BETWEEN
SONG & SCORE: Part 2
Remapping Recordings onto the Screen
published in The Wire No. 171, May, 1998,
London
Somewhere,
right now, a director is figuring what songs to use in his movie.
He's a young, hip director, who buys young and hip CDs from Tower.
In his cutting edge film will be a slew of cutting edge tracks.
Somewhere right now, a producer is figuring what songs to use
in her movie. She knows nothing of music - at least the kind she
thinks her movie needs to be cutting edge. She's already on the
phone to a record company to see what they've got that's 'hot'.
Two cheap scenarios - easy targets to lambast for equally cheap
ideals about rock'n'roll or whatever musical myth you cherish.
Unfortunately, they are in reality as true as they are cliched.
Numerous post-80s youth films (ie. ones which are supposedly 'hipper'
than 80s teen movies) play this game, giving us countless CD soundtracks
which painfully document both the narrowness in young and old
directors' supposedly eclectic musical tastes and the obvious
self-reflexivity of the recording industry's cynical marketing.
Just
because the plastering of film soundtracks with chartable play
lists has become rampant, one need not return to the specious
naturalism of booming symphonic orchestras, tinkling grand pianos
and delicate acoustic guitars. Playing on the 'timeless quality'
of instruments is cheap and gutless. Somewhere in the midst of
the chaotic collisions between rock/pop songs and their Frankensteinian
appendage to a film soundtrack is great value and even greater
potential. While cinema continues to become a frail corpse administered
by 'script doctors', one can look beyond into the realm of the
recorded song, wherein amazingly tangential audio-visual moments
have oriented the film experience more around the sonic than the
visual, literary or performative.
When
Mott The Hoople's "All The Way From Memphis" incongruously blasts
onto the screen in Martin Scorsese's ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
(1975), its incongruity is considered and appropriate, befitting
the film's themes of dislocation. However, there is nothing in
the lyrics which directly relate to the film's themes, nor is
there any historical evocation required by the scene to orient
the track as 'period music'. Nor is the song's positioning comedic,
irreverent, parodic, ironic. Writer-directors still believe they
are being profound when a track they select somehow 'relates'
to their film's literary themes, as if their audience is a gaggle
of literature professors assessing an essay on thematic articulation.
"All The Way From Memphis" - much more importantly - is a contemporaneous
selection whose sonar tactility becomes one with the grain of
the film at that moment. This is something in which Scorcese excels.
His choice (either alone or with his music supervisors) evidences
an ear for the malleable and enticing ingredients of a song -
its construction, its presence, its production, its tonality.
While Scorcese often rationalises songs for period purposes and
lyric-thematic connections, he always does so with a primary consideration
of how the sound of the song's music will vibrate with the scenic
moment.
The
creative and technical pinnacle attained by Scorsese's musical
sensibility is GOODFELLAS (1990). The film opens on an extreme
close-up of an eye - a bluff, as the film constructs a dense aural
architecture across time, charting Jimmy's (Ray Liotta) changing
perception of himself and his social reality. Music - more precisely,
the sound of music's record production - creates exacting memory
spaces for the unfolding of the film's scenes. The vitality and
brashness of the 60s is grossly framed by the hyper-compressed
reverberating rotundity of songs by The Ronettes, The Shangri
Las & Bobby Darrin; the blunted and altered perceptions of
the 70s are harshly boxed by the fractured multi-tracking and
denaturalised mixing of songs by Derek & The Dominos, Brewer
& Shippley, & Sid Vicious. Themes are thus relocated into
the aural fields of the accompanying recordings. As the film hurtles
toward the present, changes in the orientation of Jimmy 's commentary
parallels changes in the apparati of stereo production, moving
from breathy, lingering valve mics and line-fed echo chambers
to overloaded effects-chaining compensating the fetishization
of acoustically 'dead' studios. In short, Scorcese deftly sutures
the psycho-acoustics of microphone placement into the wavering
equilibrium Jimmy experiences through the narration of his story,
marking Scorsese one of very few directors with an ear for song.
If
Scorsese is a director who internalises pre-recorded songs and
'auralizes' his films' production design through the production
of those recordings, Michael Mann is a director who externalises
pre-recorded songs to extrapolate and extemporise their recordings
into the expanded audio-visual design of his films. Counter to
Scorsese's song methods, Mann seeks to narrate, compile and underscore
through song, to arrive at 'song-seeming scores' which exploit
the dynamics, characteristics and idiosyncrasies of pop/rock recordings.
To
this end, Mann has been remarkably consistent. His symbiotic relationship
with Tangerine Dream suggests that the "indifference, asynchronism,
amorphism and transcendentalism" of their hovering 4 chord approach
(see The Wire No.160) is as much a trait of his own preoccupations
- considering how many variations Michael Mann has done on the
mental instability of cunning serial killers and the obsessive
detectives who trail them. In as much as Scorsese's centre-piece
in GOODFELLAS has to be the fractal and heady kineticism induced
by interpolating Nilsson's manic "Jump Into The Fire" with the
sounds of helicopter buzzing, pasta bubbling and coke snorting,
Michael Mann established this technique of para-hallucinogenic
song-spatialization via the unedited positioning of Iron Butterfly's
"In A Gadda Da Vida" in MANHUNTER (1985). While deaf ears would
cite this as an example of cheesy irony or bad taste, its mixage
in the soundtrack blurs the distinction between whether the song
lives in the film or the film lives within the song. It plays
from on a turntable as the serial killer prepares for a final
killing and the detective hones in on him at the killer's house.
Acoustics distort the song and facilitate not simply our cohabitation
of the killer's mental space, but our experience of a symbolic
yet tactile aural space which embodies the synchronously warped
frame of mind of killer, detective and victim. Remarkably, the
truly inept production quality of the original recording takes
on an unnerving charismatic appeal in the film through its refraction
of the psychotic Other and its power to suck both victim and detective
into its otherworldly droning din.
The
'Mann effect' of extenuating a song's sonic traits to define the
material realm of a scene's action was heavily workshopped through
his TV series MIAMI VICE (1985-87, Jan Hammer plus songs) and
CRIME STORY (1987-89, Todd Rundgren plus songs) where much of
what we erroneously assume to be an 'MTV-effect' (droll sound-image
counterpoint, adrenaline audio-visual momentum, excessively stylistic
musical inflation, etc.) was originally defined. Mann's peak in
tracking music this way is reached in HEAT (1995). Combining a
calming and contiguous track selection with a melting, amorphous
score by Elliot Goldenthal (sounding like Glenn Branca doing John
Barry), Mann plays sophisticated games in breaking down all distinction
between song and score while building upon the armory of effects
and figures generated within song recording rather than film scoring.
HEAT
is profoundly complex in these regards. Its leaning towards ambient
stylings is less to do with a vague contemporaneity and lazy self-effacement,
and more to do with a synchronicity between the de-rhythmatized
harmonic splaying of songs by Eno, Passengers, Moby, Kronos Quartet,
Terje Rydal, Michael Brooks, Einsturzende Neubauten & Lisa
Gerrard, and the exhausted, emotional drainage of Al Pacino and
Robert DeNiro whose sense of purposeful conflict is rendered meaningless
by the film's conclusion. Just as Toru Takemitsu's inverse musical
dramatics are central to the deflated heroics of Akira Kurosawa's
historical dramas, so too are the ambient brethren of HEAT's soundtrack
crucial to the creeping existentialism which eventually upturns
HEAT'S epic form. And just as the sound of space has become the
prime erogenous zone of ambient music, HEAT's musical scoring
is the prime means of actively spatializing the film's locations
and environments - especially as a counterpoint to the highly
fragmented framing aesthetic employed by the cinematography. From
the horripulative softness of the low level string murmuring as
DeNiro placidly takes a series of escalators in the film's opening,
to the hammering synth pops and concatenated reverb bangs which
crackle under the screams of employees and customers during the
bank heist, ambience is actually foregrounded as style and form
in HEAT.
Against
HEAT and GOODFELLAS, so many other celebrated song-oriented soundtracks
pale - not because there has to be markers of high and low, but
because the narrational complexity unleashed by the song sensibilities
adopted and refined by Mann and Scorsese is simply so advanced.
To wit, Clinton Tarantino is by comparison the Wolfman Jack of
music supervisors, combining sensationalist sounds for sensationalist
purpose. It's more carney promotion than postmodernism, and certainly
matches the pyrotechnic mania of his genre-drunk cine-bashes.
But the mere act of selecting a song for a movie soundtrack neither
ensures nor fixes the depth of the song's contribution to the
film, and the reduction of music to markers of hipness alone is
reactionary and limiting.
Surpassing
such binaries grants a more rewarding experience. Consider the
song selection in George Lucas' AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1972), Wim
Wender's KINGS OF THE ROAD (1976), Phil Kaufman's OVER THE EDGE
(1979), Howard Deutch's SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL (1987), Abel Ferrara's
KING OF NEW YORK (1990), Peter Weir's FEARLESS (1993), Spike Lee's
CROOKLYN (1994), Larry Clark's KIDS (1995), MY NEW GUN (1995),
GROSSE POINT BLANK (1997), and P.T.Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997).
This group of pop/rock song-biased soundtracks complements the
post-rock neo-fusion song-oriented scores of Donald Cammell &
Nicholas Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1971, Jack Nitzsche), Michael Winner's
DEATH WISH (1974, Herbie Hancock), Nicholas Roeg's THE MAN WHO
FELL TO EARTH (1976, John Phillips), Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS
(1978, Barry DeVorzon), Francis Ford Coppola's RUMBLEFISH (1982,
Stewart Copeland), Paul Schrader's PATTI HEARST (1988, Scott Johnson),
Dennis Hopper's THE HOT SPOT (1990, Jack Nitzsche) and Walter
Hill's TRESPASS (1993) (not to mention the many Argento/Goblin
scores covered in last month's article). Ample ammunition to erase
the mouldy lingering buzz of MTV alt-soundtracking, and to silence
the insistent calls for romantic orchestrations and their muted
sweet nothings.
