Nathan Platte on Gone with the Wind (and others)

A very interesting play off the famous "Tara" theme in Gone with the Wind could form the basis of a comparison paper. Nathan Platte reveals that the composer, Max Steiner, had actually written jazz/blues versions of the tune for two films just a year or so earlier: link. [Link checked on 3-01-2024.] The films are They Made Me a Criminal (1939)—starring John Garfield, Claude Rains, and Ann Sheridan—and Crime School (1938), which stars Humphrey Bogart and Gale Page. As the titles suggest, both belong to the distinctly Warner Bros. genre of inner city crime and gangster films.

Quite a distance from southern plantations! Platte's explanations and speculation about the transformation from crime film to antebellum romance are stimulating in themselves, and one or more of them might well be explored further in a paper that forms and argues a thesis.

Nathan Platte is the author of Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2017): link to publisher page.   [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]

La La Land and Top Hat -- comparison

Students looking for a topic for a comparison paper might do well to start with Steven Cohan's post on the Oxford University Press blog: link. [Link checked on 3-01-2024.] Cohan mentions references  in La La Land (2016) to several classical Hollywood musicals, but makes a number of comments comparing it specifically with the Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat (1935). 

Cohan's list of numbers and their generic status as "challenge dance," "show number," etc., could easily be applied to other musicals.

His statement about the status of song and dance numbers certainly chimes with our generalizations about the musical in Hearing the Movies. Cohan asserts that "the numbers direct the progress of the narrative, with the boy-meets-girl plot pushed forward by the musical elements, which is also to say that the numbers are where the substance of the film resides, not the plot. The numbers are its flagship sequences."

Movie trailer assignment or project

In a post early last year (link)  [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]  we drew attention to Frank Lehman's discussion of recent Star Wars trailers (link to his post on Musicology Now)  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]. I can't say that I am overly fond of comments threads in general, but the conversation in Frank's post is interesting and informative. James Deaville's subsequent post about trailers to Musicology Now is definitely also worth a look: link.  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]

Between them, these materials could provide suitable background for a class assignment or a student paper project on film trailers. The trailer might make an interesting twist on the screening report (Chapter 6), for example, or on the compare-contrast paper assignment (Chapter 10).

Since trailers are now readily available for a wide range of films, both historical and contemporary, they could be incorporated almost anywhere in the chronological sequence from the classical period onward. Caution: in the transition period, what you will find labeled "trailer" online (even on the most respectable sites like Turner Classic Movies) is often just a clip of one of the film's song performances.

Linda Shaver-Gleason on Beethoven’s Deafness

In recent days, we've recommended two essays posted to the publisher's blog The Avid Listener. Here is another: "Beethoven’s Deafness and the Myth of the Isolated Artist" by Linda Shaver-Gleason: link.  [link updated on 3-08-2024]   Where the two previous recommendations offer material  very suitable for use in a class session, Shaver-Gleason's essay—both longer and more complex in its argument—might serve better as research material for a course paper. The two films Shaver-Gleason mentions at the beginning—Mr. Holland's Opus and The King's Speech—could form the basis for a compare and contrast paper (Hearing the Movies, second edition, chapter 10). Or, Shaver-Gleason's overall argument about inaccuracies in the common understanding of Beethoven's hearing in later life as they relate to ideas (myths) about the isolated artist could very well be folded into the final critical paper (Chapter 15).

More to the Film Score Guide series; course papers

At the bottom of this post is yesterday's list of the 19 volumes in the Film Score Guide monograph series, arranged in reverse chronological order of the film's general release. A checkmark (√) at the beginning of an entry indicates that the film is discussed or mentioned in Hearing the Movies, second edition.

If a course based on the book includes a final paper developed incrementally across the semester, it will follow logically through the work suggested in Chapters 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15. Recall that Chapters 6 and 8 explore the writing of scene analyses and the short papers we called “screening reports." The final sections of Chapters 10 and 12 focus, respectively, on a compare and contrast exercise and the building of a historical argument. In Chapter 15, the several earlier elements contribute to grounding a critical essay whose objective is to draw the sound track and music into a thematic reading, especially a reading that shows how these elements support or resist the dominant directions or emphases of the narrative. [The preceding text, btw, is a compressed and edited version of the opening paragraph of Chapter 15, page 509.]

One possibility— workable only with a small class, to be sure —would be to assign each student one of the films covered in the Film Score Guide series. Thus, reliable background and other basic information about the music and underscore composer would be readily available, and for the final paper (the work of Chapter 15) the student might well find material that would lead to supporting or challenging the arguments or point of view of the volume's author.

• 2008
• √18. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's The Dark Knight. May 2, 2016. Vasco Hexel
• 2007
• 15. Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust. IAN SAPIRO. July 2013
• 2000
• 17. James Newton Howard's Signs. January 14, 2016. Erik Heine
• 1997
• √9. Mychael Danna's The Ice Storm. MIGUEL MERA. June 2007
• 1996
• 7. Gabriel Yared's The English Patient. HEATHER LAING. February 2007
• 1993-94
• √12. Zbigniew Preisner's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. NICHOLAS W. REYLAND. December 2011
• 1989
• √4. Danny Elfman's Batman. JANET K. HALFYARD. September 2004
• 1974
• 16. David Shire's The Conversation. October 8, 2015. Juan Chattah
• 1972 ff.
• √11. Nino Rota's The Godfather Trilogy. FRANCO SCIANNAMEO. October 2010
• 1966
• √3. Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. CHARLES LEINBERGER. September 2004
• 1960
• √19. Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven. May 31, 2017. Mariana Whitmer
• 1959
• √12. Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur. ROGER HICKMAN. March 2011
• 1958
• √13. Jerome Moross's The Big Country. MARIANA WHITMER. June 2012
• 2. Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Feb 28, 2001. David Cooper
• 1956
• 5. Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet. JAMES WIERZBICKI. June 2005
• 1954
• 14. Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront. ANTHONY BUSHARD. December 2012
• 1951
• √10. Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire. ANNETTE DAVISON. February 2009
• 1947
• 6. Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. DAVID COOPER. August 2005
• 1942
• √1. Max Steiner's Now, Voyager: A Film Score Guide. Jul 30, 2000. Kate Daubney
• 1940
• √11. Franz Waxman's Rebecca. DAVID NEUMEYER AND NATHAN PLATTE. December 2011
• 1938
• √8. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood. BEN WINTERS. March 2007

Writing exercises and analyses using Film Art: An Introduction

When we first conceived the idea of a film music and sound textbook nine years ago, we modeled the work on David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, not only for its rare combination of high standards and clear presentation but also for its focus on film analysis. As Bordwell puts it,

[The book is] aimed at undergraduate students and general readers who want a comprehensive and systematic introduction to film aesthetics. It considers common types of films, principles of narrative and non-narrative form, basic film techniques, and strategies of writing about films. It also puts film art in the context of changes across history.  (description on website: link)   [link checked on 3-08-2024]

 Film Art is now in its 11th edition. With the various content transformations along the way, several short analyses were deleted, but David has generously posted them to his website (at the same link as the quote above). Here is the list of film titles, in reverse chronological order:   [list checked on 3-08-2024]  

The Prestige. dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006.
Hannah and Her Sisters. dir. Woody Allen, 1985.
Desperately Seeking Susan. dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985.
Fuji. dir. Robert Breer, 1974.
Tout va bien. dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1972.
High School. dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1968.
Innocence Unprotected. dir. Dušan Makavejev, 1968.
Last Year at Marienbad. dir. Alain Resnais, 1961.
A Movie. dir. Bruce Conner, 1958.
A Man Escaped. dir. Robert Bresson, 1956.
Day of Wrath. dir. Carl Dreyer, 1943.
Stagecoach. dir. John Ford, 1939.
Clock Cleaners. dir. Walt Disney, 1937.
The Man Who Knew Too Much. dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1934.

 Since each of these analyses was intended as a self-contained section within a chapter, we can look at them as models for student analysis and writing exercises, even if only one of them focuses on sound (and none on music). These essays will be immediately relevant to chapters 8 and 15 in Hearing the Movies, and the compare-contrast writing exercises in Chapters 8 and 10, of course, but may be useful elsewhere for readings, assignments, or background reading for student projects. Of course, many similar analyses in the current edition of Film Art can be used for the same purpose!

Week 8 Lectures

This week's lectures focused on scene analysis. The text has three chapters given over to scene analysis: Chapters 6, 7 and 9 [1st edition; in the 2d edition this material is spread over three of the historical chapters: 6, 7, and 10]. Besides giving the students an overview of the scene types, I also wanted this week's lectures to help prepare students for making scene analyses of their own, as this is the task for their second paper.

I began by following the divisions of the chapters and then formalizing some implicit subdivisions of scene types:



(NB: "Supradiegetic" is a term Rick Altman uses in The American Film Musical to describe the characteristic performance situation in a film musical, where the singing is diegetic but the accompaniment is rendered, usually after an audio dissolve from diegetic piano, by a nondiegetic orchestra. The performance is thus partially diegetic and partially nondiegetic and for Altman is representative of the idealized realm of romance.)

I then sorted the scenes according to how they deployed the sound track.



We then looked at a number of examples.

For main titles: Meet Me in St. Louis, Broadway Melody, 42nd Street, and The Apartment. I actually ran each of these examples well into the first scene so we could talk about how the main title dovetails with the establishing sequence and how the establishing sequence serves to set up the first scene. Music runs right through the establishment sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis and covers all of the opening dialogue scene in the kitchen until Agnes begins to sing, when it shifts to accompanying the song. After opening with a brief bit of the title song, Broadway Melody continues "Give My Regards to Broadway" over an establishing shot of the city; the music ends for an exterior shot of the music store, where we hear snatches of music coming from the store; with the cut into the store, we hear a cacophony of diegetic musical sound. The scene will eventually end with a performance of "Broadway Melody." 42nd Street, like Meet Me in St. Louis follows the classic two-theme title music, the title song opening the credits, with a shift to "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" when the credits turn to the actors. The music returns to the title song for the beginning of the establishing sequence, creating a three-part ternary structure (ABA') for the titles and establishing sequence considered together. As is often the case, the first extended dialogue scene, here between Abner and Dorothy, does not have music. Finally, the titles for The Apartment use a single theme. The establishment sequence, which integrated into a prologue with voiceover commentary, has new music, a march that contrasts with the lush romantic quality of the main title theme proper. The music continues until it is displaced by diegetic music coming out of Bud's apartment, just before the voiceover itself ends, marking the conclusion of the prologue.

We next compared the opening of the 1933 version of King Kong with that of the 2005 version, noting that the recent version is much, much shorter. We then also compared the final scene and end credits of these two films, so we could see how long end credits are today and how short they were in the studio era. (In fact, due to time, we did not watch all of the end credits of the 2005 version, but we watched enough of it to get the point.)

We then watched the Ländler scene from Sound of Music as an example of a performance scene before turning to two examples of montage: the montage sequence of Blood as pirate from Captain Blood and "I Wasn't Born to Follow" from Easy Rider. I then presented two action scenes: the opening of Captain Blood and the theft of the sword, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Finally, we watched some dialogue scenes: the terrace scene from Rebecca and the opening scene between Abner and Dorothy from 42nd Street.