Textbook Is Now Available

David and I just received our copies of the textbook in the mail today, and the Oxford University Press website now lists the book as officially in stock.

Three performances in The Sound of Music

We talk about the Laendler scene from The Sound of Music twice in HtM -- as a performance scene in Ch. 7 and as a love scene in Ch. 9. The dance by Maria (Julie Andrews) and Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) is framed by two other performance scenes, a waltz and the children's "So Long, Farewell." Together, these three scenes run just over eight minutes and provide a compact exemplar of differing but typical treatments of performances: (1) narrative proceeds through a performance that shifts between backgrounded and foregrounded status, (2) performance predominates but a significant narrative event occurs during, or as part of, the performance, and (3) narrative essentially stops while the rhythms of the performance take over.

The waltz (01:28:00, or DVD Ch. 29) begins with a diegetic view of an orchestra and couples dancing in the elegant circling manner of the Viennese waltz. (The music is based on "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things".) Frequent cutaways advance the narrative as guests arrive and are greeted, two speak conspiratorially, and the children appear on the outer patio and talk among themselves. The Laendler (01:30:10, DVD Ch. 30) is strongly foregrounded as a performance, but in the course of it Maria and the Captain come to realize that they are attracted to one another. We understand the orchestra to be diegetic (same as for the waltz) but we do not see it. Finally, the strongly strophic design of "So Long, Farewell" — which accommodates the seven children's one-at-a-time "good nights" — shuts narrative down (01:33:10, DVD Ch. 31). This time the orchestra is nondiegetic (there is no attempt at all to implicate the waltz orchestra, nor is there an audio dissolve).

Editing Software

Lifehacker has a quick run down on six video editing software packages for Mac and Windows. Personally, these days I mainly use Quicktime Pro or MPEG Streamclip, both of which offer a very fast way of making excerpts and changing formats but do not allow you to add transitions (e.g., fades).

The Weak Acousmêtre in Dark Passage

Dark Passage (1947) is the minor entry among the four feature films starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, by no means up to the standard of The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo. The screenwriting is somewhat pedestrian and the characterizations too obvious (except for an implausible taxi driver who can't seem to decide whether he's a gangster or a Good Samaritan), but the film's greatest weakness is that it asks the audience to believe that a man we see in a photograph with a full, square face can speak like Humphrey Bogart and, even worse, can have an hour's worth of plastic surgery so that he comes out looking and sounding like -- Humphrey Bogart. On the other hand, the leading and principal supporting roles are well-played by veteran actors, the cinematography is clean and crisp, and Franz Waxman's underscore is both skillful and effective.

Still, the film has some definite pedagogical uses. Bogart's character during the first half has some of the attributes of an acousmêtre, Michel Chion's "acoustical being" defined by sound rather than physical presence. (We discuss the acousmêtre in HtM, ch. 3.) Bogart's shadow man, however, lacks some of the most salient traits of the acousmêtre and so makes for a good comparison with, say, the Invisible Man. The combination of visual and aural point-of-view, starting just before 00:03:00, is also a point of interest, as is extensive use of offscreen sound, which divides duties between aural pov (hearing what Bogart hears) and helping the audience locate his body in relation to the frame. Reasons for the formal distribution of diegetic music, nondiegetic music, and repeated ambient sounds (sirens, motor noise, and boat horns) during the first 20 minutes are worth exploring, too.

Music and Transcendence in The Shawshank Redemption

Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is a dark romance that sets genres incongruously beside another—the hard-boiled realist prison novel and the nineteenth-century "escape" adventure novel (there is even a trace of the coming-to-age narrative, although in the warped sense of men coming to terms with the realities of life imprisonment). The protagonist Andy is falsely imprisoned for the murder of his wife. Only in the last two and a half pages of the ninety-five-page novella does the story suddenly come open, as the second protagonist, Red, is paroled and decides to follow up Andy's hints on how to join him in Mexico. In the feature film version, The Shawshank Redemption (1994; musical score by Thomas Newman), this corresponds to the last minutes of the film. Although both novella and film place the center of attention on Andy (Tim Robbins), the novella is written from the first-person perspective of Red (Morgan Freeman), who is now offered a deus ex machina, thanks to Andy's persistence and intelligence.

The novella ends there, with Red's hope that he can indeed find escape, but the film goes further to show us (to imagine?) the realization of that hope, and it is at this moment that the film's main theme, a simple melody, resists the old cliché of a descending close, which it has followed several times earlier, and instead reaches out and up to end on a high note just as Red, still absorbing the demonstration of Andy's generosity and loyalty, speaks of things "only a free man can feel." (The two versions are shown in musical notation below.) Two markedly different iterations of this transcendent, utopian gesture immediately follow in confirmation, and the film comes to an end with the two men greeting each other on a pristine, isolated beach as credits begin to roll, superimposed.




update

JB here: I found the clip on You Tube.

Woody Allen and Diegesis

Woody Allen's films are replete with violations of diegetic space that are, of course, played for humor, part of which is triggered by the audience's recognition of the film's constructedness. Beyond their specific functions, these ruptures of the diegetic are valuable pedagogically as exceptions that prove the rule about filmic conventions of space and time, of diegesis and synchronization (we discuss these topics in HtM, chs. 3 & 4).

Perhaps the most familiar instances are when Allen suddenly breaks out of his character to address the audience directly. In Annie Hall (1978), for example, he does this as a frustrated movie-goer forced to listen to the pompous blather of a person behind him in the ticket line. Allen compounds the confusion by dragging in Marshall McLuhan from offscreen (?) to rebut the offending would-be critic, who had mentioned the famous media theorist. Direct address to the audience is hardly unknown -- the voice-over narrator, after all, is addressing the audience, not characters in the film -- but voice-over narration exists in the nondiegetic realm. The barrier of the screen makes direct address to the audience difficult and problematic, not so in the traditional theater, where that barrier is the far more permeable front edge of the stage, so amenable to monologues and soliloquies. Managing voice-over narration in a similar way is ironic or funny, as in Allen's usage, or complex and often ambiguous, as when a voice-over narrator is at some other time revealed to be a character.

The device is pushed to its reductio ad absurdum in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), when one of the actors in a film spots Mia Farrow in the audience (see the first screen still below) and talks to her. He then walks through the screen out into the theater, to the consternation of audience and screen actors alike (see the second screen still). The plot then revolves about the "real life" actor and his newly acquired shadow, both of whom claim to have fallen in love with Mia Farrow's character. If at the end we are suspicious that she might have imagined the whole thing in the course of watching the movie multiple times, the film staunchly refuses to let on.

Screen Sound and Theater Sound

I first saw The Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) in a multiplex theater. Most of this historical costume drama was shot on a somewhat claustrophobic set depicting neighborhoods in a Dutch city during the lifetime of the painter Vermeer, but a very few scenes were done in landscape settings. During one of these, I was impressed by a sound track detail -- faint, distant thunder heard against a clear sky, an effect that subtly hinted at the emotional turmoil in which Griet (Scarlet Johannson) would shortly find herself. Only later, when the thunder reappeared nonsensically during an interior scene, did I realize that the sound was the bass bleeding through the walls from the action film next door. (We discuss multiplex theaters in HtM, chs 13 & 14.)

Woody Allen plays on this confusion of real-world and diegetic sound near the end of Bullets Over Broadway (1994), an inspired farce in which backstage comedy and 1930s gangster films collide. An actress's bodyguard is pursued by two members of his own gang and killed offstage while a play is being performed. The next day the producer reads aloud from glowing reviews. A particularly enthusiastic critic writes that "One of the greatest moments in this reviewer's experience is in act 3, when the lieutenant returns and confronts his mistress. We hear distant gunshots, which get louder and louder, bringing the lieutenant's twisted military past and violent tendencies into bold bas relief." The urge to interpret is strong, but the result may just be fodder for ironic humor.