that we have long expected. After Carl Joseph von Trotta, his father, and the emperor all have died, the Radetzky March must follow. The cue begins when Franz von Trotta is shown on his deathbed and continues into the scene where his friend Skowronek is playing chess with himself while crippled war veterans are limping through the rain. Example 9.7 shows the final bars of Wilhelm’s score. In this last occurrence of the leitmotif, Wilhelm synthesizes techniques from two previous death scenes: the duel between Demant and Tattenbach and the death of Carl Joseph. The pizzicato rendition of the march motif is placed on the downbeat in a (insert here ³  ⁴ symbol) meter. After a long and torturous journey, the march motif expires at last.

Example 9.7  W  ilhelm, Radetzkymarsch, cue no. 21.  Deutsches Komponistenarchiv Hellerau—Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Dresden (Germany), N-012.  Printed with permission by Helga Wilhelm.

Decomposing Heroism  229

Radetzkymarsch as Allegory The score for Radetzkymarsch was not a routine job for Wilhelm as his diary reveals: “Struggling with Radetzky…. Slowly it is taking shape. A very tough job, for I want to do it particularly well, especially for the Vienna Symphony.”16 Whatever the team around Kehlmann and Wilhelm contemplated and discussed, they clearly did not aim at another run-of-the-mill monarchy film. We think that Wilhelm’s ambition and his difficulties are symptomatic of the changing political climate in the mid-1960s when the heyday of escapist Kaiserfilms was over and a new, critical perspective on the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was, in fact, overdue. Radetzkymarsch premiered on 18 April 1965, five weeks before the presidential elections in Austria, on the Austrian public television channel ORF. Some viewers reacted with outrage about the film’s portrayal of the Austrian military and the Kaiser. Alexander Lernet-Holenia, a renowned Austrian author, reminded them that the operetta image of emperor and empire, so familiar from Sissi and other monarchy films, had little to do with historical facts. “As usual, we had drowned our past in all the schmaltz we are used to appreciate. We—not only but primarily we ourselves—are the gravediggers of great memories we should have” (qtd. in Russegger 46).17 A similar effort to revise the postcard views on Austria’s past is evinced by Claudio Magris’s thesis on the “Habsburg Myth” (1963/66), which would become the most influential book on “Austrianess” in literature. In the author’s account, the Habsburg Myth involves feelings of stagnation, resignation, and hedonism that emerged already under the neo-absolutist agenda of the imperial regime and its loyal administration in the nineteenth century. This predominating mood grew even stronger after the Great War in nostalgic accounts longing for the lost Habsburgian Monarchy such as in dime novels and operettas as well as in significant literature such as Roth’s Radetzkymarsch. One might picture this mood as melancholic inertia of castaways holding out with cake and wine on a fragile raft in the midst of a growing thunderstorm of republican, nationalist, socialist, and capitalist forces. Any step in any direction would be a step toward downfall, which seemed inevitable anyway. Cautious attempts to renegotiate Austrian history and (by implication) Austria’s present national identity were looming when Wilhelm pondered over his “translation” of Roth’s central idea into a score. Since the march is a formally clear-cut, upbeat and forward driving piece, it provided perfect material to narrate the seemingly inexorable decline into a state of total resignation and stagnation. Throughout his score, Wilhelm avoids any evocation of the sublime, a characteristic attitude in the defeated nations after the Second World War. While painters, architects, and composers continued traditional, and created new, expressions of the sublime in the United States and in the USSR, German and Austrian artists eschewed it with the exception of some Heimat and monarchy film scores. Following Kant’s Critique of Judgment, ­nineteenth-century conceptions of the musically sublime referred to expressions of pathos, power, marvel, and the infinite, which overwhelmed the

230  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch imagination (see, e.g., Michaelis). They took shape in musical topoi frequently found in Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss and were directly transferred to the screen as evidenced in catalogs and cue sheets from the silent period. Later, they throve especially in the Berg film (mountain film) as well as Western, war, Heimat and monarchy films associated with imageries of military might, royal splendor, vast landscapes, towering mountains, etc. Typical are majestic fanfares and clashing cymbals or horn calls over iridescent soundscapes of whooshing harps, extended tremolos, and trills. Wilhelm excelled in this idiom (Und ewig singen die Wälder, 1959, And the forests sing eternally; and Das Erbe von Björndal, 1960, The inheritance of Björndal), and Radetzkymarsch would have offered a few opportunities to use it. However, from its overall design down to every detail and particularly in the derangement of the two marches, Wilhelm’s score appears to be guided by an effort to undo the musical sublime. This is surprising insofar as in Heimat and monarchy films worn-out (Richard) Straussian topoi of the musical sublime, which even Strauss would no longer use after 1945, occasionally lurk in Alpine mountain tops. It is not surprising insofar as already in Roth’s novel, the march serves as a leitmotif and musical emblem of a doomed empire going downhill steadily from its Sunday morning mirth and young Carl Joseph’s daydreaming to ugly fragments and eventually its initial drumbeats announcing death. Wilhelm went even further when he conceived the Radetzky March as a musical companion or shadow of the troubled “un-hero” (see Sanger). Anthropomorphic metaphors such as “companion,” “shadow,” and “alter ego” can lead music criticism astray, to be sure, into the wilderness of unbridled hermeneutics. In this case, however, it seems hard to resist the idea that the Radetzky March does not just have or illustrate a character but rather is a character, perhaps even the true main character of Radetzkymarsch, understood as a negative Bildungsroman. Any attentive listener of the film will follow, consciously or not, the fate of Radetzky March: how it (or “he”) enters young, strong, and with optimistic spirit, then suffers and weakens under the onslaught of tragic events and finally ends up moribund when its head motif apathetically spins in narrow circles of the smallest possible chromatic perimeter. We believe this idea to be rooted in the novel itself. Already its title raises questions about its hero, for Roth could have easily chosen the name of his protagonist as many novelists did before and after him. He did change the title, to be sure, after he had published the novel in 1932 as Der Radetzky-Marsch in the Frankfurter Zeitung.18 The lack of the definite article on the cover of the book lends an aura of agency to the march as though it were a person. We usually omit the article (definite or indefinite) when we address individuals by their name. Hence, Radetzky March is something like an invisible character in Roth’s novel. This notion becomes even clearer in Wilhelm’s score where Radetzky March survives Carl Joseph, Franz (his father), and Franz Joseph I (his Übervater) for a little while only to sigh out his soul in the final scene. A score for a film about “Der Radetzkymarsch” might have presented the march like a “theme song:” diegetically and as a musical mnemonic signal to recall previous moments

Decomposing Heroism  231 of the drama. Wilhelm’s score, however, portrays Radetzky March as an anti-­ sublime musical allegory whose physiognomy reflects the Habsburg era and thus must suffer its destiny.

Notes 1 To avoid confusion, we refer to Roth’s novel and Michael Kehlmann’s screen adaptation by the German title Radetzkymarsch. There are several English translations of the novel as The Radetzky March: Geoffry Dunlop (1933), Eva Tucker (1974, based on Dunlop’s translation), Joachim Neugroschel (1995), and Michael Hofmann (2002). Unless stated otherwise, we quote from Neugroschel’s translation. 2 Rolf Wilhelm (1927–2013) was one of the most prolific and renowned German film composers of the post-war period. He studied piano, conducting, and composition in Vienna and Munich with Joseph Haas, Joseph Marx, and Hans Rosbaud among others. He also wrote music for stage and radio plays and was a sought-after conductor until he passed away in 2013. The collaboration between Kehlmann and Wilhelm continued with the screen adaptations of Roth’s Hiob ( Job) in 1979 and Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without end) in 1985. 3 Representative precursors of monarchy films are pre-war operettas and screen musicals such as Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt (1930, Two hearts in waltz time), Der Kongreß tanzt (1931, The congress dances), Walzerkrieg (1933, Waltz war), and Im weißen Rößl (1935, The White Horse Inn). 4 This is the musical formula used in Kaiserwalzer, Kaiserjäger, Die Deutschmeister, Hoch klingt der Radetzkymarsch (Lofty sounds: The Radetzky March), Im Prater blüh’n wieder die Bäume (In the Prater, the trees bloom again) and other monarchy films. 5 Not every monarchy film before Radetzkymarsch presented escapist fairy tales from Austria’s past. Erzherzog Johanns große Liebe (1950, Archduke Johann’s great love), Oberst Redl (1955), Der Kongreß tanzt (1955), and Kronprinz Rudolfs letzte Liebe are exceptions in this respect. 6 “Diese friedlichen Eroberungen, welche unsere Armee mit dem Clarinett macht, statt mit dem Bajonnet, sind fürwahr nicht die letzten. Auf Flügeln der Harmoniemusik ist gar oft schon österreichisches Militär in die Herzen ganzer Bevölkerungen eingezogen” (Hanslick 290–91; the English translation is ours). 7 Friedrich Grillparzer’s poem was first published in the Constitutionelle Donauzeitung on 8 June 1848. For the German version, see Grillparzer 318–19. The translation by Robert Russell is taken from Trencsényi 438–39. 8 “Siegesfest zu Ehren der tapfern Armee in Italien, und zur Unterstützung der verwundeten Krieger,” announced in the Wiener allgemeine Theaterzeitung on 2 September 1848. 9 Historische Märsche und sonstige Compositionen für das kaiserliche und königliche Heer, instrumentiert für vollständige Militär-Musik von Emil Kaiser, Wien 1895. 10 Memorial sites include the Heldenberg (Heroes’ mountain) about fifty kilometers northwest of Vienna where Radetzky was buried in 1859, a bronze monument in Prague (1858), and an equestrian statue of Radetzky in front of the Viennese War Ministry (1892) (Cole 63–107). 11 Adaptations of Roth’s novels feature prominently in European post-war television and film productions: Die Rebellion (1962, The rebellion; directed by Wolfgang Staudte), Das falsche Gewicht (1971, The false weight; directed by ­Bernhard Wicki), Das Spinnennetz (1989, The spider’s web; directed by ­Bernhard Wicki), Die Rebellion (1993, The rebellion; directed by Michael

232  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch

12 13

14

15 16

17

18

Haneke), Legende vom heiligen Trinker (as La leggenda del santo bevitore. 1988, The legend of the holy drinker; directed by Ermanno Olmi). Wilhelm’s film music has been recorded as part of the series Deutsche ­F ilmmusik-Klassiker. For the original music of Radetzkymarsch, see “Rolf ­Wilhelm,” vol. 2, Alhambra Records, 2012. In Wilhelm’s score, the intro of the march in glockenspiel and harp is rhythmically augmented. Both in the film and on the soundtrack CDs, however, the glockenspiel and harp feature the march motif in the original rhythm as transcribed in Example 9.5. This way, the motif is more recognizable within the dense texture of musical reminiscences. We disagree with Zoë Lang, who recognizes in the particular melodic design that “there is little in the music to suggest that this work would become and remain his [Strauss’s] most recognizable” (245). Cultural and political contexts cannot fully explain the flabbergasting and enduring success of the Radetzky March, since there were many other candidates for the Parnassus of patriotism: A. Tischler’s Sommacampagna-Marsch and Franz Lehár’s Oliosi-Sturm-Marsch (Oliosi storm march)— written to commemorate the victory of 1848—­L ehár’s Vater Radetzky ruft (Father Radetzky calls), Franz Wolfgang Swoboda’s Radetzky’s Sieges Marsch (Radetzky’s victory march), Johann Nepomuk Král’s Radetzky Monument-Marsch (Radetzky monument march) and many more. Here and in the following two quotations, we use our own translation. Russegger points to the circling camera movement in many key scenes of Kehlmann’s film (53–54). “Gemurksel am Radetzky—noch nicht reif…. Allmählich stellt sich bissl was ein. Ist sauschwer, denn ich will’s ganz besonders gut machen, schon wegen der Wiener Symphoniker” (Wilhelm’s diary entries from 6 and 8 February 1965, kindly communicated by Catharina Wilhelm). “Wie gewöhnlich hatten wir ja unsere Vergangenheit mit all dem Schmalz übergossen, das uns stets zu passen pflegt. Die Totengräber der großen Erinnerungen, die wir haben sollten, sind also, wenn nicht ausschließlich, so doch in erster Linie wir selbst” (Kurier, 27 April 1965; the English translation is ours). Roth’s novel appeared in 71 installments from 17 April to 9 July 1932 in the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Works Cited Bronsen, David. Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1976. Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton University Press, 1995. Cole, Laurence. Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria. ­Oxford University Press, 2014. Dassanowsky, Robert von. “Finis Austriae—vivat Austria!: The Re/Vision of 1918 in Austrian Film.” Österreich 1918 und die Folgen. Geschichte, Literatur, Theater und Film, edited by Karl Müller and Hans Wagener, Böhlau, 2009, pp. 179–96. Fritsche, Maria. Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre, and Masculinity. Berghahn, 2013. Grillparzer, Franz. “Feldmarschall Radetzky.” Sämtliche Werke. Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, vol. 1, Hanser, 1960, pp. 318–19. Hanslick, Eduard. “Musikalische Briefe. (Ueber Militärmusik.) I.” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 1/3, Böhlau, 1995, pp. 290–94. Höbelt, Lothar. “‘Wohltemperierte Unzufriedenheit.’ Österreichische Innenpolitik 1908–1918.” Die letzten Jahre der Donaumonarchie, edited by Mark Cornwall, Wegberg, 2004, pp. 58–84.

Decomposing Heroism  233 Lang, Zoë. “The Regime’s ‘Musical Weapon’ Transformed: The Reception of ­Johann Strauss Sr’s Radetzky March Before and After the First World War.” ­Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 134, no. 2, 2009, pp. 243–69. Magris, Claudio. Der habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur. Translated by Madeleine von Pásztory, Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2000. Michaelis, Christian Friedrich. “Einige Bemerkungen über das Erhabene der Musik.” Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 1, no. 46, 1805, pp. 179–81. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. “Michael Kehlmanns Verfilmung von Joseph Roths Roman Radetzkymarsch.” Joseph Roth. Interpretation, Rezeption, Kritik, edited by Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert, Stauffenburg, 1990, pp. 227–32. Roth, Joseph. The Radetzky March. Translated by Joachim Neugroschl, Penguin, 1995. ———. Radetzkymarsch. Edited by Werner Bellmann, Reclam, 2010. Russegger, Arno. “Michael Kehlmanns ‘Radetzkymarsch’ (1965).” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 32, no. 4, 1999, pp. 40–59. Sanger, Curt. “The Figure of the Non-Hero in the Austrian Novels of Joseph Roth.” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 2, no. 4, 1969, pp. 35–37. Scheible, Hartmut. “Joseph Roth’s Flucht aus der Geschichte.” Joseph Roth. Sonderband aus der Reihe Text + Kritik, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, edition text + kritik, 1974. Sked, Alan. The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2001. ———. Radetzky: Imperial Victor and Military Genius. I.B. Tauris, 2011. Trencsényi, Balázs, and Michal Kopeček, editors. Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries. Vol. 2: National Romanticism—The Formation of National Movements, Central European University Press, 2007. Films Cited Das falsche Gewicht (The false weight). Television production. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, music by George Gruntz, Intertel and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 1971. Das Spinnennetz (The spider’s web). Television mini-series. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, music by Günther Fischer, Beta Film, Filmexport Bratislava, Provobis Gesellschaft für Film und Fernsehen, et al., 1989. Der Kaiser und das Wäschermädel (The emperor and the laundry maid). Directed by Ernst Neubach, music by Hans May, Wien Mundial Film, 1957. Der Kongreß tanzt (The congress dances). Directed by Erik Charell, music by Werner Richard Heymann, Universum Film (UFA), 1931. Der Kongreß tanzt (The congress dances). Directed by Franz Antel, music by Werner Richard Heymann, Cosmos Film Productions GmbH and Wien, Neusser-­ Film GmbH, 1955. Die Deutschmeister (The German masters; also known as A March for the Emperor). Directed by Ernst Marischka, music by Robert Stolz and Wilhelm August Jurek, Erma-Film, 1955. Die Rebellion (The rebellion). Television production. Directed by Wolfgang Staudte, music by Siegfried Franz, Fernseh-Allianz, Freie Film Produktion GmbH & Co., Hamburg, and Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), 1962.

234  Janina Müller and Tobias Plebuch Die Rebellion (The rebellion). Television production. Directed by Michael Haneke, Wega Film and Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), 1993. Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without end). Television mini-series. Directed by Michael Kehlmann, music by Rolf Wilhelm, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Schwei-­ zerische Radio- und Fernsehgesellschaft (SRG), and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 1985. Hiob ( Job). Television mini-series. Directed by Michael Kehlmann, music by Rolf Wilhelm, Fernsehfilmproduktion Dr. Heinz Schneiderbauer, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), and Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), 1979. Hoch klingt der Radetzkymarsch (Lofty sounds: The Radetzky March). Directed by Géza von Bolváry, music by Franz Grothe, Lux-Film Wien and Sascha-­ Filmproduktion, 1958. Im Prater blüh’n wieder die Bäume (In the Prater, the trees bloom again). Directed by Hans Wolff, music by Robert Stolz, Paula-Wessely-Filmproduktion, 1958. Im weißen Rößl (The White Horse Inn). Directed by Karel Lamac, music by Ralph Benatzky, Hade-Film and Ondra-Lamac-Film, 1935. Kaisermanöver (The Emperor’s maneuver). Directed by Franz Antel, music by Hans Lang, Hope Film and Neusser-Film GmbH, 1954. Kaiserwalzer (The Emperor’s waltz). Directed by Franz Antel, music by Hans Lang, Neusser-Film GmbH, 1953. Kronprinz Rudolfs letzte Liebe (Crown Prince Rudolph’s last love). Directed by Rudolf Jugert, music by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, Lux-Film and Sascha-­ Filmproduktion, 1956. La leggenda del santo bevitore (based on the novel: Legende vom heiligen Trinker, The legend of the holy drinker). Directed by Ermanno Olmi, Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica, Aura Film, and RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1988. Radetzkymarsch. Television production. Directed by Michael Kehlmann, music by Rolf Wilhelm, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), 1965. DVD: Hoanzl #037, 2006. Sissi. Directed by Ernst Marischka, music by Anton Profes, Erma-Film, 1955. Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The young empress). Directed by Ernst Marischka, music by Anton Profes, Erma-Film, 1956. Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The fateful years of an empress). Directed by Ernst Marischka, music by Anton Profes, Erma-Film, 1957. Walzerkrieg (Waltz war). Directed by Ludwig Berger, music by Franz Grothe and Joseph Lanner, Universum Film (UFA), 1933. Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt (Two hearts in waltz time). Directed by Géza von Bolváry, music by Robert Stolz, Super-Film GmbH and Deutsche Lichtspiel-­ Syndikat (DLS), 1930.

10 The Music of Sacrificial Acts Displacement, Redemption, Beethoven, and Verdi in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983)1 Tobias Pontara Between 1962 and 1986, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made in total seven feature films, all of which have attained status as cinematic classics. Compared with the rather extensive writing on cinema directors such as ­Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, however, the scholarly literature on Tarkovsky is surprisingly scarce. The fact that Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie’s 1994 book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue still stands as the locus classicus of Tarkovsky scholarship is telling in this regard. It is therefore gratifying to note that the last decade has witnessed a slow but steady increase in monographs and anthologies dedicated to the study of Tarkovsky and his films (Bird; Jónsson and Óttarsson; Chion, Andrei Tarkovsky; Robinson; Dunne; Redwood; Skakov; Dyer; Bould; Sitney, Cinema of Poetry; McSweeney). However, even though several of the just referenced books do pay some attention to the role of the soundtrack in Tarkovsky’s films, they are overwhelmingly concerned with the visual dimension of those films. All in all, the presence of music and sound in Tarkovsky’s cinema is an understudied phenomenon, with only a handful of articles and book chapters focusing specifically on these topics (Truppin; Chion, Audio-Vision; Shpinitskaya; S. Smith; Noeske; Barham, “Scoring Incredible Futures”; Pontara, “Beethoven Overcome” and “Bach at the Space Station”; Fairweather; Çolak). The present essay contributes to this limited body of literature by focusing on a topic that has not yet received attention among scholars of Tarkovsky’s cinema: namely the role and function of Western art music, or classical music, in Tarkovsky’s penultimate film Nostalghia (1983, Nostalgia).2 Nostalghia revolves around a dejected Russian intellectual who travels around a gloomy Tuscan landscape to research the life of an obscure ­eighteenth-century composer by the name of Pavel Sosnovsky. In this somber and visually refined film, the presence of music is pared down to a minimum. Apart from recurring bits of a Russian folk song, a brief passage of Chinese music, and a fragment of what Johnson and Petrie describe as “middle eastern music” (165),3 the soundtrack of Nostalghia comprises in total four musical passages: two short fragments from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and two brief excerpts from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. These musical passages are

236  Tobias Pontara closely, if not obviously, connected to the central themes and characters of the film. The two male protagonists—Andrei Gorchakov (the Russian intellectual and poet-musicologist at the center of the narrative) and the Italian “madman” Domenico—are both haunted by a deep and recurring nostalgia for their pasts, a nostalgia that mirrors the disorientation and loss of coherence that characterizes their present. Their acts of apparently pointless self-­sacrifice at the end of the film are both closely linked to classical music— Andrei’s with Verdi’s Requiem and Domenico’s with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”4 In Tarkovsky’s hands, the condition of nostalgia becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand, nostalgia is depicted as a compulsive occupation with an idealized homeland and an unattainable past besetting the film’s main character—an occupation that successively draws him into an ever-more vicious existential circle. Feeding the fantasies and dreams he repeatedly resorts to in order to escape his present sense of loss and displacement, his nostalgic reveries only drive him deeper into a state of despair and alienation. On the other hand, nostalgia is expressed as an acute concern of both Domenico and Andrei with the suffering of mankind, eventually leading them to their spectacular acts of self-sacrifice. However, while Andrei and Domenico (the latter in particular) are obviously driven by a conviction that the wrong-doings and sufferings of humanity can be redeemed by their acts of self-sacrifice, I suggest that what ultimately drives them is the need to break free from their own personal isolation and to reconnect with a more authentic way of life that seems irredeemably out of reach to them. A genuinely compassionate attitude can instead be found in the way the film itself relates to its characters, a notion that will be fleshed out below with the help of Daniel Frampton’s concept of “filmind.” In this chapter, I argue that classical music—the music of Beethoven and Verdi—is importantly involved in the film’s multifaceted construal of nostalgia. Far from being clearly discernible, however, this involvement is both subtle and complex. While classical music can justifiably be interpreted as an emotional and symbolic resource employed by the film’s characters in their attempt to cope with a growing sense of isolation and displacement, it can also be plausibly understood as an expression of grief and compassion issuing from the more abstract vantage point of the filmind, and in this latter sense as being directed toward the characters and their fates. As will become clear from my argument, even though the relation between Domenico and Beethoven’s music is by no means without its complexities, it is above all the position and placement of Verdi’s music in the film that creates the most challenging ambiguities. By taking the different possible diegetic locations of Beethoven and Verdi’s music into consideration, this chapter aims to clarify the ways in which music interacts with and partakes in the multilayered examination of nostalgia, displacement, existential alienation, and the call for redemption that is at the center of Nostalghia. I begin by discussing the relation between Domenico and Beethoven’s music. I then proceed to discuss the role of Verdi’s music in the film, considering first the connection between this music and the

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  237 meta-diegetic reveries of Andrei, and thereafter the way it can be interpreted as an expression of the filmind’s thinking.

The Triumphant Music of Failed Self-Sacrifice: Domenico’s Beethoven Although Andrei Gorchakov must be regarded as the central character of Nostalghia, Domenico is far from a peripheral figure. Not only is he an intriguing character in his own right, but as the narrative unfolds, it also becomes increasingly clear that Domenico will play a decisive role for the fatal turn that Andrei’s life will take toward the end of the film. Influenced by Domenico’s conviction that the present deplorable state of the world can only be redeemed by an act of radical self-sacrifice, Andrei postpones his journey back to Russia and returns instead to the thermal baths of Bagno Vignoni. Here, he fulfills the request expressed by Domenico earlier in the film that he must carry a lit candle across the grand basin at the center of the village. Domenico’s reputation as a madman is based on events that occurred earlier in his life. We learn that he spent a long period in a mental asylum after having kept his family locked up in a house for seven years, apparently in order to protect them from what he believed to be an imminent global destruction. In a poignant flashback sequence (shot in black and white), we witness the dramatic rescue of Domenico’s family by the police. With his family taken away, Domenico, who seems to have receded more deeply into his apocalyptic fantasies, is now planning a spectacular event at the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, where he intends to sacrifice himself for the greater good of humanity by burning himself to death—a plan that is realized toward the end of the film. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is linked to Domenico at two different moments in the film. It first appears shortly after Domenico has granted Andrei entrance into his dilapidated house. What we hear at this point is the choral passage that begins with the words “Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?” (Do you fall down, you millions? Do you sense the Creator, world?), which forms part of the Andante maestoso section appearing at about two-thirds into the fourth and final movement. The passage culminates in one of the movement’s several variations of the “Ode to Joy” theme, of which we hear only a few seconds before the music is suddenly cutoff. That we are supposed to understand the music as diegetic here—that is, as being part of the film’s story world—becomes clear from Andrei’s reaction, as he turns around with an expression of mild surprise as the piece abruptly stops. This impression is further confirmed by the words Domenico speaks immediately thereafter, when he proclaims “Allora, hai sentito? È Beethoven!” (“Well, did you hear? It’s Beethoven!”). Judging from Domenico’s elevated tone of voice, it is evident that he has some kind of special relation to Beethoven’s music. The complexity of this relation is bound up with the complexity of the music’s diegetic status. As

238  Tobias Pontara we have seen, both Domenico and Andrei acknowledge the music’s presence, so it seems obvious that the music belongs in the diegetic space of the scene. However, I would argue that its relation to this diegetic space is nevertheless rather ambiguous. During most of the scene, we may actually perceive it as non-diegetic underscore music. Before Andrei’s reaction and Domenico’s announcement, there are no clues to suggest that the music is originating from a source inside the house. This impression is strengthened by the fact that not only is the music strongly foregrounded on the soundtrack but it also dominates the soundtrack at the expense of all other sounds. The scene thus displays a clear deviation from standard sonic representations of diegetic music, which typically align the volume and sound quality of the music in accordance with established cinematic conventions, regulating our expectations of how diegetically produced music should sound. Because of this, we may, even on repeated viewings, be inclined to perceive the music as non-diegetic, despite knowing that it eventually will be anchored in the film’s story world. Understanding it as non-diegetic, we may become more alert to the possibility that perhaps it should be interpreted as a commentary on Domenico’s character and situation. In short, the perception that Beethoven’s music cannot be described as unproblematically diegetic, but may also be experienced as a piece of non-diegetic underscore, amplifies an already complex interpretive issue; if its presence in the scene is already difficult to account for on a diegetic reading (why is Domenico playing Beethoven’s music for Andrei?), it becomes even more so when we understand the music as non-diegetic. The situation is even more complex, however. For there may be other options here than just choosing between manifestly diegetic and non-diegetic readings. For example, by being so strongly foregrounded in the soundtrack— and by implication in the viewer’s audiovisual experience—Beethoven’s music comes to penetrate and envelop the space of Domenico’s house to such an extent that it can plausibly be construed as a piece of background music existing inside the fictional world. That is, up until the moment it stops, it may be experienced as a kind of musical underscore that permeates the diegetic space without Andrei or Domenico necessarily noticing it or even hearing it.5 As yet another alternative to manifestly diegetic and non-diegetic readings, we can envision that Andrei has here entered what, following Robynn Stilwell, could be called Domenico’s “metadiegetic lair” (199). In this perspective, Domenico is posed as the visually absent but psychologically foregrounded subject into whose musically rendered grandiloquent fantasies both Andrei and the film’s audience are drawn. Functioning like a sonic force field, the music here helps to delineate and demarcate Domenico’s physical and mental world, setting it off from an external reality with which he seems to have cut all ties. We may conjecture that despite its acknowledged diegetic status, “the music is symbolically metadiegetic … while musically it is functioning like nondiegetic underscore” (Stilwell 199). The upshot of all these options is that up until its diegetic disclosure, the music is inherently ambiguous regarding its cine-­ontological status, existing, as Stilwell would say, in a kind of “fantastical gap” between

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  239 6

stable diegetic states. This uncertainty (and at the same time multiple realizability) can be understood as an important factor in the intimate connection that is established between Domenico and the music of Beethoven. Domenico confirms the importance of Beethoven’s music at the same time as this music pervades, encapsulates, and demarcates his domestic space to such an extent that we may actually experience it as an integral part not only of this space, but of Domenico himself. By working on several diegetic levels simultaneously, Beethoven’s music enters into the very constitution of the madman’s confused interiority and so becomes inextricably interwoven with his somewhat distorted self-image and his rather pessimistic view of the world and the people inhabiting it. But why this close relationship between Domenico and Beethoven’s music? An answer to this question emerges when we look closer at the second appearance of Beethoven’s music in the film. The second excerpt from Beethoven’s Ninth in Nostalghia is the most well-known passage of the symphony, namely the “Ode to Joy” theme, as it appears in full chorus at measure 213 in the Alla marcia section of the final movement. It occurs toward the end of the film when Domenico—having delivered his exalted speech in Rome about the wrong path taken by humanity and the necessity of returning to “the main foundations of life”—sets himself on fire. Domenico’s spectacular and deadly performance is witnessed by a small group of people, most of whom seem rather disinterested and some of whom look conspicuously like patients from a mental asylum. In this scene, the music is unambiguously diegetic. Having ended his speech, Domenico asks for the music to be put on, and after some initial technical problems, it begins to resonate from the loudspeakers. Only a few seconds later, however, the tape recorder malfunctions, turning Domenico’s dramatic performance into some kind of a tragic farce. In an act of heroic self-sacrifice and accompanied by the triumphant music of the “Ode to Joy,” the burning Domenico throws himself from the statue of Marcus Aurelius on which he has been standing while holding his speech. As he hits the ground, the music starts to skip and repeat (sounding more like a broken car engine than a supreme expression of pure joy) and immediately after comes to a full stop. Considering this piece of music’s importance to Domenico, already established upon its first appearance at his house, the unsuccessful playing of it at this crucial point thus underscores the failure of his meticulously planned martyrdom and perhaps can even be seen as ridiculing the somewhat outrageous conviction of Domenico that such an act, beyond being a mere protest, could actually make a difference in redeeming humanity from the “wrong course” it has taken.7 Deprived of the music that was meant to underscore his sacrificial act, the screaming Domenico—engulfed in flames—ends his life crawling around on the ground while calling out for his dog Zoe (Figure 10.1). In the absence of his family, this dog is presumably all he has left in this world, and his desperate calling out for it during these final moments of his life suggests that the elevated ideals he has so fully embraced—and boosted with the aid of

240  Tobias Pontara

Figure 10.1  D  omenico in flames at Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome calling for his dog.

Beethoven’s music—are in fact empty generalizations, the purpose of which is to help him escape the alienation at the center of his own life. Living in an almost-complete existential isolation after the disappearance of his family, Domenico’s obsession with Beethoven’s exuberant and celebratory music betrays a profound longing for communion and contact with other people and with life itself. While Domenico is manifestly and intensely preoccupied with the notion that humanity must be redeemed from its wrong-doings, and in this spirit calls for a “return to the main foundations of life” in the name of the ideals of universal brotherhood and communion expressed by Beethoven’s music and Schiller’s poem, what he is above all seeking is a way out of his own alienated condition. Like Andrei, he is plagued by a state of deep and consuming nostalgia. But unlike Andrei, who revels in dreams and fantasies of his beloved homeland, Domenico’s nostalgia—to the extent that his obsession with the shortcomings of humanity allows him to be conscious of it—is essentially temporal in character, nurtured by an impossible longing after an intimacy and closeness lying irretrievably in the past.8 Domenico’s failed performance signals the collapse, and perhaps ultimate illusiveness, of the ideals connoted by Beethoven’s music and Schiller’s poem. For Domenico, the remedy to his profound existential quarantine and displacement does not lie in the abstract ideals of universal brotherhood or a collective return to “the main foundations of life.” Indeed, the technical break-down that puts an end to Beethoven’s music at the very peak of Domenico’s spectacular self-sacrifice underscores the inevitable failure of the madman’s attempt to escape his personal isolation through this excessive engagement with the failures of humanity as a whole. In Nostalghia, then, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony functions as a kind of false consciousness that the deeply unhappy Domenico has internalized in order to protect himself from a threat far greater than humanity’s supposed wrong turns—the full awareness

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  241 of his own alienation and his inability to break it. However, the cinematic deconstruction of the “Ode to Joy” toward the end of the film makes it clear that this self-deception cannot be maintained; instead of a final grand statement crowned by Beethoven’s triumphant music, the dying Domenico calls out in anguish for his dog. But of course, to some extent, Domenico’s Beethoven is everyone’s Beethoven. On the assumption that Domenico’s relation to Beethoven’s music should be assigned a broader significance, the appearance and deconstruction of the Ninth Symphony in Nostalghia may more generally be understood as a subtle but powerful critique of what Tarkovsky regarded as a deeply questionable tendency in modern Western history: an undue emphasis on and celebration of abstract and collective values at the expense of individual life experience.9

Meta-diegetic Reveries and the Contemplating Filmind: Andrei and Verdi If Domenico more or less self-consciously weaves Beethoven’s music into his distorted self-image and his desperate quasi-heroic act, Andrei’s relation to Verdi’s music is somewhat more complex. There are no clear indications in the film that Andrei is intentionally invoking or interacting with Verdi’s Requiem, which on a first impression may act more like commentary, non-­ diegetic music—although what the music comments on and why may not be immediately discernable. The Requiem first appears at the very beginning of the film before we have made acquaintance with the main character. As the opening credits roll over the screen, we are shown a beautiful Russian landscape enclosed in mist. In the midst of this scenery, we see Andrei’s family as each member moves across a meadow toward a lake or a river. What is not immediately obvious is that the little group—four people and a dog (and further down the slant, a white horse)—is here placed in front of the family’s dacha (so that in fact we see them from the perspective of the dacha where Andrei himself would supposedly be positioned). On the soundtrack, Verdi’s Requiem is preceded by a passage from the traditional Russian folk song Oi vi kumusciki.10 The folk song reappears, but this time alongside Verdi’s music, creating the overall impression that the two musical pieces are layered upon each other rather than one succeeding the other. Through this layering, they in fact become so closely linked as to merge into one composite musical gestalt.11 The second appearance of the Requiem comes in the film’s penultimate scene, where it underscores the fatal outcome of Andrei’s decision to comply with Domenico’s request. This passage then leads over to the concluding scene, where Oi vi kumusciki returns to accompany a shot of Andrei and his dog sitting in front of the Russian dacha, which is now itself framed within a Tuscan setting inside the ruins of San Galgano Abbey (a thirteenth-century gothic church located a few kilometers southwest of Siena). In contrast to its appearance at the beginning of the film, the Requiem here precedes the brief passages from Oi vi kumusciki.

242  Tobias Pontara In what follows, I shall approach Verdi’s Requiem as it appears in Nostalghia from two different perspectives. First, I shall explore it as a meta-diegetic phenomenon, that is, as something emanating from Andrei’s state of mind. Second, I shall investigate its significance from the more abstract vantage point of the filmind. This dual perspective will help me to capture more fully Tarkovsky’s multilayered understanding of nostalgia and the relation of Verdi’s music to this complex phenomenon in the film. A meta-diegetic understanding of Verdi’s music originates from the observation that the opening and concluding scenes of Nostalghia are closely related to other scenes recurring throughout the film. To begin with, fragments of a folk song similar to those of the opening and ending scenes are actually heard several times during the course of the film, mostly in connection with the dream (or dream-like) sequences portraying Andrei’s inner visions of and longing for his beloved Russia and for his family.12 There is thus a musical affiliation between the film’s opening and closing scenes and the scenes concerned with Andrei’s recurring meta-diegetic reveries. But the opening and closing scenes are also connected visually and thematically to these other scenes, in that they depict the same people and the same Russian countryside occurring in Andrei’s reveries (see also Burns 104). We can therefore plausibly imagine the scenes at the film’s beginning and end as also being part of or emanating from Andrei’s interior, and consequently we may imagine the music in these scenes as constituting an integral part of Andrei’s intense nostalgia. Andrei is deeply plagued by his memories and his geographic displacement, demonstrating many of the signs of severe homesickness traditionally associated with the concept of nostalgia.13 On the assumption that the opening and closing scenes can be plausibly imagined in conjunction with the rest of Andrei’s recurring nostalgic reveries, Verdi’s Requiem can be recognized as an expression of Andrei’s despondent state of mind. More specifically, the Requiem can be construed as an acknowledgment on the protagonist’s part that something deep inside him prevents his return to his homeland, and that, consequently, he is doomed to end his days in desolation and exile. In conjunction with the folk song fragments—in which the nostalgia of the film’s title seems to be particularly densely encoded—the Requiem comes to define the Russian’s state of mind as he simultaneously invokes the memory of his former life and yields to the insight that his inability to return to it is also his inability to go on living. A requiem, of course, is a mass for the dead, and this particular requiem, by the Italian composer par excellence, is a clear indication that, for Andrei, Italy has become synonymous with death. Along this reading, the concluding scenes can be understood as a reinforcement of the insight expressed in the opening scene. Without the strength to return to his earlier life, what remains for Andrei in Italy is increasing existential estrangement and, in the end, physical expiration. In the film’s penultimate scene, Andrei carries out his promise to Domenico and walks with the lit candle in his hand through the drained pool of St. Catherine in Bagno Vignoni. Domenico has previously made several failed attempts to complete

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  243 this symbolic act. Unlike Domenico, however, Andrei is successful, but only at the price of his own life. Reaching the opposite side of the pool with the candle still burning, Andrei suffers from a heart attack and dies. With this outcome, the symbolic act transfigures into a peculiar form of self-sacrifice that may actually redress, even redeem, the failed performance of Domenico in Rome. We may imagine, though, that Andrei remains conscious for a while and that the film’s two concluding scenes disclose his final thoughts in life. In so doing, they may take on an extra layer of signification, in that they can perhaps now be seen as revealing a newfound insight of the dying Andrei, namely that he has finally attained some kind of reconciliation between the memories haunting him and the alienation of his present exiled condition. Verdi’s music is closely associated with the melodic fragments of the Russian folk song, just as it was in the opening scene (although the two layers of music are not merged together here). But now, this intermingling of Italy and Russia is taken to a new level as we witness Andrei’s vision of himself in front of his Russian dacha, which itself is placed inside the roofless Italian gothic church (Figure 10.2). From this perspective—and envisioned as if flowing from Andrei’s mind—the words of Verdi’s Requiem aeternam, which read “Give them eternal peace, oh Lord,” take on an added meaning in relation to the opening scene. If in the opening scene they are most plausibly understood as an expression of Andrei’s desperate need of and call for redemption, their appearance at the film’s end signals the possibility that he has now attained peace with himself, that perhaps his seemingly incurable nostalgia and deep existential alienation have been redeemed by his peculiar self-sacrificial act, an act of genuine altruism performed out of duty to Domenico.14 But there is another way to conceive of Verdi’s Requiem in Nostalghia, one in which it is seen as issuing from the film itself rather than filtered through Andrei. Daniel Frampton’s concept of “filmind” implies that one thinks about the film as embodying a kind of consciousness. For Frampton, the filmind

Figure 10.2  A ndrei in front of the family dacha set inside the Abbey of San Galgano.

244  Tobias Pontara is essentially “ just the film” (74), but it is the film imagined or thought of as “a ‘film-being’ thinking about the characters and subjects in the film” (7). According to Frampton, “[T]he filmind and the film-world are one and the same,” which implies that “the film-world does not organize itself independently of the filmind” (75). By expressing itself through Verdi’s music, the filmind reacts with sorrow and compassion to the fates and foreseen deaths of both Andrei and Domenico, as early as the outset of the film. At this point, however, I would like to introduce a modification to Frampton’s concept, which I feel is less congenial to capture those elements of the film that more closely relate to the main character’s visions and actions. As I see it, we do not have to embrace Frampton’s idea that the filmind is coextensive with everything that appears and happens in a film, that is, that it pantheistically “is its objects and characters” (Frampton 79; emphasis in the original). Instead, we can attribute to the filmind those elements of a film that we believe can be most aptly understood as an expression of its thinking. The Requiem, being much more loosely tied to Andrei’s reveries than the extracts from Oi vi kumusciki, is more amenable to be imagined as a kind of film thinking than those fragments. To flesh out this thought in more detail, we may invoke Jerrold Levinson’s theory of musical expressiveness. According to this theory, in order to hear a musical passage as expressive, one should “first be imagining a persona for it, and second, be imagining this persona to have the power to achieve in unmediated fashion an outpouring of sound that normally requires … the intermediary of musical instruments” (Levinson 339). With regard to the opening and closing scenes of Nostalghia, the idea of a particular persona behind the music may further an understanding of the Requiem in which the filmind more strongly comes to express a personal and deeply felt concern with the film’s characters, something that in turn may lead us to experience the filmind’s presence more intensely. In contrast, making sense of the expressive intention behind Oi vi kumusciki requires neither the concept of filmind nor the idea of an imagined persona. In other words, even though we may conceive of the Requiem as issuing from the filmind’s thinking—that is, as being expressed by a filmind persona—we may still feel that Oi vi kumusciki is more plausibly experienced as a meta-­d iegetic phenomenon closely tied to Andrei’s interiority. The upshot of all this is a “mixed reading” of the two musics’ diegetic locations that combines them into a composite musical whole and fuses their subjective outlooks and expressive perspectives. This intermingling of Andrei’s thinking and the thinking of the filmind thus results in a diegetically complex musical gestalt by way of which the longing for an idealized but unobtainable past becomes, simultaneously, an insignia of Andrei’s nostalgia and a premonition of death articulated by the filmind’s persona. In “choosing” Verdi’s Requiem, the filmind persona alerts the viewer to the theme of death. However, this should not be taken simply as a forewarning of Andrei and Domenico’s actual deaths at the end of the film. More importantly, it can be taken as the filmind’s reaction to Andrei’s and Domenico’s present

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  245 life situations, which are both characterized by an existential and emotional sterility in that the two men are incapable of establishing a deeper connection with other people and are unable to live in the present. In Andrei’s case, this incapacity grows directly out of his continuous and compulsive re-imaginings of an increasingly idealized past and a homeland that, in an important sense, are no longer his, and to which, judging from his decision at the end of the film to cancel his trip to the airport (and back to Russia), he might never have had any serious intention to return.15 However, in expressing itself through Verdi’s Requiem the filmind persona does more than just react to the fates of Andrei and Domenico. As mentioned above, it is the requiem aeternam part of the Requiem that Tarkovsky uses. The first words of the text, in Latin, are: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine; that is, “Give them eternal peace, oh Lord.” By expressing itself through these words, the filmind persona is in fact issuing a plea for redemption; it is praying for the haunted and unhappy characters at the center of the film. Thus understood, the Requiem is an invocation on the filmind’s part that Andrei and Domenico be released from their sufferings. It is at this point that a further dimension of the concept of nostalgia is revealed, a dimension that is seldom mentioned in connection with Tarkovsky’s film. For in praying for the protagonists’ salvation, the filmind persona displays a compassion that Tarkovsky himself saw as closely connected to the Russian meaning of the word nostalgia.16 Understanding the condition of nostalgia both as a “deadly form of homesickness” (Hara 6) and, more radically, as “a profound alienation from the world … a global yearning for the wholeness of existence” (Tarkovsky 204–05), he seems also, and perhaps somewhat idiosyncratically, to have understood the term in a wider, more altruistic sense: The Russian term is difficult to translate: it could be compassion, but it’s even stronger than that. It’s identifying oneself with the suffering of another man, in a passionate way.17 Here, Tarkovsky is talking about Andrei’s relation to Domenico and, in particular, Andrei’s decision to comply with Domenico’s request that he carry the candle Domenico has given him across the thermal bath of Bagno Vignoni. I would suggest, however, that Andrei’s compassionate identification with Domenico also reflects how the filmind persona relates to its characters by its use of Verdi’s Requiem. And this has a further consequence: for if Jeremy Barham (“Music and the Moving Image” 228–29) is correct in his suggestion that we reconceive the filmind as an amalgamation of, on the one hand, what Jerrold Levinson calls the implicit fictional presenter and, on the other, the responsive viewing subject—that is, of poietic and esthesic principles—then we should realize that, as spectators, we are also deeply implicated in this compassionate stance toward the characters.18 Indeed, much the same thing happens in The Sacrifice (1986), but there with the help of the aria “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Just as with the Requiem aeternam in Nostalghia, the Bach aria

246  Tobias Pontara in The Sacrifice appears at the beginning and ending of the film. And just as with Nostalghia, in The Sacrifice, we may envision a filmind persona meditating over and bemoaning the destiny of the increasingly confused and ill-fated protagonist. Again, the filmind being partly constituted by our own reactions, the proper response is not only to observe the compassion it expresses, but to feel it ourselves, to live it through the film and its music. I have argued for a twofold interpretation of Verdi’s Requiem as it appears in Nostalghia. Thus, I have claimed that it can be experienced as issuing from the interiority of the film’s main character or, alternatively, that it can be imagined as a compassionate invocation emerging from an imagined filmind persona. It might indeed be difficult to hold these perspectives simultaneously in one’s mind, but it does not follow from this that they should be seen as blocking each other out. Rather, by complementing each other, they together enable a richer understanding of the film and the role within it played by Verdi’s music.19 Admittedly, in stressing one of these perspectives, we will direct our focus to some of the possible meanings of the concept of nostalgia at the expense of others. However, by acknowledging the plausibility of both perspectives, and by allowing ourselves to switch between them in our viewings and our thinking of the film, we can attain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the film’s multilayered exploration of nostalgia as well as the ways Verdi’s Requiem is implicated in the construction and expression of this nostalgia. The nostalgia in Tarkovsky’s film is not only an impossible longing for loved-but-lost objects such as one’s homeland or family; rather, it is a loss of, an alienation from, one’s own self. In other words, the nostalgia of Nostalghia encompasses all the trappings of homesickness in its traditional sense, as well as a “yearning for the wholeness of existence.” More than this, however, it also involves a deep compassion with the suffering of others, a compassion expressed by Andrei and Domenico’s sacrificial acts and by the filmind in its reaction toward the film’s characters. I have shown in this section that Verdi’s music is compatible with all these senses of nostalgia, and I have further claimed that it invites the viewer to take an active part in the conceptual and emotional exploration of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Whether felt as issuing from the film’s main character himself or from the diegetically more remote position of a filmind persona, Tarkovsky’s Verdi implicates us all; it bonds director, spectator, filmind, and film character into a shared compassionate contemplation of the inescapability of existential alienation and our ineradicable longing for wholeness.

Conclusion In this essay, I have considered the role played by Verdi’s Requiem and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. In the course of this analysis, some significant differences between the two works have become apparent. One such difference concerns music’s relation to the film’s diegesis. Despite

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  247 some initial difficulties in determining its diegetic status, Beethoven’s music is eventually quite explicitly anchored in diegetic space. In contrast, the cine-­ ontological status of Verdi’s music is genuinely indeterminable, which does not mean that we cannot develop plausible suggestions for how it could be understood and experienced. I have argued that Verdi’s Requiem can be experienced both as a kind of meta-diegetic music flowing from the main character’s interiority and as a compassionate contemplation expressed from the more abstract vantage point of the filmind. Perhaps more importantly, however, the two musics can be seen as representing two contrasting reactions to the intense suffering associated with deep nostalgia. In this sense, Verdi’s music may be experienced as an acknowledgment, perhaps even an embracement, of the main character’s alienation and displacement, an acknowledgment that houses within itself the potential for redemption and release. In contrast, the overexcited and awkwardly celebratory character of Beethoven’s music as it appears in Nostalghia may be taken to signal a desperate need to escape from individual suffering, a need above all expressed in an overzealous concern with the abstract ideals of universal communion and brotherhood. Given the credibility of these claims, we may recognize in Nostalghia a musical dichotomy by which the affection and intimacy of the folk-song-imbued Requiem is separated from the generalized and objectified universal joy articulated by Beethoven’s music. The fact that similar musical dichotomies are operative in some of Tarkovsky’s other films—most notably in Solaris and Stalker (see Pontara, “Beethoven Overcome” and “Bach at the Space Station”)—should encourage us to further investigate how they are articulated in Nostalghia. We could extend our interpretive perspective to include the Chinese and “middle eastern” music, which might lead us to recognize a further and more encompassing musical dichotomy in the film. This would be a dichotomy in which Beethoven and Verdi’s music are both distinguished from the “­Easterness” of Russian, Chinese, and “Turkish” music. Such a dichotomy, mirroring the dichotomy between Western classical music and Eastern-sounding electronic music in Stalker, would not erase the contrast emphasized here between Beethoven and Verdi. Rather, this contrast would be framed within a larger musical and interpretive context that stresses the possible implications shared by the Requiem and the “Ode to Joy” qua Western art music. Such an extended reading might take as its point of departure Tarkovsky’s comparison between Eastern and Western music: “The West is forever shouting: ‘This is me! Look at me! Listen to me suffering, loving! How unhappy I am! How happy! I! Mine! Me!’ In the Eastern tradition they never utter a word about themselves. The person is totally absorbed into God, Nature, Time; finding himself in everything; discovering everything in himself. Think of Taoist music” (240). From this perspective, Verdi’s music articulates the same obsession with the joys and sufferings of the individual ego as Beethoven’s music, albeit very differently expressed. The interesting thing about Nostalghia, however, is that by merging East and West at the film’s end (i.e., by connecting Verdi’s music with Russian folk song, the Russian landscape and dacha with the Italian cathedral,

248  Tobias Pontara and even the dog of Andrei’s family with Domenico’s presumably Italian dog), it may in fact move beyond the unresolved musical dichotomy in Stalker.20 Nostalghia may be a film marked by “unrelieved gloom” (Tarkovsky 203), but it is nevertheless a film that ends on a note of hope and reconciliation.

Notes 1 An extended version of this essay will appear as “Musical Offerings, Soothing Sounds and Sacrificial Acts: Managing the Nostalgia of Nostalghia” in my Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice. Routledge, forthcoming. 2 In a recent article, Kunio Hara discusses Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia in relation to Toru Takemitsu’s musical work Nostalghia: In Memory of Andrei Tarkovsky. In the course of his discussion, Hara pays some attention to the music in the film, but since the main focus of his article lies elsewhere, he does not provide any lengthy analyses (see Hara). 3 Later in their book, Johnson and Petrie specify this description when they speak of this music as “the strangely discordant ‘Turkish’ music” (200). 4 A third character in the film is Eugenia, a translator helping Andrei with his research on Sosnovsky. Like Andrei (and indeed like Tarkovsky himself), Sosnovsky seems to have suffered from severe nostalgia for his homeland during his travels around Italy. The real-life model of Sosnovsky is the Ukrainian eighteenth-century composer Maxym Berezovsky (ca. 1745–77). See also ­Skakov 167. 5 This way of conceiving the music’s diegetic status is associated with film musicologist Ben Winters’s concept of intra-diegetic music (see Winters “Non-­ Diegetic Fallacy” and Music, Performance). 6 Stilwell 186. Jeff Smith argues that in cases such as these, there is in fact only an apparent ambiguity. The music is diegetic the whole time, even though this is not immediately revealed to us (see chapter “Recent Discussions of the Boundary between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music”). In a strict sense, this may be true, but this does not mean that we cannot experience the music as ambiguous. As Giorgio Biancorosso notes, “an ambiguity that is finally solved is no less ambiguous for that” (11). 7 Johnson and Petrie advance a similar reading of the scene, writing that “the breakdown of the music as Domenico dies underlines the fact that what was intended as a solemn and triumphant affirmation of faith has degenerated into something uncomfortably and embarrassingly close to farce” (170). A somewhat different perspective is taken by Sitney who claims that “Domenico’s fanatical behaviour translates that of the Old Believers in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Russia, who resisted liturgical reform by taking to the forests and often committing suicide in the conviction that the Last Days had come. Thousands of them burned themselves to death, convinced that the cleansing fire was the holiest form of salvation in the face of the Antichrist” (“Andrei Tarkovsky” 234). 8 Hara expresses a similar view when he says that “Domenico is a character whose actions in the present are constantly haunted by his memory of the past” (14). 9 Explaining his use of classical music (snippets from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Ravel’s Bolero and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) in his earlier film Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky said that he wanted music “that expresses the movement of the masses” (Gianvito 52). This arguably negative assessment of classical music,

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  249

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13 14

15

and nineteenth-century music in particular, sharply contrasted with his idea about the electronic music permeating parts of the film (especially the scenes taking place in the peaceful and mysterious Zone), which he described as “a kind of Zen music” that expresses “its truth about the world around us in an autonomous way” (Gianvito 52). Assuming that Tarkovsky’s view of Beethoven’s music did not change considerably between the four years that passed between Stalker and Nostalghia, it seems reasonable to claim that the same skeptical stance toward this music is expressed in both films. I rely here on the “Trivia Page” at Nostalghia.com, according to which “the Russian folk song heard in Nostalghia is called Oi Vi Kumusciki.” See URL: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/­ Tarkovsky_Trivia.html. Accessed 8 December 2016. A more common spelling of the song’s title seems to be “Kumushki.” As far as I can tell, the first verse of the song goes: “Oh, godmothers, godmothers/Be godparents, be loving/Be godparents, be loving/Love me.” Describing the opening shot of the film, Sean Martin claims that what we hear is “an Italian folk song that is replaced by Verdi’s Requiem” (164). Obviously, this claim contradicts the information given at Nostalghia.com. Moreover, given that there is no evidence in Tarkovsky’s writings for this claim (at least as far as I can tell), it appears rather implausible. Finally, whatever our more elaborate interpretations of the film will look like, on the most obvious level, the film is about a Russian’s nostalgia for his homeland. Therefore, the most plausible assumption, if we cannot come up with hard evidence, is that the song is of Russian origin. This merging of the two musical pieces is noted by Julia Sushytska who states that “already at the beginning of the movie, Verdi’s “Requiem” and Russian folk songs form a strange, unheard of harmony” (40). Interestingly, in comparison with Stalker, the color scheme in Nostalghia seems to be reversed. For while in the earlier film the scenes shot in color are associated with the mysterious Zone (the black-and-white and sepia-tinted sequences being reserved for the more mundane life outside the Zone), in Nostalghia, Andrei’s recurring entrances into his intense interior states are consistently displayed in black and white, with color being reserved for the more “objective” happenings revolving around his encounters with Eugenia and Domenico (see also Martin 172). Being closely aligned with these dream-like reveries, the folk song passages take on a clearly meta-diegetic quality; Andrei conjures them up along with all his other fantasies in his search for a sense of belonging. These passages thus belong to more or less subconscious imaginings: imaginings of a fuller and more authentic life that is apparently out of reach for the exiled Andrei. See Hara for a fuller elaboration of this point (7). Tarkovsky himself described the scene as expressing “the new wholeness in which the Tuscan hills and the Russian countryside come together indissolubly; [Andrei] is conscious of them as inherently his own, merged into his being and blood, but at the same time reality is enjoining him to separate these things by returning to Russia. And so Gorchakov dies in this new world where those things come together naturally and of themselves” (213). See also Sushytska 41. Johnson and Petrie describe Andrei as being “unable—or unwilling—to overcome his understandable loneliness and homesickness to the extent of making meaningful contact with other human beings. His dreams and memories are self-enclosed, circular, and repetitive, and seem to be used as an excuse for avoiding any commitment to his existing reality” (160).

250  Tobias Pontara 16 In Russian, the word nostalgia can be written as either ностальгия or тоска по прошлому. There is arguably a slight difference in meaning between the two terms: for while ностальгия can be regarded as a fairly direct adoption of the Greek portmanteau nostalgia, тоска по прошлому would more specifically connote a longing for the past. 17 Gianvito 80. In another interview with Natalia Aspesi in 1983, Tarkovsky expressed a similar view: “[F]or us [Russians] nostalgia is not a gentle and benevolent emotion…. For us it is a sort of deadly disease, a mortal illness, a profound compassion that binds us not so much with our own privation, our longing, our separation, but rather with the suffering of others, a passionate empathy” (par. 4). 18 I should note that this explication of the concept of filmind is in conflict with Frampton’s own understanding. According to Frampton, the filmind is “not a human mind. It is another kind of mind, its [the film’s] own mind, a new mind” (73). 19 For a similar argument with regard to the choral prelude “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, see Pontara, “Bach at the Space Station.” 20 In this regard, Nostalghia is closer to Solaris where Bach’s music becomes increasingly merged with the electronic score of Edward Artemiev during the course of the film. The basic dichotomy set up in Solaris is that between earth and space.

Works Cited Aspesi, Natalia. “The Gentle Emotion that is a Mortal Illness for us Russians.” Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky in Cannes, 1983, Nostalghia.com: http://people. ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Tarkovsky_Aspesi-1983. html. Accessed 20 December 2016. Barham, Jeremy. “Scoring Incredible Futures: Science-Fiction Screen Music, and ‘Postmodernism’ as Romantic Epiphany.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 91, nos. 3–4, Fall–Winter 2009, pp. 240–74. ———. “Music and the Moving Image.” Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives, edited by Stephen Downes, Routledge, 2014, pp. 224–38. Biancorosso, Giorgio. “The Harpist in the Closet: Film Music as Epistemological Joke.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 2, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 11–33. Bird, Robert. Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema. Reaktion, 2006. Bould, Mark. Solaris. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Burns, Christy L. “Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: Refusing Modernity, Re-Envisioning Beauty.” Cinema Journal, vol. 50, no. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 104–22. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Andrei Tarkovsky. Cahiers du cinéma: Le Monde, 2007. Çolak, Metin. “The Functions of Sound and Music in Tarkovsky’s Films.” Audio Technologies for Music and Media International Conference 2013: Proceedings, Bilkent University, 2013, pp. 12–19. Dunne, Nathan, editor. Tarkovsky. Black Dog Publishing, 2008. Dyer, Geoff. Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. Pantheon Books, 2012. Fairweather, Elisabeth. “Andrey Tarkovsky: The Refrain of the Sonic Fingerprint.” Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema, edited by James Wierzbicki, Routledge, 2012, pp. 32–44.

The Music of Sacrificial Acts  251 Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. Wallflower Press, 2006. Gianvito, John. Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Hara, Kunio. “1+1 = 1: Measuring Time’s Distance in Toru Takemitsu’s Nostalghia: In Memory of Andrei Tarkovsky.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 9, no. 3, Fall 2016, pp. 3–18. Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Indiana University Press, 1994. Jónsson, Gunnlaugur A., and Thorkell Ágúst Óttarsson, editors. Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006. Levinson, Jerrold. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cornell University Press, 1990. Martin, Sean. Andrei Tarkovsky. Pocket Essentials, 2005. McSweeney, Terrence. Beyond the Frame: The Films and Film Theory of Andrei Tarkovsky. Aporetic Press, 2015. Noeske, Nina. “Musik und Imagination: J. S. Bach in Tarkovski’s Solaris.” Filmmusik: Beiträge zu ihrer Theorie und Vermittlung, edited by Victoria Piel, Knut Holsträter and Oliver Huck, Georg Olms Verlag, 2008, pp. 25–42. Pontara, Tobias. “Beethoven Overcome: Romantic and Existentialist Utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 2011, pp. 302–15. ———. “Bach at the Space Station: Hermeneutic Pliability and Multiplying Gaps in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, vol. 8, no. 1, April 2014, pp. 1–23. Redwood, Thomas. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Robinson, Jeremy Mark. The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. Crescent Moon, 2007. Shpinitskaya, Julia. “Solaris by A. Tarkovsky: Music-Visual Troping, Paradigmatism, Cognitive Stereoscopy.” TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música, no. 10, 2006, www.sibetrans.com/trans/a157/solaris-by-atarkovsky-music-visual-­ troping-paradigmatism-cognitive-stereoscopy. Accessed 16 December 2016. Sitney, P. Adams. “Andrei Tarkovsky: Russian Experience, and the Poetry of Cinema.” New England Review, vol. 34, nos. 3–4, 2014, pp. 208–41. ———. The Cinema of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2014. Skakov, Nariman. The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time. L.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2012. Smith, Jeff. “Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music.” Music and the Moving Image, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 1–25. Smith, Stefan. “The Edge of Perception: Sound in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.” The Soundtrack, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 41–52. Stilwell, Robynn. “The Fantastical Gap between the Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 184–202. Sushytska, Julia. “Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: A Journey to the Home that Never Was.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 36–43. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, 1989. Truppin, Andrea. “And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky.” Sound Theory/Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman, Routledge, 1992, pp. 235–48.

252  Tobias Pontara Winters, Ben. “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music & Letters, vol. 91, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 224–43. ———. Music, Performance and the Realities of Film. Routledge, 2014. Films Cited All films listed below are directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Nostalghia (Nostalgia). Music by Ludwig van Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi, Rai  2, Sovinfilm and Opera Film Produzione, 1983. DVD: Artificial Eye, ART794DVD, 2011. Offret (The sacrifice). Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI), Argos Films, Film Four International, et al., 1986. Solyaris (Solaris). Music by Eduard Artemev and Johann Sebastian Bach, Mosfilm and Chetvyortoe Tvorcheskoe Obedinenie, 1972. Stalker. Music by Eduard Artemev and Ludwig van Beethoven, Mosfilm and Vtoroe Tvorcheskoe Obedinenie, 1979.

11 “Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”1 Chopin Nostalgia in Polish Cinema, 1944–91* Ewelina Boczkowska Twenty minutes into Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (1951, The youth of Chopin), a biopic portraying Fryderyk Chopin’s formative years, film director Aleksander Ford shows his protagonist afflicted with apathy at having lost the first conservatory prize in composition to a peer with traditionalist leanings. Visited by two other classmates, Chopin confesses his exasperation at being bound by the musical conventions of his era. In a bout of sudden passion, he launches into a speech. He advocates to his classmates for the use of the piano—in lieu of an o­ rchestra—as the primary means of personal expression. He explains that music need not be exclusively tragic or happy but preferably a blend of both in a composition. He prefers the candor of popular songs to the orchestral music of his contemporaries. At the apex of his impassioned soliloquy, Chopin turns to his maid, who was until then hidden behind the door to his room eavesdropping. Prompted by him to sing a song, she delivers a short kujawiak (a slow mazurka): “o nie chodz ́ koło wozu/o nie chodz ́ koło osi/o nie daj chłopcu ge ̨by choc ́ Cie ̨ o to prosi” (Don’t walk around a wagon, don’t walk around an axle, don’t kiss a boy even if he asks you).2 The ditty relieves the tension of the scene and prepares for a transition in which Chopin and his friends decide to head to the University café, where they will sing the maid’s song to irritate their professors. In this scene, Ford reimagines and attempts to humanize the historical Chopin via a fictional quibble. In his interactions with others, the composer is transformed from the sullen runner-up to a spirited youth, an altogether sympathetic protagonist whose artistic manifesto shows him to be a visionary on the precipice of an artistic revolution. Chopin foresees the aesthetic changes that herald the Romantic era and perceives the expressive potential of folk songs. In the scene’s conclusion, the maid’s song anticipates an ideological turn in the film: her “folk” song turns out to be closely based on the opening phrase of Chopin’s Mazurka in C Major, Op. 56, No. 2. Inadvertently, this instance of seamless musical borrowing (by the film composer Kazimierz Serocki) perpetuates the myth that through direct contact with Polish folk music, Chopin incorporated authentic folk melodies into his works.3 As a figure at * My gratitude to Michael Baumgartner, Barbara Milewski, Eva Sobolevski, and Ula Mieszkieło who commented on this chapter at various stages of development, and to Cindy Bylander for her support with the translations from Polish.

254  Ewelina Boczkowska once relatable and visionary, Ford’s Chopin brings to life the unrealized historical possibilities of the composer’s biography. Svetlana Boym calls this type of reimagining “restorative nostalgia” (41– 55). The word nostalgia signals longing and the impossibility of a return to a former time or place that may have not even existed. Boym’s qualifier “restorative” alerts us to the evasive ability of nostalgia to abdicate memory and to substitute a simpler, if not simplistic, view of history for the “world we had lost”—to reconstruct what is no longer there.4 Restorative nostalgia revels in symbolic rituals, fixes the past in monuments for rehabilitated heroes, and knits together a utopian vision of a community. Boym contrasts restorative nostalgia with another type of longing, which she calls, “the reflective nostalgia.” The latter takes the form of deep mourning and “dwells in longing and loss” (41). Either variant of nostalgia originates in deep-rooted ambivalence and uncertainty about the future. Boym’s theoretical framework is helpful in parsing out the nostalgia in cinematic depictions of Chopin in Poland. Ford and other Polish filmmakers, who adapted aspects of the composer’s biography to screen during and after the Second World War, tended to project onto the historical Chopin a collective yearning for a better future. Poles have long understood Chopin through a nationalist lens and mapped onto his music their own particular experience as a stateless nation during the extended period of lost independence, between 1795 and 1918, and as an oppressed people under Soviet domination, after the Second World War through 1989.5 The filmmakers’ appropriation of Chopin belonged within this broader national tradition. Films about Chopin appeared during three peaks of political instability: by the end of the war (1944–45); at the height of the Stalinist era (1949–52); and during the transition to democracy (1990–91).6 In each of these periods, Chopin’s historical status was reimagined to serve different ends: as an emblem of societal trauma; as an epitome of social progress; and later, as a symptom of collective melancholia, respectively. I argue in this chapter that the Chopin films reveal a deep-seated restorative nostalgia in Polish collective memory for an alternate post-war history. I demonstrate these moments of restorative nostalgia in case studies of Chopin films from each of the three periods. Foregoing the exact chronology, each case study pairs films thematically around three intertwined aspects of nostalgia. The first addresses the longing for a simpler past that arises from the impossibility of going back to that imagined time. This idea of impossible returns is central to Ballada f-moll (1945, Ballade in F Minor)—an experimental film made immediately following the German occupation—and ̇ is also present figuratively in films such as Z elazowa Wola (1949, Zelazowa Wola) from the Stalinist era. Second, I focus on historical amnesia in impressionistic documentary films, including Utwory Chopina w kolorze (1944, Color studies of Chopin) and Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach (1947, Chopin recital in Duszniki). The third case study shows the uneasy reconciliations of past and present in two Chopin biopics made 40 years apart, Młodos ́c ́ Chopina and La note bleue (1991, The blue note). In the conclusion of this chapter, I reiterate

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  255 how all these films reflected the complex ways in which cultural memory of Chopin’s music changed over time. The implications of this study are manifold. The chapter traces how deeply Chopin is embedded in the psyche of Poles as a symbol of their nation, and ties nostalgic attitudes toward his music to broader issues of collective memory and nationalism. My study also reveals how repurposing this music within an “imagined” Polish tradition became a source of the Poles’ longing for an alternate reality after the war. The resulting narrative of Polish filmmakers’ appropriation of Chopin’s biography threads a cultural history of Chopin’s music on film under totalitarianism and after its demise in 1989.

Impossible Returns Ballada f-moll (1945) and Żelazowa Wola (1949) My first case study centers on two films and bookends the four-year period between the end of the Second World War and 1949, the year in which Poland’s post-war communist government collapsed under the strict Soviet control of Stalinism. The two films revolve around the idea of a nostalgic return in Boym’s dual sense of an actual return home to a place that no longer exists (reflective nostalgia) and that of an allegorical return to origins, or reconstruction of an idealized past (restorative nostalgia). Paradoxically, the apparently reflective film of 1945 was as steeped in national symbolism of Chopin’s music as the more obviously restorative film of 1949. The earlier film was by and large a meditation on a lost home though it included a preface that makes restorative claims about Chopin. The reflective mood—the modus operandi of the 1945 film—was absent from the later film. Andrzej Panufnik’s short film Ballada f-moll is a mournful contemplation of a ravaged Warsaw nearly destroyed in its entirety following the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.7 Static or bleak panning shots showing debris from the devastation alternate with wide aerial views of the same. The complete absence of city inhabitants in these images is conspicuous throughout the film, and especially when an album of photographs is shown among the debris near the beginning and once more before the end of the film. An invisible hand turns the pages of the album to reveal close-ups of historic photographs of Warsaw from the inter-war era. The photographs display buildings that had once graced the cityscape and are contrasted with film images of the same sites now reduced to rubble. Adding to the nostalgic musings of the lost city, the footage of dismal sites is aestheticized. Piles of brick and broken facades create careful still-life compositional arrangements, with occasional expressionist effects such as heavy vignettes and double exposures added to otherwise basic shots. Finally, besides the juxtaposition of documentary footage and historical photographs, the film also alternates between images of static ruins and images registering the passage of time: the ceaseless movement of clouds, swirling flocks of birds over the Vistula River, etc. The contrast between the stillness

256  Ewelina Boczkowska of man-made destruction and the uninterrupted cycle of nature articulates different temporalities ­simultaneously—the ruined past, the bleak present, the uncertain future. Meanwhile, Ballade in F minor, Op. 52, No. 4 suffuses these sights with deep regret and implies a mourning presence amid the ruins. The mournful observer—with the camera in hand—registers the trauma of war and the world that no longer is. The undeniably reflective longing for a former home is absent from the preface. Framing the mournful film that the viewer is about to see, the preface makes three “restorative” references to Chopin’s place in Polish culture that assert his music’s connection to collective loss and national survival for Poles. Ballade in F minor, after which the film is titled, is a poignant musical choice for this film considering the place of Chopin ballades more generally in the context of musical narratives of lost freedom and national displacement (Berger; Zakrzewska). 8 After the silent title sequence ends, a photograph of the Monument of Fryderyk Chopin is shown. The image is telling given that the iconic sculpture—erected in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park in 1926—was the first monument that was destroyed in Warsaw as part of a larger, widespread censorship of Chopin’s music by the occupying Germans who clearly understood the symbolism of Chopin for Poles (Okoń 44).9 Heard alongside the still image of the monument are parts VIII and IX from the poem Fortepian Chopina (­Chopin’s piano) by the national poet Cyprian Norwid (1821–83). A male narrator reflects on Warsaw from Chopin’s youth and the destruction of the Chopin family residence during the Russian repression of the 1863 January Uprising. He ends with Norwid’s famous verse describing Chopin’s piano, which the poet compares to a coffin being pushed out the window to the street below and engulfed in smoke. The image of the monument is subsequently layered with flames and Chopin’s Ballade is then heard. Through examples of music, sculpture, and poetry connoting loss at the hands of foreign oppressors while placing hope in Chopin as a symbol of an infallible Polish nation, the preface frames purposely Ballada f-moll’s ensuing lament of Warsaw’s physical devastation. In contrast to Panufnik’s elegiac study of Warsaw in ruins, Eugeniusz ̇ Ce ̨kalski’s Z elazowa Wola exemplifies the Stalinist propaganda films made from 1949 onwards. The film stages a metaphoric return to the origins of ̇ Chopin’s music. Z elazowa Wola tells the story of Chopin’s native village through the lens of three generations of a peasant family. As a fictionalized documentary, the film dramatizes class struggle and the social conditions of the rural Poland of Chopin’s youth and ends with images of tireless workers building a new egalitarian society a century after Chopin’s death. ̇ Z elazowa Wola performs several “restorative” maneuvers connecting Chopin’s music to the peasant ancestors of the film’s working-class family. In the beginning, which features Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17, No. 4, the voiceover narrator deceitfully asserts that the mazurka derives from a folk tune Chopin’s mother sang to soothe him. In this piece written in ternary form with a fourbar introduction and a coda, the outer sections of the mazurka underscore a scene of a father and son cutting down trees in heavy snow. By contrast, the

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  257 brisker drone-like middle section provides diegetic music for a peasant dance. This middle section is played at a faster tempo than is called for in the score (at a quarter note equal to185bpm as opposed to Chopin’s quarter note tempo marking of 152), thus undermining the intentions of the composer in favor of the ideological goals of the filmmaker to connect the mazurka with peasant culture. Finally, Chopin’s reprise of the first four measures of the mazurka in the coda is echoed in the film by the narrator who reiterates the ever-presence of social inequality while the scene ends with more images of child labor. Restorative nostalgia is likewise manifested in the scene underscored by a polonaise. A boy, presumably Chopin, with his back turned away from the camera, performs Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, Op. 44 at the manor before an unseen salon audience. Ce ̨kalski cuts to close-ups of peasant children gathered outside an open window, surreptitiously listening to the music. The film alternates between shots of the children and close-ups of delicate porcelain figurines, shots of the pianist’s hands pressing the keys and hammers striking the strings, and images of grueling peasant labor. The scene ends when a woman suddenly closes the window, whereupon the polonaise is cut short and the children disperse. Several propagandistic ploys unfold in this scene. Ce ̨kalski tackles the ­polonaise—the quintessential character dance of Polish nobility—but undermines the historical association of Chopin with aristocratic patrons. The porcelain figurines, which appear to be handmade apparently for wealthy families who are able to afford them, can be interpreted to imply the exploitation of workers by the ruling class and to represent, within a salon setting, a cultural phenomenon described by Halina Goldberg: “Salon culture was scorned by the Communist regime as representative of bourgeois decadence and the aristocratic abuse of wealth” (Music in Chopin’s Warsaw 8). The montage suggestively aligns a musician’s work with manual labor by calling attention to the mechanisms underpinning the sound production of the piano. The presence of the children insinuates the future appropriation of the polonaise by the working class. ̇ Z elazowa Wola culminates with the Etude Op. 10, No. 12, the so-called “Revolutionary.” A pianist from a working-class background—a descendent, we are told, of the peasant family—is shown playing at the Chopin museum in Żelazowa Wola. After this diegetic exposition of the music’s performance, the montage of energetic workers, factory work, and agricultural advances follows while the etude underscores the rest of the film. “Chopin’s music had returned to its source, to the people building a new life,” asserts the narrator, thereby linking Chopin with ideas of social progress and modernization. The transformation of the historical Chopin from a mourner in Ballada ̇ f-moll into a socialist hero in Z elazowa Wola shows the work of restorative nostalgia. When all seemed irreparably lost in 1945, Chopin—as a symbol for the Polish nation—endured. The image of flames engulfing the Chopin monument, Norwid’s proverbial verse about Chopin’s burning piano, and the surviving photographs of pre-war Warsaw were ways in which Ballada f-moll expresses yearning for a Poland that no longer exists. The photographs of Warsaw from before the war anchor the inter-war period—the period of Poland’s short-lived independence—as the object of nostalgic longing.

258  Ewelina Boczkowska This yearning for the inter-war period at the heart of Ballada f-moll was problematic for the new post-war government. Poland regained independence in 1918 after over a century of stateless status, having been partitioned in 1795 by three neighboring powers. When the frontiers of Poland were re-­ established, the work of economic and cultural reintegration of diverse Polish people of the former Russian, Prussian, and Austrian territories was periodically undermined by threats to the nation’s sovereignty (Davis 105).10 The Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland on 1 September 1939 and 17 September 1939, respectively, ended Poland’s independence and unleashed ethnic cleansing and mass exterminations by both Hitler and Stalin. The displaced survivors and war refugees returning home in 1945 were understandably weary of the Soviet-backed government. Equally problematic for developing a relationship of trust was the position that the Soviets adapted toward Poland at the end of the war. On 22 July 1944, the Soviet Union announced the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, or PKWN)—a pro-communist organization with no ties to the rightful Polish government-in-exile or the underground Resistance groups. Stalin’s refusal to provide military support to the Resistance in the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation in August 1944 led to the massacre of Polish fighters of the Home Army. The ill-fated uprising weakened Poland’s military position and, as per Stalin’s design, PKWN became the basis of the new post-war government. While the communists found some support amongst the Poles, in June 1946, the overwhelming majority of the populace disapproved of the communist authorities.11 A rare glimpse of nostalgic homecoming, Ballada f-moll was known only to a small audience of the Warsztat Filmowy Młodych (Youth’s film workshop). By November 1945, when the Polish film industry became nationalized, scripts lacking in ideological clarity were censored, and many films that had been made were shelved. Panufnik made Ballada f-moll while working with the Warsztat’s likeminded filmmakers; facing opposition from the film industry, members of this group began to exercise self-censorship and the unit soon disbanded under ideological pressures (Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego 132). Ballada f-moll was never shown to a wider audience after the war, but some of its footage appeared, uncredited, at the beginning of a film about the reconstruction of Warsaw, a year later.12 For the next decade or so—in a “true” Socialist Realist spirit—any documentary-type footage of ruins was mediated by an uplifting voiceover commentary and contrasted with footage of reconstruction. Ballada f-moll was thus an isolated reflection upon the abyssal devastation of war. ̇ Z elazowa Wola, on the contrary, reveled in the social progress made under communism. Ce ̨kalski’s story is emblematic of the left-leaning Polish intellectuals of the inter-war years who became wholeheartedly committed communists after the war.13 An archival document from 1950 shows him ranked in the second to top tier of most trusted filmmakers, outranked only by three others (including Ford, the director of Młodos ́c ́ Chopina).14 Post-war

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  259 propaganda films presented Ce ̨kalski with an opportunity to continue making socially minded films that had been his hallmark since he co-founded (with Ford) Stowarzysznie Miłos ́ników Filmu Artystyczniego START (Society of art film aficionados) in 1929. ̇ Z elazowa Wola ushered in a new era. The introduction of Socialist Realism in 1949—the year that also marked the centennial anniversary of Chopin’s death—yielded new cultural policies. The doctrine demanded that the arts would serve the cultural function of educating the masses in the socialist spirit and would help eliminate any cosmopolitan and bourgeois tendencies (Haltof 56). Special emphasis was placed on positive heroes, images enforcing a classless society, and Marxist interpretations of history. In a speech inaugurating the Chopin Year in March 1949, President Bolesław Bierut outlined a hardline ̇ approach to Chopin’s music. His speech sounds like a blueprint for Z elazowa Wola. To paraphrase, Bierut stated that Chopin drew inspiration from the melodies of his Mazovian ancestors, whose songs reflect centuries of hardship and unspoken longings of the people. Skewed with restorative nostalgia, the perception of Chopin’s musical roots in culture “of the ­people”—the Polish word Bierut uses, ludowe, may also refer to folk or peasant cultures—shaped the reception of Chopin’s work as broadly accessible and educational. The patriotism emanating from Chopin’s oeuvre, Bierut said, shall, in turn, inspire the working classes’ (masy ludowe) pursuit of happiness. In his view, teaching the masses to feel the beauty and excitement in Chopin’s music would be the greatest honor bestowed upon the composer (Bierut).15 In line with the new policy articulated by Bierut regarding Chopin, propaganda films turned to Chopin’s mazurkas more than any other Chopin genre to cement the folk connection. Choreographies of the mazurka dance were ̇ common in films from this era.16 In Z elazowa Wola, the mazurka scene at the tavern stands out as a diegetic moment depicting peasant customs in the film. In Młodos ́c ́ Chopina, with which I began this essay, the lengthy wedding sequence employed dancers from two opera companies to recreate a traditional peasant dance celebration (00:42:16–00:46:10). Historian Teresa Walas points out the asynchronicity of formalized national traditions, including the establishment of professional folk-dance ensembles (49–55).17 She argues that until the late 1940s folk dances were commonly thought of as remnants of feudal power structures in the rural regions. But when the first state-sponsored folḱ ̨sk were formed in 1948, living folk tradidance ensembles Mazowsze and S la tions of various regions of Poland became more regimented and fixed into a uniform classless institution. As Boym reminds us, the paradox of restorative nostalgia is that “the stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is presented” (42). Nostalgia’s return-to-origins scenario excludes viewpoints that conflict with the master narrative. Stalinist Chopin films normalized this practice by returning repeatedly to the visual trope of peasants dancing the mazurka— imagery that, ironically, had been exploited by Poles themselves as a marker of national continuity during the period of Poland’s lost independence in the

260  Ewelina Boczkowska ̇ nineteenth century.18 As such, Z elazowa Wola appropriates the past to advance Socialist Realism while Ballada f-moll explores the national symbolism surrounding Chopin to find solace within it.

Purposeful Amnesia Utwory Chopina w kolorze (1944) and Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach (1947) The group of films I consider next mediate between a wistful meditation on the past, seen in Ballada f-moll, and the new practice of national commemȯ ration evident in Z elazowa Wola. Between 1944 and 1948, several filmmakers made documentary montage films that juxtaposed Chopin’s music with impressionistic shots of nature to convey reflective longing for a bygone Poland while making propagandist—restoring—claims about Poland’s past. During his wartime tenure at the Polish Information Center in New York, Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski created an imaginative study of Polish landscape under attack in Utwory Chopina w kolorze. The film was an outlier in his war propaganda films. Ce ̨kalski generally employed a mix of archival footage and black-and-white documentary footage in conjunction with a propagandistic voiceover narration. By contrast, Utwory Chopina w kolorze was shot in color and offered no such commentary. The film opened with footage of the music critic Olin Downes who announced three pieces by Chopin—Nocturne in F-sharp Major Op. 15, No. 2, Mazurka in F Minor Op. 7, No. 3, and Etude Op. 10, No. 12—and introduced the pianist Witold Małcuży ński at the recording studio. The rest of the film offered impressionistic visualizations of Chopin’s music and was shot outdoors. Utwory Chopina w kolorze adhered nevertheless to one important wartime film convention. It followed the twofold plot structure depicting the Polish people as a once vibrant nation now under the Nazi assault.19 To emphasize this narrative arc, the nocturne and mazurka segments show a picturesque landscape, including shots of a cloudy sky and shimmering surface of a lake and images of abundant crops, a shrine, and a scarecrow—bringing together pastoral, religious, and folkloric references to Polish culture. These symbols are subsequently shown being set on fire and annihilated by enemy air raids in the etude. While the mazurka montage also features two ballet dancers in folk costumes, the casual ease of the dance is violently suppressed as the film ends with long shots of warfare destruction and abstract geometrical projections on the screen. Intended for a Polish diaspora audience in the United States to help raise funds for the Polish war effort, Utwory Chopina w kolorze carefully circumscribes the patriotic sentiment in the broadest possible terms of longing. Scenes of rolling hills, verdant forests, and pristine lakes are intended to evoke a familiar Polish landscape, despite being shot in the Adirondacks. Downes, who introduces the film as a “visual translation” of Chopin’s music, remarked on the

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  261 essential character of each piece: a reverie in the nocturne, cultural expression (as seen through national dance) in the mazurka, and defiance in the etude, respectively. He concluded that Chopin’s music was “not only the expression of Poland but also all of humanity.”20 In Utwory Chopina w kolorze—as in Ballada f-moll a year later—the music stood for a generalizable loss caused by the war and the longing for a bygone time. Similarly to Ce ̨kalski, Tadeusz Makarczyński made several documentary films based around Chopin. His Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach focused on the 1946 inaugural annual festival commemorating a Chopin concert in 1826 in the small mountain town of Duszniki-Zdrój. The film combines concert footage with shots of nature and historical artifacts, including etchings of eighteenth-century Warsaw and Chopin’s death mask by sculptor Auguste Clésinger. A male narrator provides a commentary while Chopin’s music— initially the Polonaise Op. 26, No. 2—underscores film images. Concert renditions of Mazurka in B Minor, No. 25 by Zofia Rabcewiczowa and Waltz in E-flat major, Op. 18 (“Grande valse brillante”) by Henryk Sztompka follow.21 Profile shots of Rabcewiczowa intercept with close-up shots of the audience and then images of foggy fields, forests, dew-covered spider webs, sunsets, wild flowers, and mountainous cliffs. Front shots of Sztompka alternate with shots of water (such as creeks, waterfalls, lakes, and rain), stormy skies, and flocks of birds. The film deploys these images of nature and landscape to specific ends. As Iwona Sowińska writes, instead of Chopin’s native Mazovian plains in central Poland, we are shown mountainous vistas more characteristic of the southwestern region of the country, specifically the Sudeten Mountains and Silesia (“Chopin in Polish Cinema,” par. 5). In the wake of territorial changes agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, at which the terms for the end of the Second World War were negotiated, formerly German towns such as Duszniki-­ Zdrój (once Bad Reinerz) had recently been annexed to the southwest region of Poland. By claiming this mountainous landscape for Chopin’s music, the film was temporalizing this space to justify Poland’s right to those areas. The two films explore the nostalgic liminality of national memory. On the one hand, Chopin’s music imbued the images of natural landscape with a poetic quality and unspecified longing—a reflective nostalgia. Utwory Chopina w kolorze was a remake of Ce ̨kalski’s own avant-garde film of which the footage was lost.22 Both Utwory Chopina w kolorze and Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach harkened back to the pre-war aesthetics of social documentaries and experimental films by filmmakers associated with the film group START, wherein artistic expression and experimental cinematic techniques served as social commentary. Ce ̨kalski had been at the forefront of this approach in the 1930s. Utwory Chopina w kolorze was shot in the prevalent poetic style of the earlier movement—both Ballada f-moll and Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach continued this aesthetic after the war. On the other hand, despite their lyrical visuals, Utwory Chopina w kolorze and Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach both had propagandist aims. Following the tradition of anti-Fascist war films, Ce ̨kalski used

262  Ewelina Boczkowska generalizable images of home and the familiar landscape to move his viewers to fundraise the Polish war efforts.23 The political motivations of communist propaganda, not yet apparent in Ce ̨kalski’s wartime film, were present in Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach. Makarczyński employed a similar strategy of filming recognizable landscapes but used this material to manipulate historical memory. Given the film’s location in a Silesian mountain town, his film possibly conjured up memories of territorial expansion and political sovereignty before Poland’s partitions.24 In 1947, Makarczyński’s film served the rehabilitation campaign carried out by Polish communists to legitimize and gain popular support for their government—these attempts were cut short with the Soviet takeover of the country in 1949. Historian Marcin Zaremba elucidates the fervent nationalist rhetoric of this early campaign (as opposed to its later rebranding as socialist and revolutionary). He mentions, for example, the commemorative events surrounding the return and enclosure of the urn with Chopin’s heart in the funerary monument at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw on 17 October 1945 (170–71). On this occasion, religious and political leaders compared Chopin’s heart to a blooming red rose amid the ruined city, thus knitting metaphorical language of healing with a patriotic message of reconstruction. As Zaremba reflects, referencing Chopin was a way to display one’s patriotism and nationalist convictions to legitimize the new system (171). To understand the gradual legitimation of communist power, we can think of restorative nostalgia as “ideological camouflage,” a term Amy Drozdowska uses to describe how the communist government appropriated national symbols in order to rally the nation’s approval behind the party. She outlines this process on the example of the Old Town Warsaw. In the rebuilding of Warsaw after the war, the Old Town escaped the prevailing style of socialist architecture. Instead, the focus was on preserving the “authenticity” of the city’s historic core. While bricks used to rebuild the Old Town were made from the rubble found at the site of its destruction by the Nazis, urban planners decided not to use photographs of the Old Town from the 1930s for the reconstruction. Instead, paintings of the Old Town by the eighteenth-century Italian Bernardo Bellotto served as the blueprint for historical accuracy in the restoration of the buildings’ facades. This was in spite of Bellotto’s reputation for taking artistic license in his renderings of Warsaw to please his employer, Stanisław II Augustus—Poland’s last king before the partitions. The Old Town of 1953 was, as Drozdowska concludes, an imaginary rendering of a city that had never truly existed; its reconstruction—a case of ideological camouflage (“New Old Town”), or even, we might add, a purposeful ­amnesia—erasure—of Russia’s aggression toward Poland throughout the nineteenth century. Several parallels can be drawn between the Old Town reconstruction and Makarczyński’s Chopin film. Both projects celebrated national memory. Both also worked to conceal the propagandist whims of the ruling party and did so by tapping into the collective longing for a different past. In the case of the

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  263 Old Town, David Crowley writes that the historic neighborhood “had hardly flourished under foreign control for much of the nineteenth century … By contrast, Warsaw before the partitions could be eulogized as the stage on which the Polish Enlightenment was made … Although the last king has often been represented as vain and ultimately lacking in courage, the image of an elegant and enlightened Warsaw over which he ruled at the very moment Poland’s enemies were plotting its effacement has remained a potent and motivating myth, underlying reconstruction after 1945” (48–49). In other words, the reconstruction efforts returned the classist luster to the former crumbling district. Likewise, Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach, with etchings of eighteenth-­century Warsaw framing the impressionistic shots of the southwestern mountains of former Commonwealth Poland, staged a comforting historical continuation of Poland’s glory days—seemingly subtle and indirect.25

Uneasy Reconciliations Młodość Chopina (1951) and La note bleue (1991) This third case study compares two Chopin biopics created under very different circumstances: one at the height of Socialist Realism, and the other during the democratic transition of the early 1990s. Contemporaneous accounts hailed Ford’s Młodos ́c ́ Chopina the artistic achievement of Socialist Realism when the film came out in March 1952. The extent of Ford’s undertaking was imposing: the film featured over a hundred actors, called for nearly 2,000 costumes, and paid close attention to historical detail in careful reconstructions of nineteenth-century set designs and costumes (Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego 178). The arrangements of Chopin’s music by Kazimierz Serocki, the interpretations by the pianist and Chopin Competition winner Halina Czerny-­Stefańska, and the acting of Czesław Wołłejko in the title role counterbalanced the film’s heavy reliance on ideological rhetoric. The first Chopin biopic after 1989 was by the Polish émigré filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski. In La note bleue, the figure of an ill, melancholic émigré Chopin replaced Ford’s socialist visionary.26 In their antipodal depictions of Chopin’s romantic subjectivity, the two biopics represented similar nostalgic attempts to restore Chopin’s music for their own respective historical moments. Restorative nostalgia underpins the conspiracy scene in Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (01:13:32–01:18:09). Chopin is shown eager to discuss the outbreak in Paris of the July Revolution of 1830. At the house of the poet Stefan Witwicki, asked to wait for his friend in the drawing room, Chopin sits down at the piano and begins to play Polonaise in D Minor, Op. posth. 71, No.1 (1825), oblivious to the fact that a clandestine meeting of Polish revolutionaries, secretly plotting an anti-Russian uprising—the November Uprising of 1830—is taking place down the hall. These revolutionaries include both the supporters of the Constitutional Monarchy (the democracy of the wealthy aristocratic minority) and backers of Republicanism (or, social progress).27 Poland’s tense

264  Ewelina Boczkowska history with Russia is downplayed in the scene as a class issue. Supporters of social progress are also sympathetic to the plight of Russian revolutionaries— their spiritual forefathers who oppose the Tsar. Sowińska extrapolates that this alignment of Polish progressive thinkers with Russian revolutionaries reflected the film’s sympathy with the pro-Soviet fraction within the communist party after the war (Chopin idzie do kina 92). At the most contentious moment in the scene’s debate about the future of Poland, the camera focuses on historian Ignacy Lelewel, a staunch socialist. Lelewel’s paced speech and rhetorical pauses call attention to the Polonaise heard (in the underscoring) as coming from another room. In this instance, Chopin’s music becomes emblematic of a larger purpose and is meant to serve the socialist change advocated by Lelewel. By symbolically bestowing on Chopin the role of the spokesperson for the national cause, the scene seamlessly reconfigures the Polonaise so that it no longer signifies a noble character dance of aristocratic salons but instead represents the sound of the socialist revolution. Ford hones in on the influence of the revolutionary times on Chopin’s musical imagination after the November Uprising erupts. A montage sequence echoing an episode from Chopin’s writings—his feverish descriptions from Stuttgart of corpses and burned suburbs (Frick 231–34)—is set off by the sounds of a coachman’s bugle call on Chopin’s unsuccessful return to Warsaw (01:43:26– 01:46:08). Chopin transforms this bugle call in his mind into the solemn chordal opening of Etude Op. 25, No. 11, whose subsequently agitated passages underscore the imagined armed conflict in his mind. The same coupling of funereal piece and rampant music is evident again when Chopin deplores his inability to fight alongside his countrymen and succumbs to illness. In sporadic bouts of inspiration, he hears relentlessly in his mind fragments of Prelude in C Minor, Op. 28, No. 20 and the Revolutionary Etude (01:46:50–01:52:39). The melancholy Romantic fragment lends itself well to the representation of compositional struggle, as manifold interruptions prevent a full rendition of the short piece in this scene. Instead of playing the final tonic chord of the Prelude, Chopin instead moves on to the Revolutionary Etude in the same key. He struggles—in Serocki’s arrangement—to develop the composition fully. The first melodic phrase of the Etude (mm.10–12) comes to his mind, the image fades out, the music stops. What we see next is the close-up of Chopin in concert attire. Frontal shots of the pianist alternate with bird’s view shots of his fingers executing undulating scalar passages before the camera pans away from the stage to the attentive audience. The Etude—like the Polonaise earlier—is performed diegetically and in entirety. When the performance ends, one member of the awestricken Viennese public breaks the silence by exclaiming “Es lebe Polen!” (Long live Poland!) before the room erupts in a loud applause. The framing of the lonely compositional process as a heroic struggle precedes the ultimate instance of restorative nostalgia in the film: a pan-European revolution erupts to the sound of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude (01:59:10– 02:02:25). The call “Es lebe Polen!,” which is deeply ironic given the Austrian partition of Poland in Chopin’s day, clumsily helps shift the action of the film

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  265 from the concert hall onto the streets and from Vienna to Paris. Ford anchors the action historically in the anti-monarchist rebellion of June 1832 onto which he maps further meanings. In the words of one of Chopin’s friends in the film (02:01:39), this outbreak introduces “a new order, splendid and revolutionary [that] people are looking for.” Sowińska points out Ford’s asynchronous references to Eugene Delacroix’s iconic 1830 painting “Liberty Leads the People” and also to Raymond Bernard’s 1934 film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables (Chopin idzie do kina 97). The Etude—cut short four measures before the end—attaches itself to this revolutionary imagery. Its choice in the film is also unsurprising, given its use by Ce ̨kalski to elicit patriotic feelings in Utwory Chopina w kolorze and to affirm the socialist revolution in ̇ Z elazowa Wola. In Młodos ́c ́ Chopina, Chopin’s subjective compositional struggle culminates in a piece that heralds proletarian solidarity among nations. Ford’s restorative vision of Chopin crystalized over the three years that it took him to make Młodos ́c ́ Chopina. In June 1948, Film Polski launched an international competition for a screenplay about the life and music of ­Chopin in anticipation of the centennial the following year.28 From June through November of 1948, the press issued repeated calls for submissions and duly reported on the events surrounding the competition. The consensus was that the expectations for the film were high: this first Polish biopic about Chopin was intended to remedy foreign misrepresentations of the composer.29 Early in the process, newspapers occasionally ventured suggestions as to what such a biopic ought to be and how Chopin mattered to Polish national identity. On 6 June, Gazeta Ludowa reported on a film screening event at which Jerzy Toeplitz, the well-known film critic and chair of the screenplay contest, drew wider attention to the competition: This can be a biographical film encompassing Chopin’s entire life or just some brief episode (for example, the Varsovian period is of particular interest to us), or it can also be a film in which it is not Chopin but his music that plays the leading role. There are many pages of our history, including the last war, and particularly the Warsaw Uprising, that are connected dramatically with some of Chopin’s works. Such connections, which might be able to reflect Chopin’s Polishness even more strongly than is possible in a biographical work, could demonstrate his music’s great contribution to the life of the nation.30 While he acknowledged Chopin’s Polish upbringing and the importance of his music to Poles, Toepliz avoided casting the composer in a specific role but encouraged submissions that drew parallels to the recent war. A little over a week later, on 15 June, the Warsaw daily Kurier Codzienny pitched the idea for a Chopin film set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw: It was 1942. The windows were wide open, a dim electric light poured onto the street, and a melody that hardly fit the general mood could be

266  Ewelina Boczkowska heard. Someone was playing Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude. The performance was masterful. The pianist broke the cascade of notes once so that it was possible to hear the shouting of crowds rushing to the barricades, and then, bending his fingers over the keys again, he continued playing against the backdrop of the events outside. But this was the period when the Nazi authorities forbade performances of Chopin’s music. Although later withdrawn, the ban was still in effect at that time. Chopin was heard only in the underground concerts at Rabcewiczowa’s in Żoliborz [the northern neighborhood of Warsaw] or at Professor Woytowicz’s apartment. Chopin meant everything to us then [emphasis mine].31 The pitch was strikingly emotional and broadly nostalgic. The anonymous author took the reader back to the moment in time when hearing Chopin’s banned music was a defiant act of a people willing to risk their lives to attend an underground concert. The author possibly attended such a concert himself or herself. But it is also plausible that the description was based on other historical accounts—the memoir of the pianist and war survivor Władysław Szpilman or the Chopin episode in the first post-war feature film Zakazane Piosenki (1947, Forbidden songs), itself possibly based on the lived experience of that film’s music arranger, Roman Palester.32 The expression “Chopin meant everything to us then” in the passage above encapsulates the idea of Chopin as a source of heroic defiance. Similar interpretations, still possible in 1948, were shortly brought under one cultural policy and one artistic vision. Of the 97 submissions, including 14 sent in from abroad, none won the first place (no screenplay was received); the second prize and third prize were awarded to two short stories. Ford largely ignored the selection committee’s ranking and instead wrote the screenplay himself. The director later reflected that he selected for the film only the aspects essential to Chopin’s creativity. He sought a consistent line in “Chopin’s character, life, environment, and contradictions” that would reveal “the revolutionary character of his music” (qtd. in Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego 178). Żuławski’s La note bleue too was a product of its day but yields a very different interpretation of the historical Chopin as a melancholic émigré. As Poland emerged from communism after 1989, the core romantic beliefs of heroic sacrifice and national identity were met with skepticism under the new democratic system. Films steered away from representations of Chopin’s “Polishness” to depictions of his melancholia and personal obsessions. Żuławski’s biopic exemplifies this new trend and its restorative nostalgia. La note bleue subverts the familiar nationalist tropes of the previous eras with a newfound ironic detachment and mistrust of the established narratives of the composer’s subjectivity. The soundtrack contributes to this destabilization of meaning through a fragmentary underscoring and frantic diegetic playing both of which, combined, make for music’s essentially constant presence in the film. The musical selections are no longer limited to mazurkas and polonaises, occasional

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  267 nocturnes, preludes or waltzes, and the compulsory Revolutionary Etude that the earlier films featured. La note bleue incorporates heretofore overlooked pieces such as fragments of Scherzo, Op. 31, No. 2 (00:16:34–00:17:48 and 00:18:31–00:20:50), Concerto Op. 21, No. 2 (01:18:00–01:19:34 and 01:19:40–01:23:47), Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. posth. 66 (01:27:58–01:31:11 and 01:31:42–01:33:00), and Berceuse, in D-flat Major, Op. 57 (01:36:57– 01:38:08). Pieces tend to begin in the midst of a section only to be abandoned mid-phrase. Recorded on site on a period Pleyel piano, diegetic performances contain wrong notes and incoherent fragments of pieces or isolated measures strenuously strung together—a sonic analog to disorderly world of the film. The underscoring, by contrast, contains the barely audible fragments of Chopin piano works perfectly executed by pianist and Chopin specialist Janusz Olejniczak in the title role. In contrast to the diegetic music, the underscoring hints at another plane of existence: the aspirational and seemingly alienating realm of artistic creativity. Żuławski occasionally dismantles this established diegetic/non-diegetic music dichotomy such as in the abrupt interruption of Chopin’s exquisite evening performance of Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 72, No.1 (01:55:19–01:56:49). La note bleue revolves around the disorderly emotions of the main characters. The story takes place over the course of a single day during Chopin and novelist George Sand’s last summer together at her Nohant house in 1846. Chopin, Sand, and Sand’s adult children, Maurice and Solange, enjoy the company of their many distinguished friends—Delacroix, Pauline Viardot, Albert Grzymała, and others. All the characters are prone to emotional intensity, sexual intrigue, and petty mannerisms. Sand, the self-proclaimed outspoken socialist, offends the sensibilities of her aristocratic guests, via her blunt political opinions or via her joking about Chopin’s profuse perspiration. Żuławski’s chaste Chopin refuses Solange’s sexual advances. He suffers from severe cough and fever, which are symptomatic of the tuberculosis that ended his life in 1849. He is shown as being so sick that he must be held by his manservant in order to be able to play the piano. Such a portrayal undermines the earlier associations of the composer with the youthful Chopin aflame with thoughts of socialist revolution. The film trivializes any symbolism Chopin’s music might hold for Poles. At one point during the evening, Chopin bemoans Poland playing what he says is “la prière d’un Polonais en détresse” (the prayer of a distressed Pole) in the lyrical passage from the Scherzo, Op. 31, No. 2. He interrupts the Scherzo and begins the Polonaise in A Major, Op. 40, No. 1 (the “Military”), at which point, Grzymała, a fellow Pole in this French group, eagerly swings his sword with an over-exaggerated heroic gesture of someone who is confidently inebriated (01:52:00–01:53:15). Polonaise in C Minor, Op. 40, No. 2, heard during a scene in which Solange insults her fiancé Ferdinand, is stripped of any Polish national subtext (00:51:22–00:53:01). In another instance, having had a little too much to drink, the house guests go looking for Chopin to show him their similarly intoxicated dog (00:46:00–00:48:37). At Sand’s request to play

268  Ewelina Boczkowska something for the pet, Chopin plays Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1 (“The Minute Waltz”). The swirling dance quickly degenerates into a mortifying cacophony and is abandoned by Chopin in favor of a frantic rendition of the Revolutionary Etude—or what in fact is a de-composed version of the iconic work in Młodos ́c ́ Chopina. Similarly, Chopin’s urgent, incessant improvisation on two measures of retransition—based on the half step E and F natural—at the end of the middle section of the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17, No.4 enrages Sand who deplores his arduous compositional process but does not comment on the character dance itself (00:27:15–00:29:07). La note bleue also makes Chopin’s obsession with death central to the plot. This obsession is represented through the inclusion of puppets, phantasmagorical beings, and bacchanals in the film. In the theater-within-the-film finale, the guests, each holding his or her own look-alike puppet, prophesize about each of their destinies before an audience of mysterious beings. Except for Sand and Delacroix, who sense these spirits intuitively, no other character sees them. As these phantasmagorical creatures slowly encroach on the film’s reality, the inhabitants of the house themselves grow more and more drawn to their surrogate puppets. The puppets provide a vehicle for the houseguests to communicate their deepest wishes to the film audience. Chopin first finds his puppet laying in a coffin with a lit candle held in its hands. He is inspired by it to play his funeral March. as the room around him fills with specters on stilts and other beings wearing drapes in the red and white national colors of Poland (01:38:00–01:39:40). Żuławski’s use of grotesque, morbid imagery in his representation of Chopin was not an isolated case.33 A year earlier, the Polish émigré filmmaker based in the United States, Zbig Rybczyński made Funeral March, a short experimental film that formed part of an hour-long program set to canonic works of Western art music, titled The Orchestra (1990)–shot in the then new high-definition technology. In Funeral March, Rybczyński distills the rhythms and the ternary form of Chopin’s piece to structure his visual cues. In the March sections of the piece, individuals materialize on the screen alone or in groups in front of the keyboard that frames the bottom of the frame. Appearing in mourning or else portrayed as macabre beings, these individuals each press down a note in a gesture synchronized to the March rhythms. Immediately upon the release of a note, they walk or fade away. Funeral March subverts the prevalent cultural symbols of public mourning. As an example of this subversion, in the second March, Rybczyński tackles the subject of national heroism. Individual mourners first place gifts, dinner plates, and then dry flowers on the keyboard. The keyboard is clearly evocative here of a tomb. Then, groups of wounded soldiers and war heroes follow one another in a funeral parade that borders on grotesque due to the growingly exaggerated acting—and perhaps, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ford’s montage battle sequence in Młodos ́c ́ Chopina. In Funeral March, Rybczyński replaces the dashing bullets of Ford’s battlefield with objects such as boots, suitcases, loaves of bread, kielbasa sausage, and apples being thrown at the

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  269 characters. The characters’ body language and facial expressions communicate a variety of exaggerated emotions, from sacrifice and prayer to despair and revenge. Żuławski and Rybczyński’s reimagining of Chopin’s romantic subjectivity as rooted in intense emotion and obsession with death is indicative of a broader cultural shift after 1989. Teresa Walas, for example, describes the crisis of national identity of the early 1990s when the newly decentralized cultural institutions suddenly found themselves at the whims of the free market and in urgent need of redefining their cultural canons that had not in some way been appropriated by the communist regime. The unspecified yearning for the past, Walas argues, was rooted in unresolved mourning of the Second World War and the communist era (103–18). In his recent monograph about the Polish phenomenon of Socialist Realism, historian Marek Hendrykowski studies the collective amnesia and trauma surrounding the Stalinist era, which remains to this day one of the least studied periods in Poland’s post-war history (9–10). By gravitating toward Chopin’s ghosts, Żuławski and Rybczyński challenged a longstanding “memory” of Chopin. They substituted the figure of the earlier socialist hero for a melancholic, suffering, and terminally ill émigré. Not unlike themselves, forced to leave Poland during the communist period and thus culturally severed from a continuous national identity, Żuławski and Rybczyński were perhaps also compelled to articulate that rupture through the most iconic Polish exile of all, Chopin. In their films, Poland is evoked constantly as a ghost figure—a distant but deeply ingrained memory of home. Emotional instability of the characters subverts Socialist Realist representations of romantic imagination. La note bleue also shifted the discussion away from Polish nationalism to the core human aspects of Chopin’s biography: his illness, failed relationships, and his persistent melancholia. A repulsive Chopin shows a postmodern suspicion of the communist past and highlights the directors’ own exilic realities.34

Conclusion For nearly two centuries, Chopin’s music has sustained generations of Poles in their longing for a better future. Inevitably then, Chopin would be featured as the subject in several Polish films. I have argued that in times of war and political instability, Polish filmmakers drawn to the national composer were recontextualizing the historical Chopin and creating comforting versions of Poland’s history as a means of coping with foreign brutality and uncertain times. Svetlana Boym called this kind of rebranding of history, rooted in an intense yearning for stability, “restorative nostalgia.” Restorative nostalgia, I  argued, was a motivating force behind the cultural reconfigurations of Chopin in Polish cinema at three historical conjunctures: under the German occupation, the Soviet “takeover,” and after the democratic liberation. In Ce ̨kalski’s war film Utwory Chopina w kolorze and Panufnik’s Ballada f-moll, Chopin functioned as a consoling symbol of Poland. Both films borrowed art film

270  Ewelina Boczkowska techniques and an evocative aesthetic of the inter-war Polish experimental film tradition. Panufnik’s film, which dealt more forcefully with national loss than with post-war politics, was shelved under the new communist regime because it lacked a clear ideological message of Soviet liberation. The vehement period of political transition that culminated in the imposition of Stalinism in 1949 saw the creation of films that were both reflective and propagandist in their nostalgic inclinations. Makarczyński’s Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach, for example, used Chopin’s music to make implicit claims to the territories annexed to Poland’s western border after the war. During Stalinism and the post-1989 era, visions of Chopin as a socialist hero and melancholic émigré, ̇ respectively, took hold. Stalinist propaganda films—Ce ̨kalski’s Z elazowa Wola and Ford’s Młodos ́c ́ Chopina—all appropriated Chopin to legitimatize ­Soviet-led communism in Poland. The films imposed onto the historical Chopin future-oriented, teleological plots of class struggle and social revolution. This model crumbled with the fall of the Iron Curtain, allowing for repressed traumas to creep into representations of Chopin in Żuławski’s La note bleue and Rybczyński’s Funeral March. This time Chopin would hardly symbolize Poland at all. Rather, these émigré filmmakers’ depictions of a repulsively morbid Chopin allowed for a way out of prescribed communist narratives of Chopin and into an exploration of the trauma of national discontinuity, exile, and diasporic dislocation wrought by that very communism.

Notes 1 This expression was used in a description preceding a call for the film script competition that the state-run studio Film Polski launched in anticipation of the Chopin Centennial in 1949. “W setna ̨ rocznice ̨ s m ́ ierci Chopina,” Kurier Codzienny, 15 June 1948, Press clipping in A-340 Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. 2 Several textual variants of this song exist, but folk compilations list no musical transcriptions of this particular song. See for example Lud, edited by Kalina Lwow, vol. 4, Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze, 1898, p. 425. 3 See Milewski, “Chopin’s Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk” and Pekacz. 4 The idea of nostalgia as “the abdication of memory” is Lasch’s. See also Scanlan. 5 The heroic suffering of the nation and the sorrowful plight for sovereignty became familiar tropes in historical accounts of Chopin’s generation—a generation deeply marked by the failed anti-Russian Uprising of November 1830 and the forced exile that followed it. Contemporaneous accounts of the 1830 November Uprising include the poetic drama Dziady (1832, Forefathers’ eve, part III), the epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834, Sir Thaddeus), and the messianic poetic essays, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (1834, The books of the Polish people and of the Polish pilgrimage) by national bard Adam Mickiewicz. Recent scholarship includes Zakrzewska; Berger; Goldberg, “Remembering;” Milewski, “Magical Returns” and The Mazurka and National Imaginings, especially Chapter 2. 6 Given the timeframe of the present volume (1945–89), my discussion does not account for the more recent films such as Chopin. Pragnienie miłos ́ci (2002, Chopin—Desire for love). For the discussion of this film, see Mazierska; Lubelski,

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  271 “Chopin w trzech biograficznych filmach;” Sowińska, “Obecnos ć ́ muzyki Chopina w polskich filmach fabularnych.” 7 The cinematographer Adolf Forbert shot the film. 8 Zakrzewska and Bellman, especially Chapter 6, associate Chopin’s Ballade Op. 38, No. 2 with national martyrdom. 9 The statue was recast from a small surviving model of the original mold and rebuilt in Łazienki in 1958. 10 Davis lists six border wars in the short span between 1918 and 1921, including the Polish-Soviet War (101). 11 See for example Andrzej Paczkowski, Referendum z 30 czerwca 1946 r, Przebieg i wyniki, qtd. in Zaremba 136. 12 Tadeusz Makarczyński’s Suita Warszawska (1946, Warsaw suite), with music by Witold Lutosławski. 13 Born in Saratov, under the Russian empire, Ce ̨kalski was 12 when Poland regained independence in 1918. During his formative years in Warsaw, where he moved in 1920, the country witnessed a literary and scientific revival. Many young avant-garde intellectuals embraced Marxism as an ideology of modernity (Shore 1–7). Ce ̨kalski’s own leftist inclinations were fueled by a passion for film. Throughout the 1920s and again after the war, Ce ̨kalski made socially engaged documentaries and advocated for the formation of film clubs and film programs. In 1948, he was appointed Dean of the Łódz ́ Film School, a position which he held until his untimely death four years later on 31 May 1952 at the age of 45. 14 Direkcja Generalna Filmu Polskiego, sygn. 1/3, teczka 23/25, decree by Stanisław Albrecht, dated 18 February 1950, Archiwum Akt Nowych, qtd. in Lubelski, Historia niebyła kina PRL, pp. 63–64. 15 Excerpt from the speech: Chopin czerpał z nieprzebranej skarbnicy twórczos ć i ludowej, z motywów i melodii ludowych na naszym Mazowszu, melodii, które utkane były w cia ̨gu stuleci i odzwierciedlały smutki i rados ć i tego ludu, jego niedole i te ̨sknoty niewypowiedzialne…. Gora ̨cy patriotyzm Fryderyka Chopina, płyna ̨cy z jego utworów niechaj sie ̨ stanie z kolei natchnieniem milionów w ich pracy nad budowa ̨ szcze ̨s ĺ iwego życia. (Bierut) 16 Mazurki Chopina (1949, Chopin’s mazurkas) is the only outlier in that it documents concert renditions of piano mazurkas by contestants of the 1949 Chopin Piano Competition. 17 See also Mach 67–69. 18 Milewski, The Mazurka and National Imaginings 1–4. 19 In his war propaganda films such as To jest Polska (1940, This is Poland) and Biały Orzeł (1942, The white eagle), Ce ̨kalski first portrays Poles as freedom-­ loving people with a courageous past of resisting oppression and then frames their heroic fight alongside other nations against fascism. Ce ̨kalski very possibly developed this twofold narrative approach by studying the propaganda films of the British Ministry of Information. Listen to Britain is a representative film that uses evocative images and sounds to show British society at war (Reeves 166). 20 See also Downes 117. 21 The narrator misidentifies the piece as Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1. 22 Descriptions of Ce ̨kalski’s lost short experimental film Trzy Etiudy Chopina (1937, Three Chopin etudes) appear in Toeplitz, Historia sztuki filmowej 409 and Ozimek 61. 23 Ce ̨kalski’s artistic conception in Utwory Chopina w kolorze was likely influenced by his work as the producer of Calling Mr. Smith (1943, Wzywamy pana

272  Ewelina Boczkowska

24 25 26 27

28

29 30

31

32

Smitha; UK, Poland) by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. The film was an incendiary condemnation of the Holocaust, paired documentary and experimental modes of storytelling, and contrasted musical fragments by Bach, Chopin, and Szymanowski with the acoustically distorted Nazi anthem Horst Wessel Lied. In one brief segment set to Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. posth. 72, No. 1, the shot of a turning shellac record was juxtaposed with that of falling leaves and the sole of a shoe crushing the record. Upon this symbolic silencing gesture, the narrator presses the viewer into taking action against the Third Reich. The film was shown privately, first at the Gaumont British cinema in London in early October 1943 and then two months later at the Edinburgh Film Guild to Polish and British politicians and journalists (see Lemann 84– 86; Ozimek 49; and Lee 110–12). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was one of the largest states in Europe at its height in the early 1600s. The three partitions of the Commonwealth occurred in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Sowińska, “Chopin in Polish Cinema,” par. 7. La note bleue is loosely based on the 1937 three-act comedy play Lato w Nohant (Summer in Nohant) by Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Historically, the Monarchists, led by Prince Adam Czartoryski, supported modernization and diplomatic relations with the West—a position, which appealed to the middle-class professionals such as Chopin’s family. By contrast, nineteenth-century Polish Republicans advocated transforming the centuries-­ long democracy of the gentry into a democratic political nation based not on a hereditary title but citizenship. In the Constitutional Kingdom of Poland (1815–30), members of the landless gentry were stripped of their right to vote and grew resentful of the Tsar and the wealthy Polish aristocratic minority. See Walicki 31–42. A 30-page typed manuscript was required, including character development and plot summaries. Film Polski reserved the right to alter the script. The winners were announced on 12 November 1948. A-340 Folder, Biblioteka Filmoteki Narodowej, Warsaw. Non-Polish biopics included Abschiedswalzer (1934, The farewell waltz, ­Germany), La Chanson de l’Adieu (1934, The farewell song, France), and A Song to Remember (1945, USA). For an overview of these films, see Mitchell 51–58. Polish original: “Może to byc ́ wie ̨c film biograficzny, obejmuja ̨cy całe życie Chopina lub tylko jakis ́ fragment (np. bardzo dla nas interesuja ̨cy okres warszawski), ale może byc ́ również film, w którym nie Chopin, lecz jego muzyka odegra role ̨ bohatera. Jest wiele kart w naszej historii, choc b́ y i z ostatniej wojny, a zwłaszczaz Powstania Warszawskiego, zwia ̨zanych dramatycznie z pewnymi utworami Chopina. Taka koncepcja mogłaby nawet silniej, niż utwór biograficzny, przemówic ́ polskos ć ia ̨ Chopina i okazac ́ wielki udział jego muzyki w życiu narodu.” Polish original: “Rok to był 1942. Okna były szeroko otwarte, to też wraz z nikłym swiatłem elektrycznym wylewała sie ̨ na ulice i rozprzestrzeniała po niej, jakże nie licuja ̨ca z ogólnym nastrojem melodia. Ktos ́ grał Etiude  ̨ Rewolucyjna ̨ Chopina. Grał po mistrzowsku, zrywaja ̨c raz siekliwa ̨ kaskade ̨ tonów, w której słychac ́ było zda sie ̨ krzyk pe ̨dza ̨cych na barykady tłumów, raz znowu przegiegaja ̨c palcami po klawiszach, wybiegał za kulisy zdarzeń. A był to przecież okres, w którym, władze niemieckie zakazały produkcji utworów Chopina, zakaz, który został wprawdzie póz ń iej cofnie ̨ty, lecz obowia ̨zywał wówczas. Chopina grano tylko na konspiracyjnych koncertach u Rabcewiczowej na Żoliborzu lub w mieszkaniu prof. Wojtowicza. Chopin był wówczas dla nas wszystkim.” See Lubelski, Historia niebyła and Milewski, this volume.

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  273 33 On these morbid aspects discussed in Chopin scholarship, see Kramer, Boczkowska, and Przybylski. 34 Rybczyński sought political asylum in the United States after the imposition of martial law in 1981 defeated the oppositional Solidarity movement. He received an Academy Award for his animated short film Tango (1981) and later gained critical acclaim as a pioneer in high-definition technology. During the communist period, Żuławski’s non-conformist style caused his work to be banned in Poland and resulted in his exile to France.

Works Cited Bellman, Jonathan D. Chopin’s Polish Ballade Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom. Oxford University Press, 2010. Berger, Karol. “Chopin’s Ballade Op. 23 and The Revolution of the Intellectuals.” Chopin Studies 2, edited by John Risk and Jim Samson, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 72–81. Bierut, Bolesław. “Fryderyk Chopin 1810–1849.” Polska Kronika Filmowa, no. 10, 1949, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWyK53IDmnU. Accessed 7 February 2018. Boczkowska, Ewelina. “Chopin’s Ghosts.” Chopin’s Subjects, special issue of 19th-Century Music, vol. 35, no. 3, Spring 2012, pp. 204–23. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Crowley, David. Warsaw. Reaktion Books, 2003. Davis, Norman. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. Oxford University Press, 2001. Downes, Olin. The Lure of Music: Picturing the Human Side of Great Composers, with Stories of Their Inspired Creations. Harper & Brothers, 1922. Drozdowska, Amy. “New Old Town.” 99pi, 5 February 2013, www.99percent invisible.org/episode/episode-72-new-old-town/. Accessed 6 March 2017. Frick, David, translator. Chopin’s Polish Letters, The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, 2016. Goldberg, Halina. “‘Remembering that Tale of Grief:’ The Prophetic Voice in Chopin’s Music.” The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Halina Goldberg, Indiana University Press, 2004, pp. 54–92. ———. Music in Chopin’s Warsaw. Oxford University Press, 2008. Haltof, Marek. Polish National Cinema. Berghahn Books, 2002. Hendrykowski, Marek. Socrealizm po polsku: studia i szkice. Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2015. Kramer, Lawrence. “Chopin at the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern Death.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 54, no. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 97–125. Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Norton, 1991. Lee, Matthew. “The Ministry of Information and anti-Fascist short films on the Second World War.” Holocaust and The Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, edited by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, Wallflower Press, 2005, pp. 106–15. Lemann, Jolanta. Eugeniusz Cękalski. Muzeum Kinematografii, 1996. Lubelski, Tadeusz. “Chopin w trzech biograficznych filmach fabularnych polskich reżyserów.” Chopin w kulturze polskiej, edited by Maciej Goła ̨b, Wydawnictwo Universytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009, pp. 265–84.

274  Ewelina Boczkowska ———. Historia kina polskiego: twórcy, filmy, konteksty. Videograf II, 2009. ———. Historia niebyła kina PRL. Znak, 2012. Mach, Zdzislaw. “National Anthems: The Case of Chopin as a National Composer.” Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, edited by Martin Stokes, Berg, 1994, pp. 61–70. Mazierska, Ewa. “Multifunctional Chopin: The Representation of Fryderyk Chopin in Polish Films.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 24, no. 2, 2004, pp. 253–68. Milewski, Barbara. “Chopin’s Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 23, no. 2, Fall 1999, pp. 113–35. ———. The Mazurka and National Imaginings. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2002. UMI, 2002. ———. “Magical Returns and the Interior Landscape of Chopin’s Mazurkas.” The Sources of Chopin’s Creative Style: Inspirations and Contexts, edited by Artur Szklener, John Comber, and Magdalena Chylińska, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2005, pp. 71–80. Mitchell, Charles P. The Great Composers Portrayed on Film 1913 through 2002. ­McFarland & Company, 2004. Okoń, Waldemar. “The Monument of Fryderyk Chopin by Waclaw Szymanowski: Concepts and Reality.” The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ­ alina Goldberg, Indiana University Press, 2004, pp. 40–54. edited by H Ozimek, Stanisław. “Film polski na obczyznie.” Historia filmu polskiego, edited by Jerzy Toeplitz, vol. 3 (1939–56), Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1974, pp. 42–73. Pekacz, Jolanta T. “The Nation’s Property: Chopin’s Biography as a Cultural Discourse.” Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigm, edited by Jolanta T. Pekacz, Ashgate Publishing, 2006, pp. 43–68. Przybylski, Ryszard. Cien ́ jaskółki, Esej o mys ́lach Chopina. Wydawnictwo Znak, 2009. Reeves, Nicholas. Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality. 1996. Continuum, 2003. Scanlan, Sean. “Introduction: Nostalgia.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Fall 2004, pp. 3–9, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ijcs/ijcs05-02.htm. Accessed 6 March 2018. Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968. Yale University Press, 2006. Sowińska, Iwona. “Chopin in Polish Cinema.” Limited edition DVD collection of Chopin. Filmowe Motywy, Filmoteka Narodowa, 2010. ———. Chopin idzie do kina. Universitas, 2013. ———. “Obecnos ć ́ muzyki Chopina w polskich filmach fabularnych.” Chopin w kulturze polskiej, edited by Maciej Goła ̨b, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009, pp. 285–327. Toeplitz, Jerzy. Historia sztuki filmowej, vol. 4 (1934–39). Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1955. Walas, Teresa. Zrozumiec ́ swój czas. Kultura polska po komunizmie. Rekonesans. Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003. Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

“Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then”  275 Zakrzewska, Dorota. “Alienation and Powerlessness: Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballady and Chopin’s Ballades.” Polish Music Journal, vol. 2, nos. 1–2, Summer/Winter 1999, http://pmc.usc.edu/PMJ/issue/2.1.99/contents.html. Accessed 6 March 2018. Zaremba, Marcin. Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce. Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2001. Films Cited Ballada f-moll (Ballade in F Minor). Directed by Andrzej Panufnik, Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych, 1945. Filmoteka Narodowa archival copy. La note bleue (The blue note). Directed by Andrzej Żuławski, Erato Films, G. Films, Oliane Productions and Gemini Filmproduktion GmbH, 1991. Mazurki Chopina (Chopin’s mazurkas). Directed by Tadeusz Makarczyński, Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych, 1949. Limited edition DVD collection: Filmoteka Narodowa, 2010. Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (The youth of Chopin). Directed by Aleksander Ford, music by Fryderyk Chopin and Kazimierz Serocki, Filmoteka Narodowa, SF “Kadr,” SF “Perspektywa,” SF “Oko,” SF “Tor” and SF “Zebra,” 1951. Limited edition DVD collection: Filmoteka Narodowa, 2010. Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach (Chopin recital in Duszniki). Directed by Tadeusz Makarczyński, Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych, 1949. Limited edition DVD collection: Filmoteka Narodowa, 2010. Suita Warszawska (Warsaw suite). Directed by Tadeusz Makarczyński, music by Witold Lutosławski, Przedsie ̨biorstwo Państwowe Film Polski, 1946. The Orchestra. Directed by Zbig Rybczyński, Zbig Vision Ltd., 1990. Utwory Chopina w kolorze (Color studies of Chopin). Directed by Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski, 1944. Limited edition DVD collection: Filmoteka Narodowa, 2010. ̇ Z elazowa Wola (Zelazowa Wola). Directed Eugeniusz Ce ̨kalski, Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych, 1949. Filmoteka Narodowa archival copy.

12 Returning Home Critical Nostalgia and French Cinematic Illusion in the Post-war Musical Films of René Clair and Jean Renoir Hannah Lewis René Clair and Jean Renoir, two of France’s most prominent directors of the inter-war period, both left France for America on the eve of the Second World War. Abandoned by their publics and their government, they each sought temporary solace in Hollywood. After the war, and after a series of somewhat frustrating experiences directing in Hollywood’s more restrictive studio system, they both returned to direct films in France. There, 15 years after they first left, they found a public and a cinematic tradition that had changed dramatically. As a nation, France was recovering from the political upheaval and massive loss of the war. As an industry, French cinema struggled to bounce back from the significant creative restrictions and loss of talent caused by the wartime years, and following several years of austerity after the war, to reassert its identity as a country with a strong national filmmaking tradition. French films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly those in the tradition de qualité, seemed to come from a different aesthetic and cultural world than the bold and politically daring experiments with the medium that Clair and Renoir had come to be known for in the 1930s. Upon their return home to France, they made a somewhat unexpected decision: they both turned to the film musical genre. In his 1952 film Les Belles de nuit (Beauties of the night), Clair returned to the audiovisual style he had established in his highly successful films of the early 1930s, incorporating music and songs to trigger a series of fantastical dream sequences that depict earlier times. Renoir, who became a US citizen in 1946 and traveled back and forth between France and the United States for the rest of his life, departed from the social cinema that he was recognized for to direct French Cancan (1954), which was the second in a series of three lush Technicolor musical films that he directed.1 The film pictorialized the Belle Époque era that his father had captured in his paintings, with a focus on Montmartre and the cancan. Both directors’ embrace of the musical may seem like a preference for lighter, crowd-pleasing subjects at the expense of topical social cinema, particularly in the aftermath of the international trauma of the war. The style of both films is indebted to high-budget Hollywood escapist fare—perhaps a symptom of both men’s experiences there in the 1940s. But both films are

Returning Home  277 also steeped in nostalgia that is quintessentially French: they engage with a romantic longing for a France that, after the war, no longer existed. The films are set in the Belle Époque, a setting that evoked the France of the directors’ childhoods (though Clair’s film spans multiple periods), and an era long gone for a 1950s audience, following two dreadful wars. Besides representing France’s cultural past, Clair and Renoir both drew aesthetically on their own cinematic pasts, nostalgically incorporating many elements that recalled the height of their filmmaking activities in 1930s France. But the films contain more than just diversionary song-and-dance entertainment. The cinematic nostalgia in these two films acted as a means of subtle social critique: of the escapism that post-war French spectators seemed to crave, and of the dangers of cinema’s potential to create illusions. Both Renoir and Clair show in their films how cinematic illusion that facilitates nostalgia often denies reality, and music is a key factor in creating such a cinematic illusion. In fact, the films’ critique of cinematic illusion is expressed most clearly through their musical sequences, which play a fundamental role in the creation of this critical nostalgia. Designed for a public eager to distract itself from Europe’s recent past, these films reflexively comment on cinema’s audiovisual efficacy for both critique and for deception. In this chapter, I analyze how both Renoir and Clair’s films employ themes of nostalgia and memory to create a veiled contemporary critique of the cinematic medium, and particularly of cinema’s role in post-war France. I discuss the films’ techniques to create illusion, and the ways in which both nostalgia and critique are embedded in their plots and audiovisual aesthetic. I pay particular attention to the films’ musical soundtracks, and the music’s dual-purpose role as both evoker of nostalgia and tool for critique. Although Renoir and Clair approached the film musical genre in markedly different ways, their stories and aesthetics feature important commonalities. Most significantly, both films have scores by composer Georges Van Parys that prominently feature a waltz. The waltz in each film takes on special importance, becoming a crucial tool for delivering each director’s message of French nostalgia. Reconsidering these films side by side brings the political undertones of post-war musical films in France to light, provides a broader understanding of the possibilities for interpreting the functions of cinematic nostalgia, highlights music’s importance in this kind of interpretation, and reveals alternative approaches to the film musical’s form, content, and style than those being offered contemporaneously in Hollywood.

Nostalgia, Memory, and the Film Musical Nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym, is “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (xiii). As scholars like Boym, Andreas Huyssen, and Linda Hutcheon have argued, nostalgia carries with it a sense of both spatial and temporal loss but is often intertwined

278  Hannah Lewis with imaginations of this past time and place. Moreover, nostalgia is often deeply connected to the concerns of the present day. It becomes particularly important during times of upheaval and change because nostalgia can act as an intermediary between individual and collective memory. Films and other artistic media that engage in nostalgia help define the collective memory of a nation, whether explicitly or subconsciously, during crucial moments in history. In particular, the utopian entertainment provided by film musicals can give audiences—in the words of Richard Dyer, “the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide” (177). In the middle of the twentieth century, film musicals were particularly useful vehicles for nostalgia. Musicals reveled in a romanticized construction of a time and place, often imagined or idealized, a crucial element of any nostalgic endeavor. According to Martha Shearer in her analysis of “nostalgia musicals” in 1940s Hollywood, they were “products of a system dedicated to artifice, providing opportunities to construct entirely synthetic approximations of real places … at both a historical and geographical remove” (76). The community-building common of both stage and screen musicals further connected nostalgia to the construction of a collective memory.2 In Hollywood, the nostalgia musical became prominent in the 1940s because of—in Shearer’s words, a “tension between desire for transformation and fear of loss [that] was acute due to the threats of war and planning for significant urban change” (77). Nostalgia musicals were not escapist but “necessarily engaged in contemporary debates” (77). By setting a musical in a romanticized historical time and place, a film could comment on the realities of the day. These films relied on the authenticity of the times and places they represented, but they always presented a faux-authenticity, a construction of a past reality that never existed in the particular way it is represented onscreen. Although the musical film did not have the same kind of prominence in France in the 1940s as it did in Hollywood, films more generally became important vehicles for nostalgia in France after the war. They served in some respects as distractions from the realities of the past decade and in other respects made important comments on French society of the present, asserting France’s cultural dominance in a post-war world. According to Vanessa Schwartz, a number of “Frenchness films” emerged out of both Hollywood and France during the 1950s, and Belle Époque Paris in particular, as the representative era of the height of French culture, “became the emblematic representation of France for movie audiences in the 1950s” (20). Filmmakers “turned to depictions of France as a way to situate the contemporary visual culture they were producing” (21).3 In other words, French films in the 1950s that were about France from an earlier time helped both shape collective memory and make sense of contemporary understandings of French culture. It is no surprise, then, that a musical film directed by Renoir or Clair, who were both important symbols of a quintessentially French inter-war cinematic

Returning Home  279 tradition, could become a powerful statement on French nostalgia and collective memory and the role of these phenomena in contemporary cinema.

Clair’s and Renoir’s Cinema of the 1930s Renoir and Clair both began their film careers in the 1920s, but they directed their most significant and enduring films in the 1930s. They were two of France’s most influential directors during the era of transition from silent to synchronized sound film in the early 1930s, yet their approach to music and the soundtrack in many ways represented different ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Clair, who had successfully entered the avant-garde film world with his 1924 short film Entr’acte,4 was known for his distinct blend of cinematic surrealism and lighthearted humor. Concerned that synchronized dialogue would destroy the dreamlike essence of cinema, Clair explicitly avoided overreliance on spoken dialogue. Instead, music featured prominently in his early sound films, Sous les toits de Paris (1930, Under the roofs of Paris), Le Million (1931, The million), and À Nous la liberté (1931, Freedom for us), which use songs, rather than spoken dialogue, to propel action forward. For Clair, music served as a springboard for more abstract, poetic sequences.5 Renoir, on the other hand, was known for his preference for musical realism in his films. Frequently adapting novels or stage plays, he took great care in working with actors to develop their roles, and with the dawn of sound took a more dialogue-centric approach than Clair. His first sound film, On purge bébé (1931, Baby’s laxative), was an adaptation of a play by Georges Faydeau, and the only music appeared during the opening and end credits. His other early sound films—La Chienne (1931, The bitch), La Nuit du carrefour (1932, Night at the crossroads), and Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932, Boudu saved from drowning)—all take a realist approach. Throughout the 1930s, as Renoir became one of the most influential directorial voices in the poetic realist cinematic movement, he frequently favored diegetic music in his films, opting against non-diegetic musical underscoring and justifying any music on the soundtrack through visual presentation of its diegetic sources. For instance, and perhaps most famously, in his satirical La Règle du jeu (1939, The rules of the game), music is abundant, but its sources—musical automata, music boxes, and phonographs—are always onscreen. Renoir weaves these diegetic musical sources into the plot. The musical machines help deliver a broader critique of the upper class: Robert, a marquis, is fascinated with these musical machines, and they, just like his social status, represent an obsolete thing of the past. Though Clair’s and Renoir’s cinematic trajectories were quite different in the early 1930s, their paths became strikingly similar leading up to the Second World War, when both ended up in Hollywood. Clair’s massive flop Le Dernier milliardaire (1934, The last billionaire) led to his self-exile from the French film industry in 1935, and after a period of time in London, he arrived in Hollywood in 1940. Because of his departure, his French citizenship was

280  Hannah Lewis revoked by the Vichy government (and later reversed). While in America, he directed The Flame of New Orleans (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow (1944), and And Then There Were None (1945). While his films were commercially successful, scholars and critics have downplayed his Hollywood contributions, believing them to lack his clear directorial voice;6 Clair himself later said as much, in 1951 asking the question “Among the four or five hundred films made every year in California, how many bear the stamp of a personal style? How many seem to be the work of an original artist or craftsman?” (126).7 Renoir stayed in France through the 1930s. His 1939 film La Règle du jeu, a satire of contemporary French society that is often cited as one of the greatest films of all time, was at the time a huge commercial and critical failure, and because of its negative portrayal of French culture, was banned by the Vichy government immediately following the outbreak of the Second World War. Renoir enlisted in the French Army Film Service, but after Germany invaded France, he too, fled to the United States.8 There, he directed Swamp Water (1941), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Southerner (1945), Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947); the last two were poorly received. Though Renoir became a naturalized citizen and was nominated for an Academy Award for The Southerner, his wartime Hollywood films were by no means universally acclaimed. Consensus is that Renoir’s American films were, like Clair’s, not as good as his pre-war French films.9 For both Renoir and Clair, Hollywood was a system that required compromising aesthetic control. After the War ended, both directors returned home, albeit under different circumstances. The France these émigré directors returned to, however, was not the same as the France they left; neither was the film industry nor film-­ going public the same as the one that had so enthusiastically received their successes of the 1930s. As Janet Bergstrom has suggested, Charles de Gaulle’s “myth of national unity—the idea that France had collectively resisted the Occupation” was at odds with the part of France that supported Vichy, resulting in “deep-seated difficulties in renegotiating cinematic representations of French national and individual identity following the war” (“Émigrés or exiles?” 88). The best solution for directors to represent France after the war was to avoid contemporary issues and “situate films in an earlier time, especially the turn of the century” (“Émigrés or exiles?” 88).

Dream Worlds in Les Belles de nuit (1952, Beauties of the Night) Clair had trouble adjusting to France upon his return: “After all those years in England and America, I wanted to return to my old vision of Paris—­ singers, little people in the streets, neighborliness, familiarity. But all that had been changed by the war. Paris had become a different place; it had a different atmosphere” (qtd. in Dale 1: 361–62). He returned to France in 1946, to direct Le Silence est d’or (1947, Man about Town), his first French

Returning Home  281 film after the war. The film is set around 1906 in a silent film studio, a nostalgic return to the era of the birth of cinema itself. Though he never lost his comedic or fantastical edge, Clair’s films after his return to France were decidedly more serious than his films of the early 1930s; according to Clair biographer R. C. Dale, his post-war films are marked by a “distinct slide towards pessimism” (1: 430). This trend is particularly apparent in his Faustian La Beauté du diable (1950, Beauty and the devil) and dramatic Porte des Lilas (1957, The Gates of Paris). With Les Belles de nuit, however, he briefly revisited his successful formula of the 1930s: the comedic, fantastical comédie musicale, a nostalgic return to his older style of filmmaking, when Clair was at the height of his critical success. Clair’s initial idea for the film was to create a “comic Intolerance,” a reference to D. W. Griffith’s epic silent film depicting parallel stories from four distinct time periods (Dale 1: 422).10 He wrote in an early scenario draft that the “general idea” was “the old days were lots better. People complain about the present. They despair of the future. But hasn’t it always been like that?” (2: 369). The film follows Claude, a small-town music teacher and composer, who lives next door to a mechanic’s shop but dreams of being a successful opera composer. He finds the noise of modern life exhausting and is weary from his mundane existence. He seeks refuge and happiness in his dreams, which transport him to earlier times: the Belle Époque, the 1830 war in Algeria, the year 1790 and the French Revolution, and, briefly, the seventeenth century and the reign of Louis XIII. In each dream world, he is a respected composer and music teacher who receives the attention of beautiful women; each woman resembles someone he knows in real life (Figure 12.1a–c). He is so enamored of his dream worlds, and his relationships with the women within them, that he begins to ignore his reality. As he retreats further and further into his dreams, his friends begin to worry about his mental health. His dreams transition into nightmares when he must confront the angry husbands and brothers of his dream lovers, narrowly escaping death in each era. He wakes up, and, this time, fears falling back asleep and does everything he can to stay awake. He encounters his neighbor Suzanne, the daughter of the mechanic next door and the inspiration for one of the women in his dreams, and they fall in love. He falls back asleep and, in his final climactic dream sequence, his friends come to the rescue and pull him out of the earlier eras and back into his own. When he wakes up, he discovers that the opera he had written and submitted to the Paris Opéra has been selected for production. With the love of Suzanne and his newfound success, he no longer needs to create happiness in an imagined past: his waking life has surpassed his dreams. Throughout Les Belles de nuit, Clair uses music, specifically songs, to trigger the transition between waking life and Claude’s dreams. Georges Van Parys composed the film’s music. Van Parys, who began his career as an operetta composer, had collaborated with Clair on his musical film Le Million, and over the following years he had established himself as a preeminent film composer in France. By 1950, Van Parys was representative of an older style of

282  Hannah Lewis

Figure 12.1  (a–c) Claude in his dream worlds (Les Belles de nuit).

film composition, rooted in early twentieth-century French operetta.11 Clair initially wanted three different composers for the film, one for each historical epoch,12 but this idea did not come to fruition, and Van Parys was the sole composer for the film, tasked with composing music in the style of three different historical periods. In his memoirs, Van Parys described the additional challenge that Clair gave him: to use music as a bridge from Claude’s reality into his dream worlds. The clearest bridge from Claude’s waking life to his dream is a waltz, which is also the film’s most obvious musical signifier of nostalgia. Clair asked Van Parys to compose a waltz “in the style of 1900, where the beginning and the end are built on the seven notes of the scale,” and where “the passage from reality to dream will be connected to the linking of the scale on the piano to the sung waltz” (Van Parys 385–86, my translation).13 The waltz first appears in the scene where Claude falls asleep for the first time while teaching a piano lesson. He stares at a painting of a Belle Époque salon while his young pupil plays scales; then the audio dissolves to a piano solo based on the scale, and Claude finds himself seated at the piano in the painting. The painting then becomes animated and sets the stage for his dream world. Soon after, the woman in his dream sings the waltz (with lyrics written by Clair) to Claude (Example 12.1).

Returning Home  283

Example 12.1  Opening of waltz based on scale (Les Belles de nuit). My transcription.

This first transition into Claude’s dream world is one of wonder and excitement, as the elaboration on the musical scale literally brings the nostalgic dreamscape to life. The song’s upward-reaching melody and lush chords invite the listener to revel in the music’s turn-of-the-century style. The message of the lyrics is seductive, an invitation to escape into this past world that this intriguing woman exists in: “You will see me every night, on the borders of shadows, in the depths of your dreams.” At the same time, the verb tenses in the lyrics evoke all at once the future, the present, and the past: “you will see me,” “it’s my memory that you’re searching for.” The music and lyrics draw Claude, and by extension, the viewer, into the dream world—a world that appears to be of the past but is very clearly framed by Clair as a construction of the present.

284  Hannah Lewis Throughout the film, characters only sing in the dreams, and song is one of the primary means of distinguishing between the film’s “fantasy” world and “real” world. Compared to the mundane reality of the present day, the songs come as a reprieve for Claude. Sometimes, the songs are diegetic, like the Belle Époque waltz. Other times, characters spontaneously burst into song—the “directeur de l’opéra” in Claude’s Belle Époque dream, for example, comically sings his dialogue in an over-the-top operatic style, perhaps a cheeky reference to the spontaneous singing that frequently takes place in Hollywood musicals, or to Clair’s own parodic style in his 1930s operetta films. Each time Claude gets thrown into an earlier epoch, the shift is indicated and precipitated by a change in musical style. Each woman sings a song composed in the style of the music of her era the first time the spectator meets her, adding to the allure of both the character and the particular historic period, and set in visual relief with camera tricks, elaborate costumes, and unnatural décor. As Claude’s dreams get confused and begin to mix together, music gives the main character (and by extension, the director) permission to dream (direct) odder and odder events. But amidst the surrealism of the dream landscape, the film highlights a real desire to escape the contemporary world. Claude escapes into his dream worlds out of nostalgia for bygone eras, for what he believes to be the “good old days.” Clair emphasizes the nostalgia for past eras through the humorous character of the older man in the bar. Though a minor character, he appears briefly in each epoch, and his words encourage Claude to reach further and further back in time to seek happiness. The spectator first sees the old man in the bar in Claude’s real life, when a turn-of-the-century waltz comes on the radio (an instrumental version of the waltz he heard earlier in his dream). The music triggers nostalgic notions in the old man, who recognizes the waltz and comments that the piece is not of Claude’s time. He then proceeds to complain about present-day life: “crimes, wars … that’s all. Terrible times” (“des crimes, des guerres … c’est tout. Sale époque”) (Les belles de nuit, 00:12:17). The year 1900, the old man claims, was “la plus belle des époques,” the most beautiful of epochs. Once Claude finds himself in 1900, however, the same old man appears and complains yet again about the “sale époque” (terrible times) they find themselves in, reminiscing about the time of his youth, 1830, during the reign of Louis-Philippe. (Clair’s inclusion of the 1830 French conquest of Algeria as one of the three historical epochs of Claude’s dream was timely, and, though it is a romanticized depiction of French colonialism, may very well have been a means of obliquely commenting on the very real, very contemporary issue of Algerian independence in the 1950s.) Once in 1830, the old man yet again reminisces about an earlier era—that of the reign of Louis XVI. Clair uses the man’s unhappiness for comic effect. But the dangers of pining for the past are clear: Claude, a friend of the Revolution in his dream, is mistaken for nobility and sent to the guillotine, and, as nostalgia gets the better of him, he narrowly escapes death in each of his dream worlds.

Returning Home  285 The music of Claude’s dream worlds is contrasted with the ugly noise of daily life: as he tries to play piano in his apartment, he is interrupted by the sounds of the mechanic’s shop next door and loud jackhammers on the street. As Claude’s dreams slowly begin to take over his life and become nightmares, the beautiful music of his dreams transforms into the ugly noise that he so despises, the surest sign that the utopian space of his reveries has turned sour. This shift is explicitly represented in the dream scene of his opera’s premiere (in the year 1900), and the conductor, who the spectator sees from behind, transforms into his mechanic neighbor, the orchestra members no longer playing musical instruments, but motorcycles, vacuums, and jackhammers (Figure 12.2). This chaotic sonic intrusion into his dream world signals the dissolution of his happy relationships in his dreams, prompting his desire to return to reality. But it also marks Claude’s moment of realization that the perceived simplicity of these earlier eras was only a figment of his imagination. The noise symphony is literally a wake-up call: Clair uses noise to signal the potential dangers of living in the past, in an imagined dream world, without confronting the unpleasant realities of our own world. The cinematic medium, itself a dream world, holds the same potential dangers. Just as he had in his 1930s musical fantasies, Clair used the form and content of the film to comment directly on the medium and film apparatus itself. The dream worlds that Clair creates in the film serve as a metaphor for the cinematic medium. Cinema provides the opportunity to go back in time and relish in far-away times and places. As entertainment, it can serve as a distraction from reality. But in Les Belles de nuit, Clair also subtly suggests that

Figure 12.2  The dream world turned ugly as music becomes noise (Les Belles de nuit).

286  Hannah Lewis viewers cannot responsibly retreat into other times without considering the implications on their own reality. At one point in the film, Claude asks his pharmacist for a soporifique to help him sleep. Cinema, too, acts as an escapist soporific, and audiences can be brought to a similar passive state by treating cinema as pure entertainment. Music has the power to contribute greatly to cinema’s soporific effects. Just as Claude finds it harder and harder to pull himself out of his constructed, musical imaginary worlds, as he faces graver and graver consequences in his real life—the ire of his friends and neighbors, the loss of his job, and even brief imprisonment for disorderly conduct—Clair seems to suggest that spectators must not mindlessly consume cinema’s diversions. Lurking just beneath the surface of this nostalgic comédie musicale is Clair’s critique of the very kind of fluffy entertainment the film purports to provide.14 Les Belles de nuit received mixed critical reception. It was first screened at the Venice Film Festival in September 1952 and was thought to be a contender for the Golden Lion grand prix but did not win. Some critics liked it: JeanLouis Tallenay, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, aptly interpreted Clair’s use of cinematic unreality as “the best means of subtle expression of an acute sensibility of contemporary problems…. The fantasy of Les Belles de nuit illustrates a contemporary need to avoid [imagining the future] and an idealization of the past” (54, my translation).15 Other critics were more negative, considering it, in the words of R. C. Dale, “an amalgam of earlier Clair ideas” (1: 438). This is not surprising, considering what Dale has called a “sudden emergence of hostility in France to Clair’s work after decades of popular and critical adulation” (1: 439). André Bazin and the soon-to-be New Wave filmmakers preferred Renoir’s films, which had more in common with New Wave values to Clair’s. Clair’s aesthetic, in their opinion, was too concerned with technique and too controlled. Truffaut wrote in 1954 that “for the last ten years, René Clair has been posing as an official amuser. He makes films for little old ladies who go to the movies twice a year in their old chauffeur-driven limousines, once to see the latest masterpiece by Sir Laurence Olivier” (qtd. in Dale 1: 439). Les Belles de nuit seemed to confirm for the New Wave that Clair was retreating into his older techniques, perhaps sinking into the same kind of nostalgia that Claude did in his dreams, but perhaps the New Wave missed the anxiety that the all-too-perfect happy ending had lurking beneath the surface. Once the cinematic dream is over, the spectator must wake up.

French Cancan (1954) and the Post-war French Spectator It took Renoir almost a decade after the war ended before he made another French film. Despite his unfulfilling years in Hollywood during the war, he stayed in America after the war ended, becoming a naturalized citizen. He only returned to France by way of India in 1949 where he directed The River, and Italy in 1952 to direct Le Carrosse d’or (The golden coach). He finally arrived

Returning Home  287 in France in 1954, but, according to Janet Bergstrom, felt “ambivalence toward the French film industry and the post-war French climate” (“Émigrés or exiles?” 98). French Cancan was his first French film since La Règle du jeu.16 Renoir said in 1954 that French Cancan grew out of his “great desire to make a film in a very French spirit that could make contact again between [me and the French public] easy, that would be an enjoyable bridge between French audiences and myself. I felt the public was very close to me, but I wanted to make sure” (qtd. in Bergstrom, “Jean Renoir’s Return to France” 478). The film is Renoir’s second in a trilogy of lush Technicolor musical films, along with Le Carrosse d’or and Elena et ses hommes (1956, Elena and her men). All three films take on historical topics with stories told through lavish costumes and sets, and heavy reliance on their musical soundtracks (though none are traditional film musicals). These three films, frequently viewed as frivolous because of their rejection of politics, are about spectacle and spectatorship, with a foregrounded and heightened theatricality not typical of Renoir’s earlier films (Davis, Postwar Renoir 62).17 French Cancan is an homage to his father, painter Auguste Renoir, and the Belle Époque. Set in 1890s Paris, the film focuses on Henri Danglard, an impresario and womanizer. He is played by Jean Gabin, a frequent leading man in Renoir’s films of the 1930s, whose presence in the film is another sign of Renoir’s nostalgia. On the verge of bankruptcy, Danglard decides to open the Moulin Rouge, and revive the cancan, an old-fashioned social dance that had been popular in the 1830s, to feature on the Moulin Rouge’s stage. Various romantic entanglements occur over the course of the film centered around Danglard: his mistress Lola, his new love interest, the laundress Nini, who he discovers while slumming in Montmartre and decides to feature as a cancan dancer onstage, Nini’s protective boyfriend Paolo, and the Prince Alexandre, who falls in love with Nini after seeing her dance. The narrative framework is much like the show-within-a-show conceit of many Hollywood musicals, and this was surely a nod to the genre. But the setting in the heart of Montmartre, Paris, during the Belle Époque is quintessentially French, even exaggeratedly so. Dave Kehr suggests that “Renoir seems determined to gorge himself on images of ‘Frenchness’—images that flirt with cliché” (269). Though Renoir famously avoided non-diegetic music in his earlier films, favoring diegetic music that could be narratively justified through visual presentation of onscreen sources, in French Cancan, Van Parys’s music has a much more flexible role. The film is introduced in the opening credits as a “comédie musicale,” and music appears in the form of song, diegetic instrumental music used to accompany the numerous dance scenes, and non-diegetic underscoring, in addition to diegetic music heard on a Parisian street played by an organ grinder. The film is not a musical in a traditional sense—only a few of the characters sing, and there are no traditional song-and-dance musical “numbers”—but it features a brief appearance by Édith Piaf, as well as other chanteurs and chanteuses, and dance plays an important role throughout the film.

288  Hannah Lewis Just like in Clair’s film, a simple waltz is featured prominently in the score, acting as the film’s theme song, becoming the refrain of the neighborhood and serving as a musical signifier of nostalgia for this earlier era.18 This waltz, titled “La Complainte de la Butte” (The lament of the [Montmartre] hill), written by Van Parys with lyrics by Renoir, is meant to sound like it could have come straight out of Le Chat Noir or another Belle Époque cabaret (Example 12.2). The song functions as a leitmotif, first appearing diegetically in instrumental form, played by an organ grinder on the streets of Paris, which establishes its authenticity as music du quartier. Later, Danglard and the dancers hear someone humming the tune across the alleyway. It is later revealed to be Esther Georges, who becomes Danglard’s new protégée and love interest. The song is heard throughout the film, culminating in a performance of the song by Georges at the Moulin Rouge. The lyrics in the song’s introduction describe a brief encounter between a poet and a woman on the

Example 12.2  E  xcerpt of refrain, “La Complainte de la Butte” (French Cancan). My transcription.

Returning Home  289 Rue St. Vincent in Montmartre. The poet wrote a song in the hopes that the woman might hear it one day on a street corner. The rest of the waltz is sung from the perspective of the poet, describing the woman he encountered in the moonlight, whom he references as “princesse de la rue.” The refrain’s melody, constructed around a single three-note motive, is simple, easy to sing, and instantly recognizable whenever it appears in the film. The song’s lyrics are not heard in their entirety until toward the end of the film, but when they do appear, they are so clearly tied to the film’s setting that they lend the waltz a kind of faux-authenticity: its ubiquity in the film, connecting various characters through their presence in the neighborhood, is seemingly too perfect, which both contributes to the film’s nostalgic agenda and highlights the fact that the entire endeavor is a construction of Renoir’s present-day cinematic imagination. The song’s orchestration and glossy polish contributes to the feeling of faux-authenticity. But the biggest musical number of this comédie musicale is instrumental: the culmination of the film, the performance of the French Cancan in the final scene. Accompanied by the well-known “Internal Galop” from Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, the most famous historic cancan music, the dancers perform the virtuosic choreography, not on the stage but right on the floor amongst the audience members. Unlike the well-known chorus lines of American choreographer Busby Berkeley, the dancers’ individuality shines through, at the same time as the collective dance celebrates the group.19 With its rapid editing and exciting choreography, this scene is meant to amaze the spectator (Figure 12.3). Because the film is saturated with, in the words of Dave Kehr, “immediate pleasures—music, color, movement, beautiful women and handsome men”

Figure 12.3  The finale (French Cancan).

290  Hannah Lewis (269), Renoir’s call for us to indulge in these cinematic pleasures seems a far cry from his pre-war films La Règle du jeu or La Grande illusion (1937, Grand illusion). For this reason, scholars and critics have often seen the subject matter of French Cancan as a signal of Renoir’s withdrawal from political cinema, even a rejection of the poetic realism which he was so known for. Janet Bergstrom, for instance, has suggested that his abandonment of the realist mode of filmmaking was “a betrayal of the intelligent, socially evocative, photogenic filmmaking Renoir had excelled in before the war” (“Jean Renoir’s Return to France” 459). She points at a double-regression in the film: a regression back to the Belle Époque as a means of Renoir’s accessing his childhood, and a “retrograde representation of male-female relationships” (“Jean Renoir’s Return to France” 460).20 Furthermore, she suggests that the film portrays a fairy-tale representation of class relationships. While Bergstrom’s claims about the film are all valid on the surface, the regressive elements in the film are precisely the source of the film’s subtle critique, through the concept of nostalgia. And, as a signifier of nostalgia, music plays a major part in this retrograde movement. Behind the veneer of color, music, and spectacle, lies Renoir’s comment on his post-war French audience. Renoir’s wariness or disillusionment with his contemporary audience is enacted in the film through the stand-in of the Moulin Rouge’s audience. Renoir makes clear, through his constant foregrounding of the venue’s audience members, the strange relationship between performers and spectators in this iconic performance space. Danglard’s Moulin Rouge serves as a safe space for the upper class to go slumming in Montmartre, providing his rich patrons a glimpse into working-class culture, but their voyeurism is satisfied by an imagined construction of an essentialized French folk culture, which they can freely opt in and out of. The craze for the French Cancan is a key example: it is an antiquated dance form, by then several decades old, which must be reinvented and made stylish through the addition of the English word “French,” which serves to both defamiliarize and culturally appropriate the style. Renoir highlights at various points the artificiality of this endeavor: even Danglard’s talent that he finds in the neighborhood streets or in the dance halls must be highly refined for their performances to be received as authentic on the stage. His newest recruit, the singer Esther Georges, enters the Moulin Rouge from the back of the house for her performance of “La Complainte de la Butte,” followed by a violinist, in a blatant move of faux-authenticity. Nini, whom Danglard discovered dancing the cancan in a dance hall, must endure countless hours of lessons to be ready to perform the very same dance for a paying audience. Nostalgia, in other words, is by its very nature an artificial, constructed endeavor. This particular form of nostalgia is restorative, which, as Svetlana Boym has argued, aims to reconstruct the past through myth-making, an embrace of invented tradition seemingly based in history but symbolic and selective (41–42). Both music and cinema can play a powerful role in the construction of restorative nostalgia, as this scene makes clear.

Returning Home  291 However, Renoir’s most profound, and most blatant, comment on his postwar French public can be found in Danglard’s monologue toward the end of the film.21 Esther Georges has just performed her song to great applause, and Danglard embraces her backstage. Nini overhears them, and, upset at having to share her lover with another woman, shuts herself in her dressing room and refuses to perform the cancan unless she can have Danglard all to herself. Danglard replies that restricting him would be like caging a canary. But, he says, it does not actually matter what either of them wants: “In the end do you think it matters what you and I want? All that counts is what they want. We’re at the service of the public” (01:33:16). His speech changes Nini’s mind, and she joins her fellow dancers onstage for the cancan after all. Everything seems to be set right again. Danglard’s speech, though brief, articulates the underlying strain of pessimism that surfaces subtly throughout the film. There are, of course, the regressive sexist implications behind his own justification for his infidelity. But at the same time, Danglard implicates the audience into all the conflict and wrong-doing that has occurred until that point in the film—Lola’s attack on Nini, Danglard’s near financial ruin, Alexandre’s attempted suicide, and the homelessness and destitution of Prunelle (a former “Queen of the Cancan” who now lives on the street). Every aspect of these characters’ lives is driven by the public’s whims. They do not care about the cost for the players behind the scenes. This comment on the lives of stage artists is a thinly veiled reference to the lives of professionals in the film industry. The final climactic cancan scene ends the film with lavish spectacle. The dancers enter through the crowd, and the spectators and dancers interact with each other as the gap between spectacle and spectator closes. Danglard is relieved to hear the applause of the crowd. Nini, grinning from ear to ear, seems completely in her element in the spotlight. Everyone is smiling and having a wonderful time, as the dancers show off their virtuosic choreography. Yet, because it immediately follows Danglard’s monologue, something rings false about the diversionary effect of this scene. Renoir, through Danglard, gives the public what they want. However, in so doing, he seems to ask, what is wrong with a public that would destroy so many lives without a second thought? With so much uncertainty in the real world, what are the potential risks of getting swept up in cinematic illusion? Renoir’s seeming decision to escape into an earlier, simpler time only partially masks the darker consequences of entertainment.22 Far from being a fluffy, escapist film, French Cancan’s contemporary critique, when uncovered beneath the glitz and glamour, is scathing.

Conclusion Clair and Renoir approached the film musical in decidedly different ways, and, even though Van Parys composed the scores for both films, the role of music in Les Belles de nuit and French Cancan bears the distinct aesthetic mark

292  Hannah Lewis of their directors. Nonetheless, when examined side by side, their similarities bring to light the ways in which nostalgia for an idealized past in these two post-war French musical films can carry political undertones. This approach to the film musical’s form, content, and style reveals an alternative to those being offered contemporaneously in Hollywood. Jane Feuer (1981) has argued that the Golden Age Hollywood musical is often self-reflective, but only in order to reaffirm its own values and perpetuate the codes of the genre. In American musicals, any reflexive comment on the musical genre, through devices like the backstage musical’s show-within-a-show, only serves to reinforce the film’s illusion. In contrast, far from being mere diversionary entertainment, the cinematic nostalgia in Les Belles de nuit and French Cancan acts as a means of subtle social critique of post-war French society, and by extension, contemporary French spectatorship. Song and dance steeped in nostalgia, instead of perpetuating illusion, point to the dangers of cinema’s potential to create such illusions in the first place. Renoir’s and Clair’s post-war musical films have had a tendency to fall through the cracks of film history. The innovations and impact of both directors’ earlier work has a much less complicated legacy. Both directors had felt split across continents—sheltered from the war geographically but never comfortably at home in Hollywood—and, as a result, these films of the early 1950s seem anomalies in the directors’ later careers, as they adjusted to their returns to France. They nevertheless brought elements of a Hollywood aesthetic back to France, putting them even more at odds with the local audience. More generally, these films belong to an era of French cinema that is frequently overlooked, the early 1950s belonging neither to the era of poetic realism from the 1930s into the wartime years, nor to the radical formalist experimentalism that occurred with the rise of the New Wave by the end of the 1950s. By the 1960s, the film musical form had been reinvented and reinvigorated in France by New Wave directors, most notably with Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme est une femme (1961, A woman is a woman) and Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964, The umbrellas of Cherbourg), and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967, The young girls of Rochefort). But it was not just French cinema that was in a period of flux. For France as a nation, the 1950s was a liminal period: reeling from the aftermath of the Second World War, and on the cusp of the Algerian War of Independence and France’s protracted process of decolonization, French society was in a time of uneasy transition. However, by reconsidering music’s role in Les Belles de nuit and French Cancan, we can better understand the subtle ways in which cinema can self-reflexively both indulge in and critique its role in creating nostalgia, particularly through the use of musical performance. It is precisely because Clair and Renoir directed these films during this time of ­t ransition—for France, for cinema, and for their own careers—that these films can tell us a great deal about cinema’s efficacy for subtle critique in places where we least expect.

Returning Home  293

Notes 1 The other two films were Le Carrosse d’or (1952, The golden coach) and Elena et les hommes (1956, Elena and her men). 2 See Altman. 3 This “Frenchness” took on different meanings for American audiences. Some of the best-known examples of Hollywood “Frenchness films” are Vincente Minnelli’s musicals An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), and John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge. 4 Entr’acte was first screened in between the acts of Erik Satie’s ballet Relâche, put on by the Ballets Suédois, and accompanied by a score composed by Satie. 5 For more on sound and music in Clair’s early sound films, see Dale, The Films of René Clair; Fischer; Gorbman; and Roust. 6 For instance, Celia McGerr states that Clair’s time in Hollywood was “artistically, neither wildly successful nor especially disappointing” (137). 7 Clair went into more detail about his experience in Hollywood in an interview with R. C. Dale (Dale and Clair). 8 For more on Renoir’s years in Hollywood, see Bowles. 9 Christopher Faulkner, for instance, calls Renoir’s American films “an uneven body of work” and claims that “not one of Renoir’s American films is entirely satisfactory” (126–27). André Bazin believed that everything Renoir stood for went against prevailing Hollywood styles, writing that in his “heart of hearts” he always found Renoir’s American films “inferior to the French films” (93– 94). Renoir himself claimed, “I just don’t think my type of work fits in with a large administration [like the Hollywood studio system]” (11). See also Davis, Postwar Renoir 3–5, and O’Shaughnessy 155–61, for a discussion of scholarly and critical assessment of Renoir’s American films. 10 Dale points out that apart from certain narrative elements, “largely parodistic in origin, the film bears no serious resemblance to Intolerance” (1: 423). 11 He later went on to serve as vice president of the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM). For more on Van Parys, see his memoirs (1969). 12 Van Parys, in his memoirs, wrote that Clair “would like me to assume the role of music director, but hopes that three composers can participate: [Georges] Auric, me, and another whom he has not yet chosen. Each one of us would have one distinct epoch to deal with, because the film takes place in our day, but with journeys to the past, situated in 1900, 1830 and during the Revolution” (Van Parys 382, my translation). “Il voudrait que j’en assume la direction musicale, mais souhaite que trois compositeurs y participent: Auric, moi, et un autre sur lequel il n’a pas encore fixé son choix. Chacun d’entre nous aurait une époque définie à traiter, car le film se passe de nos jours, mais avec des retours en arrière qui se situent en 1900, 1830 et sous la Révolution.” 13 “Il me faut composer une valse, dans le style 1900, dont le début et la fin seront constitués par les sept notes de la gamme…. Le passage de la réalité au rêve sera fixé par cet enchaînement de la gamme au piano à la valse chantée.” 14 Antoine Philippe suggests that the film’s ending is ironic: “Clair knows that it’s only in cinema that we can always dream of something else. He also knows that his public is only half naïve” (145–46, my translation). “Deus ex machina, fin ironique: Clair sait que ce n’est que du cinéma et que l’on peut toujours rêver d’autre chose. Il sait aussi que son public n’est naïf qu’à moitié.” 15 “Son irréalisme, comme celui des meilleurs conteurs, est le moyen d’expression subtil d’une sensibilité très aiguë aux problèmes contemporains…. Le fantastique de La Beauté du Diable traduisait l’angoisse qui étreint nos

294  Hannah Lewis

16

17

18 19 20

21 22

contemporains quand ils tentent d’imaginer l’avenir, la fantaisie des Belles de Nuit illustre un besoin d’évasion complémentaire et une idéalisation symétrique du passé. Dans les deux cas l’irréalisme ouvre au cinéma la possibilité d’exprimer autre chose que des faits: crainte de l’avenir dans La Beauté du Diable, nostalgie du passé dans Les Belles de Nuit, mélancolie de l’âge mûr dans Le Silence est d’Or.” Scholarship on Renoir is extensive, but his Hollywood and post-Hollywood years have received far less attention. For Renoir’s post-war films, see Arnoldy; Bergstrom, “Jean Renoir’s Return”; Davis, “Jean Renoir’s Elena et ses hommes”; Davis, Postwar Renoir; and Faulkner. This was not the first time Renoir focused on the theater in his films: his 1926 silent film Nana is about a young actress, and several of his films are adaptations of stage plays. Nevertheless, his three Technicolor films of the 1950s mark a new and distinct turn toward theatricality and spectatorship. This kind of musical treatment was commonly found in 1930s poetic realist films. See Conway. Christopher Faulkner suggests that “[t]he performance of the cancan within the achievement of the entire film is an instance of how art satisfies human yearning through an image of ideal harmony” (195). Ginette Vincendeau offers a more nuanced perspective on the representation of gender in the film, arguing that “Renoir’s self-conscious depiction of popular entertainment offers a complex reflection, not on ‘women’ but on mythical images of women” (256), manifested most clearly in the female characters’ song and dance performances. Kehr suggests that there is “obviously, a lot of Renoir in Danglard” (270). As Colin Davis suggests, rather than being a nostalgic diversion into a “more comfortable past,” the film exposes “dark apprehension of human weakness and potential for self-delusion.” Furthermore, by “foregrounding the status of film as illusion, Renoir condemns his audience for being willingly deluded” (Postwar Renoir 64).

Works Cited Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Indiana University Press, 1987. Arnoldy, Édouard. “French Cancan et le spectateur mobile.” Cinémas, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002, pp. 11–31. Bazin, André. Jean Renoir. Translated by W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon, Simon & Schuster, 1971. Bergstrom, Janet. “Jean Renoir’s Return to France.” Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 3, 1996, pp. 453–89. ———. “Émigrés or Exiles? The French Directors’ Return from Hollywood.” Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–95, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci, BFI Publishing, 1998, pp. 86–103. Bowles, Brett. “Becoming a Franco-American: Jean Renoir, the Second World War, and A Salute to France.” Studies in French Cinema, vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 111–24. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Clair, René. Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Vera Traill, William Kimber, 1953. Conway, Kelley. Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film. University of California Press, 2004.

Returning Home  295 Dale, R. C. The Films of René Clair. 2 volumes. The Scarecrow Press, 1986. Dale, R. C., and René Clair. “René Clair in Hollywood: An Interview.” Film Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2, 1970, pp. 34–40. Davis, Colin. “Jean Renoir’s Elena et ses hommes (1956) and the Shadow of Imperialism.” Studies in French Cinema, vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 17–29. ———. Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence. Routledge, 2012. Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Genre: The Musical, edited by Rick Altman, Routledge, 1981, pp. 175–89. Faulkner, Christopher. The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir. Princeton University Press, 1986. Feuer, Jane. “The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” Genre: The Musical, edited by Rick Altman, Routledge, 1981, pp. 159–74. Fischer, Lucy. “René Clair, ‘Le Million,’ and the Coming of Sound.” Cinema Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1977, pp. 34–50. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indiana University Press, 1987. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, edited by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor, Rodopi, 2000, pp. 189–207. Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” New German Critique, no. 33, 1984, pp. 5–52. Kehr, Dave. “French Cancan ( Jean Renoir).” When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 269–73. McGerr, Celia. René Clair. Twayne Publishers, 1980. O’Shaughnessy, Martin. Jean Renoir. Manchester University Press, 2000. Philippe, Antoine. “Belles de jour et de nuit: les destins croisés de René Clair et de Luis Buñuel dans le canon du cinéma en français.” French Forum, vol. 32, no. 3, 2007, pp. 139–54. Renoir, Jean. Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks. Translated by Carol Volk, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Roust, Colin. “‘Say It with Georges Auric’: Film Music and the Esprit Nouveau.” Twentieth-Century Music, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133–53. Shearer, Martha. New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Schwartz, Vanessa. It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Tallenay, Jean-Louis. “Pour un cinéma irréaliste.” Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 3, no. 17, November 1952, pp. 53–54. Van Parys, Georges. Les Jours comme ils viennent. Plon, 1969. Vincendeau, Ginette. “French Cancan: A Song and Dance about Women.” A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, Blackwell Publishing, 2013, pp. 255–69. Films Cited À nous la liberté (Freedom for us). Directed by René Clair, music by Georges Auric, Films Sonores Tobis, 1931. And Then There Were None. Directed by René Clair, music by Mario Castelnuovo-­ Tedesco, Rene Clair Productions, 1945.

296  Hannah Lewis Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu saved from drowning). Directed by Jean Renoir, Les Établissements Jacques Haïk, Les Productions Michel Simon, and Crédit Cinématographique Français, 1932. Diary of a Chambermaid. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Michel Michelet, Benedict Bogeaus Production, 1946. Elena et ses hommes (Elena and her men). Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Joseph Kosma, Franco London Films, Les Films Gibé, and Electra Compagnia Cinematografica, 1956. Entr’acte. Directed by René Clair, music by Erik Satie, Les Ballets Suédois, 1924. French Cancan. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Georges Van Parys, Franco London Films and Jolly Film, 1954. DVD: Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir, spine # 243, The Criterion Collection, 2004. I Married a Witch. Directed by René Clair, music by Roy Webb, Rene Clair Productions and Cinema Guild Productions, 1942. It Happened Tomorrow. Directed by René Clair, music by Robert Stolz, Arnold Pressburger Films, 1944. La Beauté du diable (Beauty and the devil). Directed by René Clair, music by Roman Vlad, Franco London Films, Universalia Film, and Ente Nazionale Indu-­ strie Cinematografiche (ENIC), 1950. La Chienne (The bitch). Directed by Jean Renoir, Les Etablissement Braunberger-­ Richebé, 1931. La Grande illusion (Grand illusion). Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Joseph Kosma, Réalisations d’Art Cinématographique (RAC), 1937. La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the crossroads). Directed by Jean Renoir, Europa Films, 1932. La Règle du jeu (The rules of the game). Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Joseph Kosma, Nouvelle Édition de Films, 1939. Le Carrosse d’or (The golden coach). Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Antonio Vivaldi, Delphinus, Hoche Productions and Panaria Film, 1952. Le Dernier milliardaire (The last billionaire). Directed by René Clair, music by Maurice Jaubert, Pathé-Natan, 1934. Le Million (The million). Directed by René Clair, music by Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, and Georges Van Parys, Films Sonores Tobis, 1931. Le Silence est d’or (Man about Town). Directed by René Clair, music by Georges Van Parys, Pathé Consortium Cinéma and RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Les Belles de nuit (Beauties of the night). Directed by René Clair, music by Georges Van Parys, Franco London Films and Rizzoli Films, 1952. DVD: Gaumont, 2010. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The young girls of Rochefort). Directed by Jacques Demy, music by Michel Legrand, Madeleine Films and Parc Film, 1967. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The umbrellas of Cherbourg). Directed by Jacques Demy, music by Michel Legrand, Parc Film, Madeleine Films and Beta Film, 1964. Lola. Directed by Jacques Demy, music by Michel Legrand, Rome Paris Films, 1961. On Purge bébé (Baby’s laxative). Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Paul Misraki, Les Etablissement Braunberger-Richebé, 1931. Porte des Lilas (The Gates of Paris). Directed by René Clair, music by Georges Brassens, Filmsonor, Cinétel, S.E.C.A., and Rizzoli Film, 1957.

Returning Home  297 Sous les toits de Paris (Under the roofs of Paris). Directed by René Clair, music by Raoul Moretti and Vincent Scotto, Films Sonores Tobis, 1930. Swamp Water. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by David Buttolph, Twentieth Century Fox, 1941. The Flame of New Orleans. Directed by René Clair, music by Frank Skinner, Universal Pictures, 1941. The River. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by M.A. Partha Sarathy, Oriental International Films, 1951. The Southerner. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Werner Janssen, Producing Artists and Jean Renoir Productions, 1945. The Woman on the Beach. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Hanns Eisler, RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. This Land Is Mine. Directed by Jean Renoir, music by Lothar Perl, Jean-RenoirDudly Nichols Productions and RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Une Femme est une femme (A woman is a woman). Jean-Luc Godard, music by Michel Legrand, Euro International Film and Rome Paris Films, 1961.

Contributors

Michael Baumgartner  teaches at Cleveland State University. He is the author of the monograph Exilierte Göttinnen: Frauenstatuen im Bühnenwerk von Kurt Weill, Thea Musgrave und Othmar Schoeck, Olms Publisher, 2012. He is currently writing a book on Jean-Luc Godard’s use of music in his films. Baumgartner’s research comprises music in relation to the other arts (cinema, theatre and visual arts), music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Kurt Weill, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Duke Ellington), and the exploration of the narrative capacity of music. Ewelina Boczkowska is Associate Professor in Musicology at Youngstown State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of ­California in Los Angeles with a dissertation on music, collective traumas and memory, and national identity in the films of Krzysztof Kies ĺ owski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Roman Polański, and Andrzej Wajda. She has published on the music of Fryderyk Chopin in 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Notes and has led interdisciplinary collaborations with musicians and dancers, including a TEDx talk. Her current work explores appropriations of Chopin’s music across media in twentieth- and ­t wenty-first-century cultural contexts. Maria Cizmic is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. She teaches and writes about music and trauma; twentieth- and twenty-first-century European and American music, film and culture; and music, technology and performance. In 2012, Oxford University Press published her monograph, Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. Mervyn Cooke is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of A History of Film Music (2008), editor of The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010) and co-editor (with Fiona Ford) of The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (2016). He has also published widely in the fields of ­Benjamin Britten studies and jazz; his other books include Britten and the Far East (1998), several co-edited volumes of Britten’s correspondence, and monographs on the same composer’s Billy Budd (1993) and War Requiem (1996). Among his other publications are Cambridge Companions devoted to Britten, twentieth-century opera, and jazz. He has recently completed an analytical monograph on the ECM recordings of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny.

300 Contributors Maurizio Corbella  (Ph.D., University of Milan) is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Milan. He co-chairs the “Sound and Music in Media” work group of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). His main research areas are Italian film music, electroacoustic music in film, and the representation of musical performance in media. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Music and the Moving Image, Journal of Film Music and IASPM@Journal. He is the English translator of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (Oxford University Press, 2019). Roger Hillman is Emeritus Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra, having held a combined post in German Studies and Film Studies. His monograph Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, Ideolog y appeared from Indiana University Press in 2005. He has also published a number of chapters and articles on Italian film and music, most recently in the Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvelescu (Blackwells, 2013). Hannah Lewis  is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include film music, music and visual media, twentieth-century avant-garde and experimental music, and musical theater. She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Harvard University in 2014. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Musical Quarterly. Her monograph French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Alexis Luko is an Associate Professor of Music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture and the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa. She holds a Ph.D. from McGill University and previously worked as a Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music and the College Music Department at the University of Rochester. She is a musicologist specializing in film music, opera, music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and early music analysis. She has published articles in the Journal of Film Music, the Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, the Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music, Early Music History, The Journal of Music History Pedagog y, The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. She teaches courses on film music, Baroque opera, Richard Wagner, gender and music, and music of the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Her book, Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, was published in 2016 by Routledge. Orlene Denice McMahon received her doctorate in 2012 from the University of Cambridge. She currently lectures in film at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and the American University of Paris. Her areas of expertise are interdisciplinary, including French New Wave film music,

Contributors  301 post-war European cinema, and Irish film music. Her book Listening to the French New Wave: The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema was published by Peter Lang, O ­ xford, in 2014. Barbara Milewski  is a leading American musicologist on Polish music of the Second World War period and the Holocaust, as well as a Chopin scholar. Her primary focus across these areas of specialization is on the work of musical memory in the construction of nationalist narratives. She has also completed numerous translation projects, disseminating songs created in the Nazi concentration camps, works of contemporary Polish theater, and most recently the English subtitles for the film Forbidden Songs (1947). She is currently writing a book that explores musical-­poetic activities of prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. Her work has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Fulbright, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the American Musicological Society (AMS50). She is Associate Professor of Music at Swarthmore College. Janina Müller  received her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University of Berlin with a thesis on film noir’s music. Her areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, film music, and the history of musical listening. She has published in The Journal of Film Music and the Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung. She is also co-­editor of the eleventh volume of the Complete Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (2016) and currently prepares two volumes for the Bohuslav Martinů Complete Edition. Tobias Plebuch  is a Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. Prior to this appointment, he held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Freiburg and Berlin as well as Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. with a thesis on C.P.E. Bach and his post-doc Habilitation with a thesis on J.S. Bach’s music in films. As co-editor, he published the critical edition of C.P.E. Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (2011), the Collected Writings of Carl Dahlhaus (2000–08) and several anthologies. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Film Music. His own writings address historical, analytical, and social aspects of music with a focus on eighteenth-century music and audiovisual media from silent films to video art. Tobias Pontara  is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Gothenburg. His research interests lie chiefly in film music, music and media, and musical aesthetics. Among the journals in which he has published articles are 19th-Century Music, Philosophical Studies, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociolog y of Music, and Music and the Moving Image. His monograph examining the role and significance of music in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films is forthcoming from Routledge.

302 Contributors Emile Wennekes is Chair Professor of Post-1800 Music History at Utrecht University and former head of the School of Media and Culture Studies. He has published on a broad range of subjects, including a co-published book available in six languages. His current research focuses on two areas: mediatizing music and the remigration of Jewish musicians (post- ­Second World War). Case studies have been published by Brepols, Routledge, ­Oxford University Press, and Michigan University Press. He chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the auspices of the International Musicological Society and coordinates its annual conference.

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abrupt sonic shift 193, 197 Aïda 74, 80–2, 83n18 Air II 174, 180n18 Air III 172, 180n18, 181n26 Air V 176–7, 180n18, 181n32 Albertazzi, Giorgio 161 Alford, Kenneth 91 Algerian War of Independence 159, 168, 292 Alle Eendjes Zwemmen in het Water (nursery rhymes) 38 allegory, Radetzkymarch as 229–31 Alleman (The human Dutch) (film) 41n5 Als de Dijken Breken (When the dikes break) (television drama series) 40 Alvaro, Corrado 53 Anderson, Lindsay 97 Anderson, Michael 89 Andrei: meta-diegetic reveries of 241–6 Andriessen, Hendrik 33, 42n12 Andrzejewski, Jerzy 116 And Then There Were None (film) 280 Angels One Five (film) 89 Anna (film) 66n4 Annakin, Ken 101 anthropomorphic metaphors 230 anti-Fascist war films 261 “architecture of time” 160–1, 178 Arendt, Hannah 142 Arne, Thomas 94–5 Arnold, Malcolm 89, 91–2, 97 “artistic intentionality” 58 Assmann, Aleida 5 Assmann, Jan 5 Astaire, Fred 67n16 Attack on the Iron Coast (film) 95 Austrian monarchy films 210–12

Austrian State Treaty 211 Austro-Hungarian Empire 12, 209, 213, 229 Axberg, Eddie 187, 191 Bach, Johann Sebastian 28, 177, 245, 272n23 Ballada f-moll (film) 254, 255–60 Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a soldier) (film) 140 Ballade van de Zakkendragers/Ballade von den Säckschmeißern 29 Bargielska, Maria 113 Barham, Jeremy 245 Barthes, Roland 145, 186–90, 193–4, 196–7 Basinger, Jeanine 97 Battle of Britain (film) 88, 92, 98 battle of Solferino 209, 212, 216, 222 Battle of the Bulge (film) 98 The Battle of the River Plate (film) 89, 93 Baumgartner, Michael 9, 15, 157n6, 157n9 Bavarians 211 Bazin, André 286 Beethoven, Ludwig van 11, 15, 230, 235–47; Ninth Symphony 235, 237, 240 Beethovenian symphony 209 Belle Époque 276–82, 284, 287–8, 290 Bellotto, Bernardo 262 “Belz” 123 Bennett, Richard Rodney 101 Bensimon, Moshe 175 Bergfilm 230 Bergman, Ingmar 71, 184, 187, 192, 235 Bergstrom, Janet 280, 287, 290

304 Index Berkeley, Busby 289 Bernard, Raymond 265 Bernhardt, Sarah 77–9 Bernstein, Elmer 95 Bertolucci, Bernardo 7, 71, 73, 82 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 2 Białostocki, Zygmunt 114 Bielicka, Maria 120 Bierce, Ambrose 225 Bierut, Bolesław 259 Bildungsroman 192, 230 Binns, Alexander 185 Björkman, Stig 192, 193 Blokker, Jan 30–1 Boczkowska, Ewelina 11, 13, 14, 16 Bodo, Eugeniusz 114 Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (Rose from Cikembang) (film) 27 Bohdziewicz, Antoni 115 Bond, Jeff 96 Bondanella, Peter 46 Bonfanti, Antoine 170 Boobbyer, Philip 142 Bordwell, David 18n20, 188, 201n7, 202n11 Bossak, Jerzy 127n1 Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu saved from drowning) (film) 279 Boulez, Pierre 163, 179n5, 180n21 Boym, Svetlana 4, 254–5, 259, 269, 277, 290 Brechtian alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) 167, 192 Bridge on the River Kwai (film) 91 A Bridge Too Far (film) 98, 100–1 British Second World War films 7, 86; and Alistair MacLean 94; coronation-march idiom 92–7; and Ian Fleming 94; soundtrack 87–92; spirit of adventure 92–7 The Brothers Karamazov 142 Bruckner, Anton 230 Bruggen in Holland (Bridges in Holland) (film) 41n5 Burnham, Scott 209 Bykauˉ, Vasil 138 Caccia tragica (Tragic hunt) (film) 57 Cahiers du Cinéma 286 Cannes Film Festival 34 Carroll, Noël 145 Carter, Angela 82n5 Caruth, Cathy 4 Cayrol, Jean 162, 168 Celińska, Stanisława 134n58

Celluloid Austria 211 Ce ̨kalski, Eugeniusz 12, 16, 256–62, 265, 269–270 The Changing of the Earth (film) 41n11 The Charge of the Light Brigade (film) 98 Chinese music 235, 247 Chion, Michel 139, 145–6, 179n7, 180n17, 188, 201n7 Chopin, Fryderyk 8–9, 11–14, 16, 114, 119–20, 124–5, 253; Ballada f-moll 255–60; Funeral March 219–22, 225, 227; La note bleue 13, 263–9; Młodos ́c ́ Chopina 13, 263–9; nostalgia in Polish cinema 253–73; Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach 260–3; Revolutionary Etude 257, 264, 266–8; Utwory Chopina w kolorze ̇ 260–3; Z elazowa Wola; 255–60 Chopin ballades 256 A Christmas Carol 192 cinema: Polish see Polish cinema; relationship with memory 5–6; and trauma 5; see also films The Cinema of The Low Countries 26 Cinema Quarterly 28 cinematic memory 70 cinematic water narratives 27–9 Cizmic, Maria 1, 9–10, 15 Clair, René 12–15, 276–94; audiovisual style 276; cinema of the 1930s 279–80; Hollywood and 280; Van Parys on 293n12 Clark, Katerina 140 Clésinger, Auguste 261 Coates, Eric 89 The Colditz Story (film) 93 Cold War 70, 86; naval dramas 94 Cole, Laurence 213 collective memory 2–3, 5, 16, 172–4; and identity 7, 12, 16, 26, 71; and nation 6, 13, 26; and (trans-) nation 6–8, 14–6 comédie musicale 281, 286, 287, 289 “common” and “shared memory” 3 Commonwealth Poland 263 “communicative and cultural memory” 3 complicity 142–4 Concertgebouw Orchestra 33; extradiegetic music performed by 36–8 Concertino for Piano and Orchestra 118 Il conformista (The conformist) (film) 83n9 conscience 142–4

Index  305 Constitutional Monarchy 263 Conti, Axel 216 Cook, Pam 5 Cooke, Mervyn 7, 15, 164, 168 Copland, Aaron 87 Corbella, Maurizio 6–7, 15 Coronation March 87 Coronation Ode 87 Cowie, Peter 193, 197 critical nostalgia 276–94 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 229 Cross of Iron (film) 101 Crowley, David 263 Crown Imperial 88–9 The Cruel Sea (film) 94 The Cruel Sea (novel) (Monsarrat) 94 cultural code 186 cultural memory 7, 70–1, 82 culture: French 278, 280; French folk 290; of memory 139–42; Polish 119, 256, 260 czardas 221–2, 228 Czerny-Stefańska, Halina 263 Dale, R. C. 281, 286 The Dam Busters (film) 89, 100–1 Das Erbe von Björndal (film) 230 Davies, H. Walford 89 Decety, Jean 145 decomposing heroism 209–32 De Jantjes (The sailors) (film) 27 De Laatste Dagen van een Eiland (The last days of the isle of Marken) (film) 29 De lage landen (The low countries) (film) 41n5 De Santis, Guiseppe 6, 45, 51; description of Riso amaro 53, 57; on Petrassi’s score 58; on Riso amaro idea 52–3 De Stem van het Water (The voice of the water) (film) 41n6 De Zaak M.P. (The Manneken Pis Case) (film) 42n11 De Zuiderzeewerken (Zuyderzee works) (film) 29 Delacroix, Eugene 265 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 159–61, 167, 174, 178 Delta Phase I (Delta plan, first phase) (film) 41n5, 41n11 Democrazia Cristiana (DC) 45 Demy, Jacques 292 Der Kaiser und das Wäschermädel (The emperor and the laundry maid) (film) 211

Der Radetzky-Marsch 230 Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The death of Maria Malibran) (film) 77 Der Kongreß tanzt (The congress dances) (film) 212, 231n3, 231n5 Diary of a Chambermaid (film) 280 Die Deutschmeister (The German masters) (film) 211 Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (Roth) 214 Die Macht der Gefühle (The power of emotion) (film) 7, 71, 77, 80–2; ending of 81; and Italian opera 81–2; prelude of 80 Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs) (film) 80 Die Walküre 77 Dijkbouw (The dike builders) (film) 41n5 Discorama 171 disruption, and soundtracks 13–4 Dnia pierwszego wrzes ń ia 117 Domenico’s Beethoven 237–41 Dood Water (Dead water) (film) 26, 27, 30 Dowding, Sir Hugh 99 Downes, Olin 260 Dreyfuss, Jean-Claude 78 Drozdowska, Amy 262 Dunkirk (film) 92, 97 Dupont, Joan 162 Duszyński, Jerzy 117 Dutch fanfare 31 Dutch films, and water 25–6 Dutch nursery rhymes: Mul use of 38–9; as quotations in Fanfare 38–9 Dwie godziny (Two hours) (film) 116 Dyer, Richard 47, 51, 59, 278 Dymsza, Adolf 114 Dyson, George 89 Dziennik Powszechny 128n4 Dzikie pola (Wild fields) (film) 131n31 The Eagle Has Landed (film) 101 Easdale, Brian 89–90 Eastern-sounding electronic music 247 Edwall, Allan 194 Edward IV 89 Edward VII 87 Edward VIII 88 eigenheid 26 Eisler, Hanns 28–9, 179n14 Electra N.V. 27–9 Elena et ses hommes (Elena and her men) (film) 287 Elgar, Edward 7, 87–8, 90, 99–102 Elizabethan Age 89

306 Index empathy, and film music 144–6 Enosis revolutionary movement 93 En passion (The passion of Anna) (film) 187 Entr’acte (film) 279 “Erbarme dich” 245 Erikson, Kai 4 Ernryd, Bengt 186, 202n12 European memory complex 14–16 Express Wieczorny Ilustrowany 113 Faliszewski, Tadeusz 114 Fanfare (film) 6, 27, 30, 39–40; diegetic music 33–5; Dutch nursery rhymes 38–9; musical score by Jan Mul 33; rivaling bands in 32–3; screenplay of 30–1; and water 31–2 fanfare band 31 Fanfare in E-flat Major 34–6, 40, 42n13 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 80 Faydeau, Georges 279 Feindt, Gregor 15, 169 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 219 Feuer, Jane 292 Feux de joie (Fires of joy) (film) 181n27 “Field Marshal Radetzky” 213 Film 58–9 film music 14–16, 276–9, 291–2; and empathy 144–6; and environment 146–51; and identification 144–6 Film Polski 111, 120, 265, 270n1, 272n28 films: anti-Fascist war 261; Frenchness 278, 293n3; modernist 160–78; monarchy 210–12, 216, 222, 229–30, 231n3; and nostalgia 5; opera staged within 71; Stalinist Chopin 259; Stalinist propaganda 256, 270; Technicolor musical 276, 287; see also cinema The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Johnson and Petrie) 235 The First of the Few (film) 88 First World War 87, 119, 192, 194, 195, 209, 210, 211, 213 Fitzcarraldo (film) 7, 71, 77–80; and opera performances 77 The Flame of New Orleans (film) 280 Fleming, Ian 94 Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without end) (film) 214 folk culture 51 folk songs 6, 52–6; and political conscience 53

Forbert, Adolf 112 Force 10 from Navarone (film) 95, 99, 101 Ford, Aleksander 12–13, 127n1, 253–4, 258, 264–6 Forester, C. S. 90 Fortepian Chopina 256 Frampton, Daniel 236, 243–4, 250n18 Frankfurter Zeitung 230 Franz Joseph I, Emperor 209, 211, 215, 230 French Army Film Service 280 French Cancan (film) 12, 13, 14, 276; Auguste Renoir and 287; finale 289; “La Complainte de la butte” 288; and the post-war French spectator 286–91 French cinematic illusion 276–94 French colonialism 284 French culture 278, 280 French film industry 279, 287 French folk culture 290 “Frenchness films” 278, 293n3 French New Wave aesthetic 192 French Revolution 281 Freud, Sigmund 2 Fritsche, Maria 210 Fronte Democratico Popolare 45 fugue states 159–81; popular songs indicating 173–4 Funeral March 268, 270 Fusco, Giovanni 159, 161, 178 Gabin, Jean 287 Gatti, Guido M. 58 de Gaulle, Charles 177, 280 Gazeta Ludowa 265 Gdy w noc wrzes ń iową 117 Genette, Gérard 185, 201n9, 201n10 George V 87 George VI 88 German films: and national identity 76 German Reich 212 Ghetto Uprising Monument 133n51 Glas (Glass) (film) 29–30 Glaser, Denise 171 Godard, Jean-Luc 235, 292 Goldberg, Halina 257 Gong 113 Goodwin, Ron 95, 99; music, and stiff-upper-lip militarism theme 96; Where Eagles Dare music score 96–7 Górecki, Henryk 1 Głos Robotniczy 127n3 Graf Spee 89

Index  307 Gramsci, Antonio 82 The Great Escape (film) 91 Great Patriotic War 9, 10, 141 The Great Spy Mission 96 Great War 211, 212, 229 Greene, Naomi 177 Griffith, D. W. 281 Grillparzer, Friedrich 213 Gronostay, Walter 28 The Guns of Navarone (film) 94, 98 The Guns of Navarone (MacLean) 94 Haanstra, Bert 6, 39–40; and Dutch identity 29–30; as musical filmmaker 30; screenplay of Fanfare 30–1; use of rhymes in Fanfare 38; work 29 Habsburg: anthem 211; two marches for 216–28 Habsburg Empire 209–10, 222 Habsburgian Monarchy 229 “Habsburg Myth” 229 Halbwachs, Maurice 2–3, 5–6, 18n11 Hallelujah (film) 67n16 Hanslick, Eduard 212 Här har du ditt liv (Here is your life) (film) 9, 184–5, 191–3, 197–8, 201n3, 202n20, 202n21, 203n24, 203n26 Havardi, Jeremy 86, 92–3, 101–2 Heath, Ted 103n17 Heili heilo 119, 121 Heimat 229–30 Heimatfilm 211 Hej tam pod Krakowem 117 Hendrykowski, Marek 269 Henze, Hans Werner 9, 15, 159, 161, 169, 170–8, 179n5, 180n19, 180n21 hermeneutic code 186, 187–8 hermeneutics 140, 230 The Heroes of Telemark (film) 92 heroism: decomposing 209–32; national 268 Herzog, Werner 7, 15, 57–8, 71, 77–80 heuristics of multivocality 14–16 Hillman, Roger 7, 15 Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima my love) (film) 161 historical memory 26; Kryl’ia 140–1; Voskhozhdenie 139–40, 155 Hitler, Adolf 211, 258 Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: a film from Germany) (film) 80 HMS Ulysses (MacLean) 94 Hoeckner, Berthold 145

Hollywood 276–80, 284, 286–7, 292, 293n6, 293n9, 294n16 Holocaust 8, 12; studies 3–4 Holy Cross Church, Warsaw 262 Howard, Leslie 88 How I Won the War (film) 98 Hugo, Victor 265 Hungarians 211 Hutcheon, Linda 277 Huyssen, Andreas 3, 5, 17n9, 277 Ice Cold in Alex (film) 97 “ideal sonic ambiguity” 168 identification: and film music 144–6; and Voskhozhdenie 145 identity: and collective memory 26; national and German films 76 “ideological camouflage” 262 Ill Met By Moonlight (aka Night Ambush) (film) 93 Il trovatore 72–6 Ilustrowana Republika 113 I Married a Witch (film) 280 Imbergamo, Barbara 52 Imperial March 87 In een Groen, Groen Knolleland (nursery rhymes) 38–9 International Contemporary Music Society Festival 118 I Puritani 77, 79 Ishaghpour, Youssef 168 Iskusstvo Kino 144 Italian opera 71–2, 76–7, 80–2 It Happened Tomorrow (film) 280 Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s childhood) (film) 140 Ivens, Joris 26, 28–9 I Was Monty’s Double (film) 100 Jachnina, Anna 128n6 Jacobs, Jacob 122 Jacobs, Pim 30 Jakubowska, Wanda 117 Janáček, Leoš 81 January Uprising, 1863 256 Ja tu rządzę (musical film) 114, 131n31 jazz music: negatively connotation in Riso amaro 57; Riso amaro 48–9; see also music Je t’aime, je t’aime (I love you, I love you) (film) 159, 178 Jewish genocide 129n8 Jews 211; monarchy films and 211; personal wartime odysseys and 113;

308 Index Polish 123, 125–6, 129n10; Polish Council to Aid Jews 118 Johnson, Eyvind 191 Johnson, Vida T. 235 Jones, Kent 162 Jordaanfilms 26 Joseph, Franz 211, 212 July Revolution of 1830 263 Jurandot, Jerzy 114 juxtaposed musical mottos 197 juxtaposed sonic mottos 194 Kaiserfilm 210, 216, 229 Kaisermanöver (The Emperor’s maneuver) (film) 211, 216 Kaiserwalzer (The Emperor’s waltz) (film) 211, 231n4 Kant, Immanuel 229 Kaplan, Alexander 96 Kaplan, E. Ann 5 Kassabian, Anahid 185, 202n10 Kawin, Bruce 168 Kehlmann, Michael 11, 210 Kehr, Dave 287, 289 Kennedy, Michael 87 Kitschman, Anda 114 Klang farbenmelodie 139 Klepikov, Iurii 141 Kluge, Alexander 7–8, 15, 71, 77 Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape after battle) (film) 134n58 Krawatzek, Félix 169 Krenz, Jan 120 Kronprinz Rudolfs letzte Liebe (Crown Prince Rudolph’s last love) (film) 212 Kryl’ia (Wings) (film) 141; and historical memory 140–1 kujawiak 253 Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or Who owns the world?) (film) 41n4 Kurier Codzienny 265 La Beauté du diable (Beauty and the devil) (film) 281, 293n15 La Chienne (The bitch) (film) 279 La Grande illusion (Grand illusion) (film) 290 La guerre est finie (The war is over) (film) 159, 178 La luna (The moon) (film) 7, 71–7 La Marseillaise 194 “La musica italiana verso il popolo” 58 La notte di San Lorenzo (The night of the shooting stars) 82n2

Lalka 113 “Land of Hope and Glory” 87 Lang, Fritz 80 L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last year at Marienbad) (film) 9, 11, 159, 160–8 La note bleue (The blue note) (film) 13, 254, 263–9, 270, 272n26 La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the crossroads) (film) 279 La Règle du jeu (The rules of the game) (film) 279–80, 287, 290 La risaia (Rice Girl) (film) 61 La strategia del ragno (The spider’s stratagem) (film) 76, 79, 82n4 La Traviata 72, 76 La villeggiatura (Black holiday) (film) 77 Lean, David 91 Le Carrosse d’or (The golden coach) (film) 286, 287 Le Dernier milliardaire (The last billionaire) (film) 279 Le Million (The million) (film) 279, 281 “Leci lis ć ie” 8–9, 119, 120–2, 125–6 Ledenëv, Roman 140 Leigh-Fermor, Patrick 93 Lernet-Holenia, Alexander 229 Les Belles de nuit (Beauties of the night) (film) 12, 13, 14, 276, 280–6; cinematic nostalgia in 292; Claude in his dream worlds 282; dream worlds in 280–6; dream world turned ugly as music becomes noise in 285; opening of waltz based on scale 283; receiving mixed critical reception 286 Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The young girls of Rochefort) (film) 292 Le Silence est d’or (Man about town) (film) 280, 294n15 Les lieux de mémoire (Nora) 3 Les Misérables (Hugo) 265 Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The umbrellas of Cherbourg) (film) 292 Les Six 33 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s holiday) (film) 30–1 Lester, Richard 98 Letiat zhuravli (The cranes are flying) (film) 140 Leto, Marco 77 Levinson, Jerrold 244–5 Lewis, Hannah 12, 14–5 Leydi, Roberto 53 “Liberty Leads the People” painting 265

Index  309 lieux de mémoire 3, 6, 18n12, 26–27, 31–3, 36, 38, 40 Ligeti, György 139 Lindstedt, Pierre 187 “Live not by the Lie” 143–4 Lizzani, Carlo 46 Lohner, Helmuth 222 Lola (film) 292 The Longest Day (film) 98 Losey, Joseph 71 Louis Philippe, King of France 284 Louis XIII, King of France 281 Louis XVI, King of France 284 Lubicz-Gużkowska, Barbara 118 Ludzie Wisły (People of the Vistula) (film) 131n31 Luko, Alexis 9, 15 Lux Film 58 Macdonald, Sharon 6, 14–15 Mackendrick, Alexander “Sandy” 31 MacKenzie, S. P. 101 MacLean, Alistair 94, 100–1 Małcużyński, Witold 260 The Magnificent Seven (film) 95 Magris, Claudio 229 Mahler, Gustav 13, 219, 230 Makarczyński, Tadeusz 12, 261–2, 270, 271n12 March for Count Radetzky 212–13 Marshall, James 90 Marsz pierwszego korpusu 131n38 Masi, Stefano 51 Mathijs, Ernest 26 “Mayn Shtetele Belz” (“Miasteczko Bełz”) 122, 124, 132n45, 133n56 Mazierska, Ewa 5, 270n6 Mazurek Dąbrowskiego 131n38 McMahon, Orlene Denice 9, 15 McNaught, William 88 Meistersinger 88 memory 277–9; collective 172–4; culture of 139–42; film musical and 277–9; nostalgia and277–9; relationship with cinema 5–6; repressed 169–72; see also specific types memorylands 6 memory studies: and music 1; survey of milestones in 2–5 Mengelberg, Willem 28 merged sonic events 196 meta-diegetic reveries: of Andrei 241–6; and contemplating filmind 241–6; of Verdi 241–6 Miceli, Sergio 46

“middle eastern music” 235, 247 Milewski, Barbara 8, 15, 270n3, 270n5, 271n18, 272n32 milieux de mémoire 3 Military Order of Maria Theresa 216 Miller, Mitch 91 Miłosz, Czesław 116 Moberg, Vilhelm 186 modernist films 160–78; Air and allusion to Bach’s aria “Erbarme Dich” 176–8; Airs as indicator of repressed individual and collective memory 172–3, 176–8; Airs as narrative device to reveal repressed memories 170–2; Chanson Déjà as nostalgic retrospection 175; L’année dernière à Marienbad 161–8; Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour 168–9; music as reminder of repressed memory 169–70; music as reminder of trauma 169–70; popular songs indicating fugue states vs. Henze’s music 173–4; see also films modernist soundtracks 160–78 Młodos ́c ́ Chopina (The youth of Chopin) (film) 13, 253–4, 258–9, 263–270 Monaco, James 162 monarchy films 210–12, 216, 222, 229–30, 231n3 Monroe, Marilyn 72 Monsarrat, Nicholas 94 Moss, W. Stanley 93 Moulin Rouge 14 Mrozowska, Zofia 123 Mul, Jan 30, 40; diegetic Fanfare music 33–5; Dutch nursery rhymes in Fanfare 38–9; music score for Fanfare 33 Mullens, Willy 29 Müller, Janina 11–3, 15 multivocality 14–16 Mulvey, Laura 56 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the time of return) (film) 8–9, 11, 15, 159, 162, 168–78 music: Chinese 235, 247; in European cinema 6; and memory studies 1; middle eastern 247; and nostalgia 1–2; as persistent reminder of repressed memory 169–70; as persistent reminder of trauma 169–70; Polish folk 253; Russian 247; of sacrificial acts 235–50; Swedish traditional 193; and trauma 1–2; “Turkish” 247; Western classical 247

310 Index musical modernism 161 musicscape 46–7; Riso amaro 47 Mussorgsky, Modest 192 Muzyka Symfoniczna 118 Napoleonic Wars 213 narrative codes: sonic flashbacks and 185–200 national cinemas 71 national identity, and German films 76 National Liberation Committee 45 Naumann, Michael 86 Nazis 262 Nederland (The Netherlands) 41n5 Nel, Jerzy 114, 118 Netherlands 25; fanfare band 31; geographical location 25–6 Newman, Alfred 90 New Objectivity movement 214 Niagara (film) 72, 76 Nicolas, François 172 Nieuw Dorp op Nieuw Land (New town on new land) (film) 29 Nieuwe Gronden (New earth) (film) 26, 28; soundtrack of 28 1900 (film) 74 Noi mondine (We, mondine) (film) 61 Nora, Pierre 3, 5, 8, 26 Nordgren, Erik 186, 192–3 Norwid, Cyprian 256–7 Nostalghia (Nostalgia) (film) 11, 13, 14, 235–50; Beethoven in 235–50; displacement and redemption in 235–50; Domenico’s Beethoven 237–41; meta-diegetic reveries and contemplating filmind 241–6; triumphant music of failed selfsacrifice 237–41; Verdi in 235–50 nostalgia 11–14, 277–9; Boym on 4; and British war films 86–7; defined 4; and films 5; and music 1–2; musicals 278; reflective 5, 11–12, 254; restorative 4–5, 7, 254, 269 À Nous la liberté (film) 279 November Uprising (1830) 119, 263–4 Nuit et brouillard (Night and fog) (film) 197n14 Nusbaum, Howard 145 Nybyggarna (The new land) (film) 9, 10–11, 184, 186–7; sonic events 198, 199, 200; sonic flashbacks in 187–91 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce) 225 Oddner, Georg 186

“Ode to Joy” 236–7, 239, 241, 246–7, 248n9 Offenbach, Jacques 13 Oi Vi Kumusciki 11, 241, 244 The Oilfield (film) 41n11 Olejniczak, Janusz 267 Olick, Jeffrey K. 3 Olivier, Laurence 89 Olshanetsky, Alexander 122 On purge bébé (Baby’s laxative) (film) 279 Open City 45 Operation Crossbow (film) 96 Operation Market Garden 100 Op Hoop van Zegen (Fishing Boat “Hope for the Best”) (film) 27 Orb and Sceptre 89 The Orchestra (film) 268 Origins of Totalitarianism 142 Orphée aux enfers 289 Ostatni etap (The last stage) (film) 117 Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) (film) 141 Over Glas gesproken (Speaking about glass) (film) 42n11 Paap, Wouter 33 Palester, Roman 117–19, 131n33, 266 Palmer, Christopher 91 Panta Rhei (Everything streams) (film) 30 Panufnik, Andrzej 255–6, 258, 269–70 Pareh: Het lied van de rijst (Pareh: the song of rice) (film) 27 Parigi, Stefania 57 Parker, Clifton 90–1 Parsifal 80 Pärt, Arvo 1, 10 Paweł i Gaweł 114 Penderecki, Krzysztof 139, 159, 161, 178 Perski, Ludwik 127n1 Perspectives of New Music 160 Pesn o Gerojach/Komsomol (Song of heroes, Youth speaks) 41n4 Petersburski, Jerzy 114 Petrassi, Goffredo 6–7, 46–7, 51; score in Riso amaro 58–65; use of folk tune in Riso amaro 62–4 Petrie, Graham 235 Petrukhina, Nadezhda 140 Piaf, Édith 287 The Pianist (film) 130n21 Pies ń iarz Warszawy (Singer of Warsaw) (film) 114 Pies ń ́ o ziemi 118 Pitoëff, Sacha 161

Index  311 Piętro wyżej (One floor up) (film) 114 Plantinga, Carl 145 “pleasure-pain feelings” 2 Plebuch, Tobias 11–3, 15 Pol, Wincenty 119 Poland: cinema 111; Commonwealth 263; emerging from communism 266; “Holocaust narrative” 113; landless gentry in 272n27; liberation 111, 116–17; Ministry of Information and Propaganda 116; Nazi and Soviet invasions of 258; post-war film 112; regained independence in 258, 271n13; Russia’s aggression toward 262; Soviet-led communism in 270 Polish cinema: Ballada f-moll 255–60; Chopin nostalgia in 253–73; La note bleue 263–9; Młodos ́c ́ Chopina 263–9; Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach 260–3; Utwory Chopina w kolorze ̇ 260–3; Z elazowa Wola 255–60; see also cinema Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) 258 Polish communists 116 Polish Council to Aid Jews 118 Polish cultural resistance 129n7 Polish culture 119, 256, 260 Polish Enlightenment 263 Polish folk music 253 Polish Home Army 116 Polish Information Center, New York 260 Polish Jews 122–4 Polish nobility 257 Polskie Nagrania Muza 127 Pomp and Circumstance 7, 87 “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6” 88 Pontara, Tobias 11, 15, 19n22 Porte des Lilas (The gates of Paris) (film) 281 post-war French spectator: French Cancan and 286–91 Potsdam Conference 261 Poulenc, Francis 33 Powell, Eleanor 67n16 Powell, Michael 89 Pressburger, Emeric 89, 93 Prima della rivoluzione (Before the revolution) (film) 72, 75 Prince Metternich 211 proairetic code 186 Projecting Britain at War (Havardi) 86 “prosthetic memory” 3

Prussians 211 psychoanalytical theory 2 Queen Elizabeth II 87 Queen Mary 87 Queen Victoria 87 Qu’est-ce qu’on attend (pour être heureux) 174 Rabcewiczowa, Zofia 261, 266 “Radetzky cult” 213 Radetzky March 12, 13, 15, 209–11, 213–22, 225–30, 232n14; in Roth’s novel 214–16 Radetzkymarsch (film) 11, 13, 212, 229; as allegory 229–31; Austrian monarchy films after Second World War 210–12; march for Count Radetzky 212–13; Radetzky March in Roth’s novel 214–16; Rolf Wilhelm’s film score 216–28; Rolf Wilhelm’s music for 209–32; two marches for Habsburg 216–28 Raiders of the Lost Ark (film) 101 Rawsthorne, Alan 90, 94, 103n11 Reach for the Sky (film) 95 Realms of Memory (Nora) 26 Recital Chopinowski w Dusznikach (Chopin recital in Duszniki) (film) 254, 260–3, 270 reflective nostalgia 5, 11–12, 254 Rembrandt, Schilder van de Mens (Rembrandt: Painter of Man) (film) 42n11 Renoir, Auguste 287 Renoir, Jean 5, 12–15, 51, 276–94; American films of 280, 293n9; cinema of the 1930s 279–80; cinematic trajectories of 279–80; on French Cancan 287–91; musical realism in films of 279–80 repetition, of soundtracks 13–14 repressed memory 169–72 Requiem 11, 235, 241 Requiem aeternam 243 Resnais, Alain 8, 9–10, 11, 15 re-sounding trauma 184–203; narrative codes and 185–200; sonic flashbacks and 185–200 restorative nostalgia 4–5, 7, 254, 269 Revolutionary Etude 264, 266–8 Richard III (film) 89 Richardson, Tony 98 Ricoeur, Paul 3, 47 Rigoletto 72, 81, 83n6 Ringelblum, Emmanuel 132n46

312 Index Riso amaro (Bitter rice) (film) 6; and American dance styles 56–8; boogie-woogie style of dancing 56–8; boxoffice success of 45; and condition of women in Italy 54–6; folk songs in 49; and Italy political turnmoil 45; jazz music 48–9; musical cues in 50; musical stratification 48–51; musicscape 47; soundtracks of 46; and women in social conflict 46 The River (film) 286 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 162 Robinson Warszawski (The Warsaw Robinson) (film) 116 Robotnik 111 Rochberg, George 160 Roll, Gernot 216 Roma, città aperta (Rome, open city) (film) 66n2 Romanen om Olof (Johnson) 191 Rossellini, Roberto 76 Roth, Joseph 12, 209–12, 214–16, 225, 228, 230 Royal Navy 89 Rózsa, Miklós 89 Rozszumiały się wieżby płaczące 117 Russian music 247 Rutten, Gerard 26, 27 Rybczyński, Zbig 12, 14, 16, 268 The Sacrifice 245–6 sacrificial acts: music of 235–50 Sagolandet (Land of dreams) (film) 193 Sand, George 267 Scenes from an Exhibition 192 Scheible, Hartmut 214 Schifrin, Lalo 101 Schindler’s List (film) 130n21 Schmidt-Banse, Hans Christian 176 Schnittke, Alfred 9–10, 15, 138–9, 145; film score and environment 146–51; score of Voskhozhdenie 151; use of musical screams 152–5 Schoenberg, Arnold 139 Schoots, Hans 31 Schroeter, Werner 77–8 Schwartz, Vanessa 278 Sea of Sand (film) 91 Second World War 7, 8, 15, 159, 168, 173, 175, 229, 254, 261, 269, 279, 292; Austrian monarchy films after 210–12; and cinema 141; films 86; and moral crisis 143

semic code 186, 189 Senso (Sentiment; The Wanton Contessa) (film) 76, 77 Serce w plecaku 119 Serocki, Kazimierz 253, 263 Sessions, Roger 160 Seyrig, Delphine 161 Seyrig, Francis 159, 161, 164–9, 178 Shakespeare, William 89 Shearer, Martha 278 Shepit’ko, Larisa 8, 9, 11, 15, 138–9; film score and environment 146–51; individual repercussions of war movies 141; use of environmental sounds 145; use of musical screams 152–5; works of 140 The Sicilian Vespers 81 Siekiera, motyka 117 Sielanka 117 Silverman, Jerry 127 Sink the Bismarck! (film) 90–1 Sissi trilogy 210, 229 633 Squadron (film) 95–6, 101 Sjöberg, Alf 184 Skammen (Shame) (film) 187 Smith, Frederick E. 95 Smith, Jeff 145, 185 Smultronstället (Wild strawberries) (film) 192 Socialist Realism 259–60, 263, 269, 270 Sokolov, Vadim 144 Solaris 247 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 143–4 sonic enigma 188, 195–6, 198–9 sonic flashback 2 194–200 sonic flashback enigmas 188, 189, 195 sonic flashbacks: in films of Jan Troell 184–203; and narrative codes 185–200; in Nybyggarna 187–91, 198–9 sonic mottos 189, 191; and Här har du ditt liv introductory flashback montage 192–4 Sotnikauˉ (Bykauˉ) 138 “sound flashforwards” 188 The Sound of Music (film) 186 soundtracks 201n6; British Second World War films 87–92; modernist 160–78; Nieuwe Gronden 28; Riso amaro 46 Sous les toits de Paris (film) 279 The Southerner (film) 280 Sovetskii fil’m 141

Index  313 Soviet Union 258 “spatialization of music” 160 Spiegel van Holland (Mirror of Holland) (film) 29 ́ S piew z mogiły 131n39 Spitfire Prelude and Fugue 88–9 Stalin, Joseph 258 Stalinism 142, 255, 270 Stalinist Chopin films 259 Stalinist propaganda films 256, 270 Stalker (film) 247 Stanislaw II Augustus, King of Poland 262 Starski, Allan 115, 124, 130n21 Starski, Ludwig 8, 111–13; background 113–14; choosing forbidden songs 117–24; in hiding 114–16 START group 259, 261 Star Wars (film) 95, 101 Stilwell, Robynn 185, 238 Stishova, Elena 144 St. Matthew Passion (Bach) 177, 245 Stowarzysznie Miłos ń ików Filmu Artystyczniego START (Society of art film aficionados) 259, 261 Strauss, Johann, Sr. 12, 213, 214 Strauss, Richard 230 Streich, Rita 172 Submarine X-1 (film) 96 Sud’ba Cheloveka (Fate of a man) (film) 140 Suez crisis 86 survival, and trauma 8–11 Svensk Filmindustri 192 Swamp Water (film) 280 Swedish traditional music 193 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 80 symbolic code 186, 193 Szaflarska, Danuta 124 Szancer, Jan 116 Szelburg-Zarembina, Ewa 116 Szpilman, Władysław 266 Sztompka, Henryk 261 Szwajcer, Henryk 123, 132n49 Szymanowski, Karol 117 Tallenay, Jean-Louis 286 Tarkovsky, Andrei 11, 13–14, 235–50 Tati, Jacques 30 Technicolor musical films 276, 287 Terang Boelan (Full Moon) (film) 27 Terra Nova (New ground) (film) 27 Theodorakis, Mikis 93 theory of musical expressiveness 244

Therrien, Carl 163, 166 This Land Is Mine (film) 280 Thompson, Kristin 188 Thorne, Ken 98 Thunderball (film) 96 Tiomkin, Dimitri 94 Toeplitz, Jerzy 265 Togliatti, Palmiro 45 Tokarska, Halina 122 Tokarski, Roman 117, 120 Tomlinson, Emily 177 Tora! Tora! Tora! (film) 98 Trafic (Traffic) 41n9 (trans-)nation, and collective memory 6–8 trauma: and cinema 5; culture 5; defined 4; and music 1–2; re-sounding 184–203; social dimension of 4; and survival 8–11 Troell, Jan 8, 9–10, 11, 184, 186; sonic flashbacks in films of 184–203 Trovajoli, Armando 48 Truffaut, François 286 Tumarkin, Nina 141 Turim, Maureen 185 “Turkish” music 247 Tuwim, Julian 114 2 × 2 = 4 (film) 131n5 Übervater 230 Ulica Graniczna (Border street) 131n35 Ullmann, Liv 186 Un ballo in maschera 75–6, 77 Und ewig singen die Wälder 230 The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust 127 Une Femme est une femme (A woman is a woman) (film) 292 Uppehåll i myrlandet (Interlude in the marshland) 193 Utvandrarna (The emigrants) (film) 184, 186, 188 Utwory Chopina w kolorze (film) 254, 260–3 Valentini, Paola 46 van der Ven, D. J. 29 van Gasteren, Louis 29 Van Zuiderzee tot IJsselmeer en Waddenzee (From Zuiderzee to IJsselmeer and Waddenzee) 29 Vanina Vanini (The betrayer) (film) 76 Van Parys, Georges 277, 281–2, 287–8, 291, 293n12

314 Index Vargtimmen (The hour of the wolf) (film) 187 Ve ̌c Makropulos 81 Verdi, Giuseppe 7–8, 11, 15, 70–7, 80, 82, 235; meta-diegetic reveries of 241–6; Requiem 235–6, 241–7, 249n10 Vienna Philharmonic 213 Vienna Symphony 229 Viennese film industry 210 Vietnam War 97 Violin Concerto 118 Visconti, Luchino 76, 82 Viva l’Italia 76 Vivien, Pierre 173 von Sydow, Max 186, 202n21 Voskhozhdenie (The ascent) (film) 8, 10, 11, 15, 138–9; discourse of conscience 143–4; and historical memory 140; and identification 145; individual repercussions of war 141–2; musical screams 152–5; Schnittke’s score of 151 Vredenburg, Max 30 Wagner, Richard 7, 77, 79–80, 88, 164, 230, 248n9 Wagner’s Ring cycle 80, 88 Walas, Teresa 259, 269 Walewska, Hania 129n18, 130n22 Walton, William 88, 98–9; Battle of Britain score 98; coronation-march idiom 92; and war films music 88–9, 92 “war neuroses” 2 Wars, Henryk 114 Warsaw Uprising 118, 130n23, 255, 258 Warszawianka 131n38 “Warszawo ma” 8–9, 10, 122–4, 125, 127 Warsztat Filmowy Młodych (Youth’s film workshop) 258 water: and Fanfare 31–2; narratives, cinematic 27–9; and Netherlands cinema 25–6 Watersnoodramp (Flooding disaster) (film) 41n5 Waugh, Thomas 29 Ważyk, Adam 124 Weninger, Leopold 216

Wennekes, Emile 6–7 Western classical music 247 Where Eagles Dare (film) 93, 96, 101 Whitebait, William 97 Widerberg, Bo 184, 200n1 Wiehler, Zygmunt 114 The Wildcat (film) 41n11 Wilhelm, Rolf 12, 221; film score 216–28; Radetzkymarsch 209–32 Willem van Oranje (William of Orange) (film) 27 Williams, John 95 Williams, Vaughan 91 Wilson, Emma 172 Winar, Ernst 29 Winters, Ben 185 Witwicki, Stefan 263 Wlodarski, Amy Lynn 1 Wohl, Stanisław 115, 127n1 The Woman on the Beach (film) 280 women: condition in Italy shown in Riso amaro 54–6; singing in Riso amaro 53; in social conflict and Riso amaro 46 Wooldridge, John 89 World War see First World War; Second World War Wróg napadł na Polskę 117 Wyat, Emma W. 145 Wyszomirski, Jerzy 124 Yanks (film) 101 Young Bess (film) 89 Youngblood, Denise J. 140–1 Zabawka (The toy) (film) 118 Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden songs) (film) 8, 10, 112–13, 118, 120, 266; criticism of 124–6; forbidden songs used in 117–24; importance for Poland 126–7 Zapomniana melodia 114 Zaremba, Marcin 262 Zawadzki-Moran, Władysław 113, 115 ̇ Z elazowa Wola (film) 254, 255–60 Zieliński, Michał 119 Zuiderzee-Film 29 Zuiderzee project 27–8 Zuiderzeewerken (Zuiderzee works) (film) 28–9 Żuławski, Andrzej 12–14, 16, 263