Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War

Michael Baumgartner, Ewelina Boczkowska, Michael Baumgartner, Ewelina Boczkowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315298436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In the wake of World War II, the arts and culture of Europe became a site where the devastating events of the 20th century were remembered and understood. Exploring one of the most integral elements of the cinematic experience—music—the essays in this volume consider the numerous ways in which post-war European cinema dealt with memory, trauma and nostalgia, showing how the music of these films shaped the representation of the past. The contributors consider films from the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands, providing a diverse and well-rounded understanding of film music in the context of historical memory.

Memory is often underrepresented within scholarly musical studies, with most of these applications found in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music cognition, and psychology and music therapy. Likewise, trauma has mainly been studied in relation to music in only a few historical contexts, while nostalgia has attracted even less academic attention. In three parts, this volume addresses each area of study as it relates to the music of European cinema from 1945 to 1989, applying an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how films use music to negotiate the precarious relationships we maintain with the past. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War offers compelling arguments as to what makes music such a powerful medium for memory, trauma and nostalgia.

Part I

Collective Memory and (Trans-)Nation

1 A Fanfare Floating Beneath Sea Level

Music as a Sonic Lieu de Mémoire of Dutch Cultural Identity on Film

Emile Wennekes

Water: A National Epic¹

“God created the earth, but the Dutch created The Netherlands.” This famous, old saying refers to the many massive building projects that have been realized in a country, which—for the most part—is beneath sea level. Claiming land from rivers and the sea, building dikes for safety against the high tides, and providing new space by landfill for the densely populated nation: these are only the most extreme examples that have inspired the ludicrous argument that The Netherlands were in fact man-made as opposed to having been divinely designed or having gradually evolved in terms of their topography.

The Netherlands have also been termed “a colossal Work in Progress” (van der Woud 178). Gaining sovereignty over water has always been poignantly crucial to the Dutch—from the early economic benefits due to the accessibility of preindustrial locations via its waterways. All this progress, however, came at a cost of destabilizing the “original” topography and folklore, and, in that sense, at a cost of putting an archetypical “identity” under threat as well. Fishermen were pushed out of businesses, and families were forced to leave the territories, which they had lived in for generations. New industries, housing, and recreational facilities were artificially erected. This thriving construction boom was especially evident during the massive Zuiderzee reclaiming project and the final closing of the North Sea dike in May 1932, a project that was heralded as an “emblematically Dutch national epic” (Waugh 25).

This continuous relationship with water in its broadest sense has indeed been an essential topic in Dutch cinema ever since its inception in the first decades of the twentieth century. As will be discussed in detail below, the popularity of the topical water theme lasted well into the post-war period.² Not only were the colossal ecological transformations caused by closing out the North Sea presented in both documentaries and in feature films, but the social and economic consequences affected by these transformations were often narrated from a nostalgic perspective. Meters of film footage featured the great effort it had taken past generations to conquer the sea for better, even “utopian” prospects while these images glorified rural tradition and local habits, which were in reality on the verge of vanishing.

These shifting socio-ecological frameworks prompted an alternative reading of “Dutchness,” mediated through provocative cinematic narratives and fostered by imaginative film music. The remodeled narratives supplement two of the three characteristics that have previously been identified through an in-depth analysis of the so-called “Jordaanfilms”—films of the 1930s set in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Amsterdam. National identity was defined in these films as “a sense of duty and devotion to duty that is expressed on the level of personal, social and economic relations” as well as “a desire for a good and simple life within one’s own social peer group” (Pafort-Overduin 363). Elsewhere, Dutch identity is related to the concept of eigenheid, a term that “refers to the different ways in which people define their own being against or in relation to that of others” (Mathijs 5). In the introduction to The Cinema of The Low Countries, Ernest Mathijs states, “What is interesting in Low Countries cinema [the three countries currently known as The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg] is that this not only shows itself in the interaction among characters but also between characters and landscape, cities, ideologies and any other cultural discourse” (5).

It is this aspect of shifting identities in times of large-scale ecological transformations that will be addressed in this chapter. On the one hand, Dutch national identity is closely related to The Netherlands’s unique geographical location largely beneath sea level. On the other hand, the ubiquitous presence of water has been presented in Dutch cinema as expressions of nostalgia, tradition, and identity, and as an evolving understanding of these values. In the films dealing with the quintessential Dutch topic of water, music mediates alternative readings of Dutchness and, in turn, participates within the larger ecological conversation. Nation and identity are closely correlated to the idea of collective memory, a concept that has been comprehensively theorized by the eminent French historian Pierre Nora. In the preface to the three-volume English edition of his Realms of Memory, Nora defines his term of lieu de mémoire (memory site): “A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community…” (xvii). Nora’s theoretical model of defining the idea of historical memory provides a suitable point of departure for this study to help understand the role that music plays as precisely one of these lieux de mémoire in the Dutch films discussed below, which depict rural populations living in communities surrounded by water. The music of these films—as a sonic lieu de mémoire—contributes a “seagull’s” eye view on Dutch heritage, tradition, nostalgia, and identity that address the issues of (re-)mapping customs and merits, values, and habits of individuals by taking a position on the topic of a changing environment and by (co-)narrating the struggle of local communities coping with industrial modernization. The music in two of the most significant early Dutch films addressing these issues, Gerard Rutten’s Dood Water (1934, Dead water) and Joris Ivens’s Nieuwe Gronden (1933, New earth), will be discussed in this chapter in more detail.

For the major part of this chapter, however, I will discuss the music in a film that continues the topical tradition of these two early sound films, but in a very different way. Bert Haanstra’s seminal and extremely popular film comedy Fanfare (1958) highlights the topic of a changing environment by idealizing, or perhaps “musealizing” a way of life in a traditional Dutch, water-drenched environment that, at the time, was no longer representative. Such rural communities had already become a rarity as a fully industrialized, urbanized, and modernized society had emerged in the post-war years. Fanfare emphasizes the traditional, romanticized Dutch life, exemplified by its socially embedded, musical activities. The film correlates the endeavor of music-making as part of the prototypical Dutch variation of the brass band, the fanfare, to the life in a tranquil community surrounded by water. This is presumably intended as a representative of an idealized, not yet ecologically threatened and traditional image—a lieu de mémoire of nostalgia—for the spirit or collective memory of the whole nation.

Cinematic Water Narratives

The first Dutch studio for sound film production—Electra N.V.—opened its doors in February 1931. It nevertheless took three more years before the first Dutch full-length feature films were premiered, among these the epic Willem van Oranje (1934, William of Orange), the farce De Jantjes (1934, The sailors), and the drama Op Hoop van Zegen (1934, Fishing boat “Hope for the best”). The titles of these pictures were indicative of their plots. The subjects are self-referential: they either pay homage to an illustrious past, revisiting moments of the nation or expressing a Dutch topicality in their ambivalent relationship to the sea. Their plots follow the axiom of “the sea giveth, the sea taketh away,” or “the fish is paid at a high cost,” meaning at the cost of many human life. Other narratives such as Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (1931, Rose from Cikembang), Pareh: Het lied van de rijst (1936, Pareh, the song of rice), and Terang Boelan (1937, Moonlight, English release title: Full Moon) are situated in the colonies, the Dutch (East) Indies, or in that romanticized quarter of Amsterdam, the Jordaan, where its working-class inhabitants have famed hearts of gold.

While the narratives of most of these films take place in times past or exotic locations, others address the more contemporary issue of documenting the profound changes made to a countryside, which was by then idealized. The first Dutch sound feature film already honored a comparable theme. In the epic Terra Nova (1932, New ground), the director Gerard Rutten (1902–82) thematized the land-reclaiming project of the Zuiderzee at the time the massive project was underway. While this picture was never released, Rutten revisits the topic of rural, sea nostalgia two years later in his fictional feature film Dood Water. The film is a tragedy about the social and economic consequences of diking off the Zuiderzee to gain new grounds to be used for agricultural purposes. This awareness of cultural heritage that Rutten displays in Dood Water is a prominent feature, revealing that the director was presumably well ahead of his time. The first 12 minutes depict in a documentary style the completion of the Zuiderzee project. During this prologue, the soundtrack consists only of music, which was composed by Walter Gronostay (1906–37) and performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under the direction of the renowned Willem Mengelberg. The music recalls the baroque oratorio genre, specifically Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata and passion style. A large orchestra accompanies a solo tenor, who narrates the story of the Zuiderzee project, and a choir that responds to the tenor’s narrative in the manner of a choir in a Greek tragedy. Short tenor arias and recitatives in a neo-Bachian style and large Lutheran-like chorales bestow the documentary images of the Zuiderzee project with a quasi-religious message. The rest of the film, however, depicts with a socio-critical subtext the hardship of the fishermen’s lives in a quasi-silent film manner, accompanied by music and occasional voiceover comments of individuals as representatives of the seaside community.

The narrative framework of depicting large-scale ecological changes made to the Dutch landscape can be identified not only in the first generation of Dutch fictional feature films, which ended with the German occupation in 1940, but also in almost all film genres that were produced at the time in The Netherlands, especially in newsreels and documentaries. As can be exemplified by the leading documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898–1989), who kept a close track of the massive transformations caused by reclaiming land from the sea ever since these construction projects had begun. His two documentary projects on this topic are Zuiderzeewerken (1930–33, Zuiderzee works) and Nieuwe Gronden. The two films document the last construction stages of the Zuiderzee land-reclaiming project. After Ivens shot Zuiderzeewerken without sound, in the tradition of the indirect mode of address (Nichols 48), he uses in Nieuwe Gronden for the first two reels of footage from Zuiderzeewerken and for the third reel newly shot material and pre-existing newsreel footage. Nieuwe Gronden was released as a completely new film, profoundly transformed through sound, now addressing the audience not only visually but also aurally.³ The soundtrack of Nieuwe Gronden consists of long passages with only music, which are alternated with ambient sound or brief moments of voiceover comments by Ivens himself. Particularly the moments with music, composed by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who reused material taken from his Suites for Orchestra No. 3, Op. 26 “Kuhle Wampe” and No. 4, Op. 30 “Die Jugend hat das Wort,” are noteworthy.⁴ Ivens himself states in Cinema Quarterly that the score constitutes “a dynamic factor in the completed film” (qtd. in Waugh 34). Short character pieces are juxtaposed against images of workers constructing a dike. These character pieces are “not limited to reproducing the ‘mood of the scene, a mood of gloom and great effort’ [Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films 26]—the workers are shown bearing a huge steel conduit—but instead the underlying triumph of solidarity” (Schweinhardt and Gall 173).

Specifically, the addition of sound and the incorporation of music transformed fundamentally the original narrative at the end of the film. This expository “remake” of Zuiderzeewerken no longer celebrates an idyll of well- choreographed work labor and heroic boulder displacement, but it unmasks the dike project as a sinister exploitation, criticizing the misuse of the newly gained agricultural land for speculation purposes to increase the price of grain that resulted in large-scale unemployment. In this final part, Ivens’s voiceover comments take on a rather aggressive, accus...