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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introduction

Author : Phil Powrie

Published in: Music in Contemporary French Cinema

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The Introduction gives the background for the three major claims of the book: first, that the composed score in the heritage film is gendered and generally functions to constrain even the strongest female protagonists; second, that the significant increase in English-language songs in contemporary French films is an essential part of the way in which French films contrast them with French-language songs, whose function is to create nostalgia; finally, that there is a special function of songs in films, which I call the crystal-song. There is a discussion of approaches to film music, including the psychological analysis of “frissons,” brief coverage of music in the thriller genre, and an appraisal of some key debates in film music (the pause, the leitmotif and the diegetic).

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“Without You.”

The most prominent amongst these are Flinn 1992; Kalinak 1992; Brown 1994; Smith 1998a; Donnelly 2001; Kassabian 2001; Wojcik and Knight 2001; Buhler, Flinn and Neumeyer 2000; Dickinson 2002; Cooke 2008; Cooke 2010. I have not listed the many books on the film musical, for reasons I shall discuss below.

Jousse and Saada 1995, Mouëllic 2000, Mouëllic 2003, Masson and Mouëllic 2003, Berthomieu 2004, Abhervé, Binh and Moure 2014.

This study focuses on a number of case studies of contemporary films, exploring the combination of Hollywood-style symphonic music with a more ‘impressionistic’ French style. These are 8 femmes (2001), Sur mes lèvres (2001), Nid de guèpes (2002), Confidences trop intimes (2003), Swimming Pool (2003), De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (2005), Hell (2005) and Angel (2007).

See the books listed in the references: 1982, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2003. For translations into English by Claudia Gorbman see Chion 1994 and 1999.

For Isabelle Adjani: Camille Claudel (1988) and La Reine Margot (1994); for Jeanne Balibar: Ne touchez pas la hache (2007); for Juliette Binoche: Le Hussard sur le toit (1995), Les Enfants du siècle (1999), La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (2000) and Camille Claudel 1915 (2013); for Sandrine Bonnaire: Un cœur simple (2008); for Carole Bouquet: Lucie Aubrac (1997); for Marion Cotillard: La Môme (2007); for Catherine Deneuve: Indochine (1992); for Isabelle Huppert: Madame Bovary (1991), Saint-Cyr (2000) and Gabrielle (2005); for Sophie Marceau: La Fille de d’Artagnan (1994); for Audrey Tautou: Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004) and Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012).

Le Petit Lieutenant (2005), Ne le dis à personne (2006), Bellamy (2009), Ne te retourne pas (2009), À bout portant (2010), L’Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (2010), Trois mondes (2012), Gibraltar (2013), La Prochaine Fois je viserai le cœur (2014).

Ne andrò sola e lontana/Come l’eco della pia campana,/Là, fra la neve bianca, n’andrò,/N’andrò sola e/E fra le nubi d’ôr (I shall go away alone and far,/Like the echo of the pious church-bell goes away,/There, somewhere in the white snow, I shall go,/I’ll go away alone and far/And amongst the clouds of gold!)

“I will speak the blue words/The words you speak with your eyes”; “I will speak the blue words/The words that make people happy.”

Or as Herzog points out in her Deleuzian framework, “musicals offer glimpses of dream-images, even of crystalline images of time, only to recuperate those moments into the sensory-motor logic of the movement-image” (2009, 202).

See for example Peter Kivy commenting Meyer’s position: “Frustration is no more the sole cause of emotion than it is the sole cause of emotion in our daily lives” (1990, 156).

“Speaking of the ‘shower murder figure’ is not the same thing as naming the figure, but simply designating the place from which it emerges.”

“Present for the spectator only in so far as it is not in the perceived images or sounds.”

“The figure falls on the spectator or rather he falls into the figure much like falling in love.”

“The figure may not appear or may not appear in the same way for all the spectators of a film…It is in addition subject to variations and enrichment every time an individual watches the film anew.”

The term closed circuit is used by Matilda Mroz in her discussion of the haptic and temporality in Sobchack’s work; her “writings suggest that her physical reactions constitute a closed circuit, already a thought as a well as a sensation, and thus are not extended into time” (Mroz 2012, 30).

For example, Joe and Gilman 2010, and Bribitzer-Stull 2015.

“Homomorphia between the narrative and the composed score.”

“It incarnates the very movement of repetition which in the flow of images and sounds on screen little by little defines and limits an object, a centre.”

“Maintains the continuity of a human presence, a subjectivity.”

See for example Guserl 2016 for an analysis of the Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” in three different films.

For discussion since the turn of the century see Buhler, Flinn, and Neumeyer 2000 (where the first section of the book containing three chapters is on the leitmotif), Stilwell 2007, Neumeyer 2009, Smith 2009, Winters 2010, Yacavone 2012.

“French artists like Indochine or Kyo…who used to sing in French are turning to English, reducing the number of French titles for programmers.”

“Good or bad, quality films or mediocre films, all of them resonate in us and haunt us.”

“The institution often obliges us to organise the material of film according to established categories: genres, auteurs, historical periods, national cinemas, common themes. This is how books and teaching on cinema construct film corpora and justify their coherence. For its part, the figural series is different from the big series used by the institutions in so far as its coherence is not based on immanent criteria, on some kind of objective truth, but on the contrary on the subjective results of spectating.”

“Music makes me take off.”

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Title: Introduction
Author: Phil Powrie
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Music in Contemporary French Cinema
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52361-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-52362-0

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52362-0_1