Unsettling Scores , livre ebook

Unsettling Scores
Unsettling Scores
German Film, Music, and Ideology
Roger Hillman
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
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© 2005 by Roger Hillman
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hillman, Roger.
Unsettling scores : German film, music, and ideology / Roger Hillman. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0–253–34537–5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0–253–21754–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures and music—Germany. 2. Motion picture music—Germany—History and
criticism. 3. National socialism and motion pictures. I. Title.
ML2075.H54 2005
791.4302’4—dc22
2004019209
1  2  3  4  5  10  09  08  07  06  05
FOR Gino
 
FOR Ken
FOR THE SONG OF THE NIGHT BIRD
           Contents           
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
One: Establishing a Tonal Center
Two: Music as Cultural Marker in German Film
Three: History on the Soundtrack: The Example of Beethoven’s Ninth
Four: A Wagnerian German Requiem: Syberberg’s Hitler (1977)
Five: Alexander Kluge’s Songs without Words: Die Patriotin (1979)
Six: Fassbinder’s Compromised Request Concert: Lili Marleen (1980) no
Seven: The Great Eclecticism of the Filmmaker Werner Herzog
Eight: Pivot Chords: Austrian Music and Visconti’s Senso (1954)
Conclusion: Film Music and Cultural Memory
 
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Unsettling Scores
           Acknowledgments           
This project has evolved over a long time; in its broadest form it has grown over much of a lifetime. The following includes but a few of those who have had some input to reflections on film, music, or German studies. To all, the named and the unnamed, my deepest thanks.
Among university colleagues, Brian Coghlan, Tony Stephens, and Margaret Stoljar spring most readily to mind, though it really started with Jim Woodfield at high school. Then came Michael Noone and—especially—Deborah Crisp from the Canberra School of Music, as well as Robyn Holmes. The Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, then headed by Ian Donaldson, first let me loose on film in an academic context, a turning point in life.
The beginnings of the more focused project gained from talks with Professor Wilhelm Vosskamp in Köln. David Roberts responded to chapter 4, Karis Muller and Jeongwon Joe to other sections, Deborah Crisp to the whole manuscript, and a number of conference audiences to reduced versions of different parts. David Boyd was there from the start with film studies input.
Like many, I am indebted to Phil Brophy and his team for the Melbourne Cinesonic conferences, an ideal conjunction of film studies and sound, as well as to their participants, especially Adrian Martin. Many indirect impulses came from the old Friday night ethnographic film group based on the Canberra house of Judith and David MacDougall. Simone Gigliotti shares all she tracks down of relevance, and has lent encouragement when spirits and perseverance have flagged.
Judith Pickering gathered many materials and was full of ideas while research assistant on the project, and Sandra McColl gave both editorial and more general feedback of great value, when she held a similar position.
Beyond enabling the last two posts, the Australian National University made overseas field trips possible through faculty research grants. I much appreciate a grant from the Publications Subsidy Committee, which enabled the film stills. To library staff, especially at Chifley Library, the Canberra School of Music Library, and the Berlin Filmmuseum, I am very thankful. The Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung enabled me to pursue the early stages of the project in Köln and has enriched acquaintance with Germany over a number of years. In the United States, Professors Tony Kaes, Susan McClary, Robert Rosenstone, and David Neumeyer have been particularly generous with their time and their ideas, while Rosemary and Paul Lloyd have shared the warmth and peace of their home, as well as giving much encouragement.
At the Indiana University Press, special thanks to editor Michael Lundell, as well as to two readers for their thought-provoking reports. Leslie Devereaux and Astara Rose had significant indirect input. Earlier, Christine and Siegfried Wiemer introduced me to much of the culture and many of the identity problems of Germany. Those to whom this book is dedicated have contributed to a degree surpassing acknowledgment.
Other friends and family, even when bemused by a largo tempo at various stages, have kept me going and kept life going. My wife, Vivien, and daughters, Miranda and Kirsten, have had to live with this thing for nearly as long as Kirsten can remember, but they have been ever supportive, and without their good humor this book could not have come to fruition. Mum and Dad cultivated a musical household from the outset, provided the space for films, and encouraged the pursuit of German. I have indeed been fortunate, not least with the unfading thrill of the topic itself.
Earlier versions of parts of this manuscript have appeared in a range of sources. My thanks for permission to reproduce these in their revised form to Slavic and East European Performance, Musicology Australia, Cinesonic , and the Journal of European Studies .
Introduction
Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin’s “Funeral March.” If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies.”
Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. One phrase would say, “Salt-pan”; another “Creek-bed,” “Spinifex,” “Sand-hill,” “Mulga-scrub,” “Rock-face” and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river or scaled a ridge—and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.
“He’d be able,” said Arkady, “to hear a few bars and say, ‘This is Middle Bore’ or ‘That is Oodnadatta’—where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.”
“So a musical phrase,” I said, “is a map of reference?”
“Music,” said Arkady, “is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”
—Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 108
This study looks at the use of classical music in film, focusing on films of the New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. 1 Beethoven, Mahler, and others on the soundtrack of German films provide a counterexample to almost every aspect of the classical Hollywood paradigm. 2 Classical Hollywood mainly featured originally composed music that functioned as dramatic mood and narrative underpinning. Paradoxically, it was meant to remain invisible/ “unheard,” while occupying a significant proportion of a film’s duration. The cinema movement explored here, on the other hand, frequently used preexisting music, whose mood and narrative effects were secondary to its cultural weightings. This music consciously called attention to itself, not just as music but as a kind of historical time capsule, except that the intervening years had permeated the capsule. Unlike Hollywood scores, this was music with an independent existence before the film, music which was fragmented (heard on the soundtrack in excerpt form) and part of a grand but problematic cultural tradition. In the group of films treated, this tradition still registered the aftereffects of years of subservience to Nazi cultural politics.
Until fairly recently, any book combining film and music would have had some curiosity value. A literature existed, but some titles were dated, and few exhibited genuine border crossing between film studies and musicology. The historic contribution of Claudia Gorbman in 1987 ushered in a cluster of books appearing in rapid succession, primarily about soundtracks in the classical Hollywood era, 3 though both her work and Brown’s also engaged with European cinema, especially French. More recently, quite new directions have been embarked on in works such as Nicholas Cook’s Analysing Musical Multimedia . 4 At the same time a start has been made on translating literature about soundtracks in different film traditions. 5
The territory sketched in the first paragraph evokes the disciplinary areas of film studies, musicology, cultural studies, and German studies; the present book draws on all these to approach a subject they have all barely touched. 6
Let us first dwell briefly on the significance of preexisting versus originally composed music, as the first of a number of contrasts between classical Hollywood and this West German film movement that will emerge from the body of the study. 7 Hollywood, of course, also used existing melodies as an economic means to encompass much else. The function was that of acoustic metonymy. But more typically, Hollywood commissioned origi