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!

Underscoring by Miklos Rozsa

The website Chiaroscuro is a highly idiosyncratic collection of commentaries, critical quotes, stills, and posters for about 100 films. The site's owner is obviously a cinephile, and so one finds titles of films from American, European, and Asian traditions, including both famous (2001: A Space Odyssey) and not so well-known or early films of a variety of directors. (Caution, though: The site owner's own commentaries are usually in German.)

On the page for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), we find this critical comment embedded in a longer quotation from Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's book Film Noir. An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1992):

Miklós Rózsa wrote the music for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and it illustrates the conventional Hollywood leitmotif technique of film scoring. This technique associates a musical theme with each character, setting, or situation, thus heightening the dramatic flux and the audience’s unconscious understanding and expectation of the film’s story. It should be pointed out that the popular song "Strange Love" represents the sweetness of Toni and the happy ending, not the hardness of Martha. Rózsa over scores to the point that nonmusical moments in his films amount to negative emphasis. (267-268)

Much the same could be said of Rozsa's better known underscores for Double Indemnity and Spellbound. As an alternate to the two-film compare/contrast paper discussed in the first writing Interlude (HtM, 125) or in connection with the critical essays discussed in the second writing Interlude (HtM, 234), it might be a productive exercise for a student to compare Silver and Ward's evaluation with the glowing assessments of Christopher Palmer (who was Rozsa's assistant during the composer's last years), Royal Brown, Lawrence MacDonald, or Fred Karlin.

Palmer's book is The Composer in Hollywood (1990); the chapter on Rozsa is on 186-233 and starts with this sentence: "Miklos Rozsa is the complete professional, and without doubt one of the great musicians of our time." The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is mentioned on 189 and 201. Brown has an extended essay on Double Indemnity in Overtones and Undertones (1994), 120-133; see also his introductory comments at the bottom of 119. MacDonald has an essay on Spellbound in The Invisible Art of Film Music, 85-88; on the other hand, see his somewhat equivocal evaluation of Rozsa's music for films in the 1970s (270-272). Karlin also has a detailed analysis of Spellbound in Listening to Movies, ch. 6.