Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film

Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction

Ben Winters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415824538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135022556
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines the relationship between narrative film and reality, as seen through the lens of on-screen classical concert performance. By investigating these scenes, wherein the performance of music is foregrounded in the narrative, Winters uncovers how concert performance reflexively articulates music's importance to the ontology of film. The book asserts that narrative film of a variety of aesthetic approaches and traditions is no mere copy of everyday reality, but constitutes its own filmic reality, and that the music heard in a film's underscore plays an important role in distinguishing film reality from the everyday. As a result, concert scenes are examined as sites for provocative interactions between these two realities, in which real-world musicians appear in fictional narratives, and an audience's suspension of disbelief is problematised. In blurring the musical experiences of onscreen observers and participants, these concert scenes also allegorize music's role in creating a shared subjectivity between film audience and character, and prompt Winters to propose a radically new vision of music's role in narrative cinema wherein musical underscore becomes part of a shared audio-visual space that may be just as accessible to the characters as the music they encounter in scenes of concert performance.

Part I

The Real Versus the Reel

1 Real Performers

The Musician as Actor

In an intriguing scene near the beginning of They Shall Have Music (Archie Mayo, 1939), we follow Frankie (Gene Reynolds) into Carnegie Hall, where he witnesses Jascha Heifetz perform Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1863 violin showpiece, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso. Rather unusually for a Hollywood feature film, the Saint-Saëns is experienced in its entirety (lasting some nine minutes) not only by Frankie and the audience in Carnegie Hall but also by us the cinematic audience: the music is not edited at all. Paralleled by a number of other performances during the film featuring the famous violinist, this scene raises questions for us as filmgoers, for what models of listening and watching are implicated here? Since this appears to be a genuine musical performance that has an existence external to the constructed world of the film, where do we, as cinematic spectators, locate the distinction between what we ascribe to the film’s fictional world and what may plausibly be considered ‘reality’?¹

This scene is certainly noteworthy for me, as a violinist. For some spectators, though, it is perhaps not especially significant; or, at least, it elicits no more special thought than the everyday recognition of a character within a fiction.² Such recognition is a crucial part of Murray Smith’s ‘structure of sympathy’—the analytical-philosophical and cognitive-anthropological way in which he models our engagement with film characters—and, in some respects, films that feature performances by real-world musicians may operate in precisely the same ways as any other fiction.³ Smith’s ‘structure of sympathy’ was proposed in order to overturn a theoretical orthodoxy, one which maintained that to treat film characters as if they were real (especially in our emotional responses to them) was naïve at best, and potentially pernicious. Instead, Smith offered a conceptual system designed to model his own emotional response that replaced the vague term ‘identification’ with a distinctly layered system based on schemata of everyday interactions. Thus, he proposed we engage with fictional characters through ‘recognition’ (the construction of character—often a rapid and apparently obvious processes), ‘alignment’ (in which we are aligned with a character’s perspective through access to their actions and feelings) and ‘allegiance’ (in which we find ourselves making moral evaluations about such characters). This, for Smith, was carried out acentrally—in other words, it was a cognitive response that prompted us to respond not with empathy but with a different but appropriate emotion.⁴

Smith’s model certainly has much to recommend it, not least because it suggests interactions with film that collapse the distance between real life and film reality (as with Morin’s anthropological study of cinema), without simplifying the differences.⁵ Despite exploring problems of ‘recognition’—when, for instance, a character is played by multiple actors—Smith has little to say, though, about the possible extra layer of response introduced when a spectator recognises the performer in a concert scene as more than a character in the fiction. Although Sylviane Agacinski argues that a film’s audience does not confuse the three ways in which they view a famous actor (as a star, as a fictional character, and as a private individual),⁶ more often than not, the on-screen musical performer is functioning differently from his/her fellow actors. Unlike them, s/he may not even be playing a fictional character, but a version of themselves (as with Heifetz in They Shall Have Music); and, as such, s/he is often engaging in the very activity that defines their ‘star’ quality, namely musical performance. How do we square this intrusion of the real into the reel; how might we respond?

We are more used to seeing such metafictional self-referentiality in post-Classical Hollywood films—one thinks of Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), in which the eponymous movie star appears playing himself within a fictional narrative.⁷ Yet, in the case of musical performance, this kind of appearance can be found in what appear to be the most traditional examples of narrative cinema. Indeed, there seems to have been a particular fondness for films featuring real virtuosi playing themselves in the late 1930s and 1940s—from Heifetz, and pianists Ignacy Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein, to conductor Leopold Stokowski. These films, in presenting us with musical performances and performers we might now expect to find enshrined only in documentary film, have the potential to challenge our conception of what we count as fictional in the narrative (both in terms of sight and sound). The phenomenon is also found in more recent film and television, and after exploring a number of examples that range from the 1930s to the 1990s, I will address the implications such films have for the ways in which film theorists have sought to categorise fiction and nonfiction films—and, in particular, Noël Carroll’s idea that films either are or are not “films of presumptive assertion, whether or not we know [they are].”⁸ When real musicians appear as fictional musicians, or as historical figures, or even as fictionalised versions of themselves, something still more complicated occurs. I explore a number of these examples to further highlight the slipperiness of our engagement with these film characters. Moreover, this intrusion of the real into the reel may extend, in part, to the way we respond to repertoire of the Western classical tradition that is heard in fictional narratives. Such works are often subjected to a number of cuts, and this prompts an ontological question: Do we see these works as essentially ‘fictional’ given their differences from a real-world concert hall identity; or, like the personas of Heifetz, Paderewski, Rubinstein, et al., do these works remain recognizable as cinematic versions of their real-world selves? As with the altered Schubert Impromptu heard in Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1998), might such a cinematic version affect our watching and listening strategies, in terms of identifying where any possible boundary between the fictional and real lies, in similar ways to the presence of real performers? Finally, I look at the way in which such concert scenes are filmed: might there be a cinematographic indicator of fictionality? Comparisons with the televisual presentation of concerts are explored, and I note the equally constructed or film-mediated nature of that ostensibly ‘real’ experience.

THE MUSICIAN AS MOVIE STAR: HEIFETZ, RUBINSTEIN, STOKOWSKI, AND OTHERS

Evidently, neither a violinist like Heifetz, nor a conductor like Stokowski, had problems in self-promotion, and the resulting movies in which they appear both showcase their considerable abilities as musicians, and reveal understandably less well-developed acting skills. In the case of They Shall Have Music, the movie—a tale of a school for underprivileged musicians facing closure—was written expressly as a vehicle for Heifetz, and contemporary reviews were notable in separating discussion of the film’s narrative from his performances. Indeed, They Shall Have Music was reviewed by the New York Times’s music critic, Olin Downes, who remarked in an article of 30 July 1939 on a story that was “unnecessarily poor,” before going on to praise Heifetz’s “glorious performance.” Though Howard Barnes claimed in a review that the violinist was “woefully deficient” as an actor,⁹ Downes notes that Heifetz “never attempts to act. This is wise, and fortunate.” In fact, one could be forgiven for wondering whether this is a documentary or a feature film, when Downes remarks that Heifetz “plays here as though fully aware of his responsibility to his art, himself, and the future.” Nelson Bell in a Washington Post article of 11 October 1939 also notes: “Heifetz fiddles almost as much as he would in a full evening’s recital, but even that has its dramatic qualities, because with rare inspiration the cameraman photographed the virtuoso’s technique from every possible angle and all in close-up.” As a document of Heifetz’s art, then, this Saint-Saëns scene is remarkable. It does not seem important that it comes from a feature film: as Downes states, Heifetz is not acting; the orchestra (the Los Angeles Philharmonic) are not acting; even the conductor is ‘real’ (though it is, admittedly, the future music director of Twentieth-Century Fox, Alfred Newman in a rare on-screen cameo). In short, reality and fiction are blurred for an extended period of time in a way that moves far beyond the ubiquitous cameo appearance of famous people playing themselves in the movies.

Siegfried Kracauer noted in his Theory of Film that movies in which moments of performance are stressed were often problematic, that they were inconsistent with the medium itself. He goes on:

We might as well sit in a concert hall. But are we really transformed into concertgoers? Interestingly, it is as if the spirit of the cinema interfered with this transformation… When during a musical performance in a film the camera ceases to move—like a concertgoer who forgets to breathe because of his involvement in the score—the ensuing loss of pictorial life does not as a rule benefit our responsiveness as listeners but, on the contrary, makes us feel uneasy about the design behind the whole performance; it is as though life had gone out of the music also. With camera-reality being subdued, music, however perfectly executed, affects us as something that does not ‘belong’—a protracted intrusion rather than a crowning achievement. The result is ennui, provided the moviegoer in us does not deliberately surrender to the concertgoer. But this would be an act of resignation.¹⁰

Although he appears to bemoan the acinematic nature of such intrusive scenes, Kracauer’s questions are pertinent to They Shall Have Music. Is this scene of concert performance cinematic? How are we meant to watch these nine minutes of music? As cinema? As a ‘musical film’? As something in between?¹¹ The camera provides an occasional shot of the audience, and the character of Frankie, perhaps as an indication to the cinematic audience of the appropriate way to react to this music (with expressions of wonder and awe). These shots of Frankie also remind us of his presence, though, and keep our focus on the film’s fictional narrative—rather like the father we see in the audience trying in vain to keep his daughter’s attention on the score he has brought. Like the little girl, though, and like Frankie, we are transfixed by Heifetz’s performance until its conclusion, and no cinematic reminders can seemingly draw our attention back successfully to the rather mundane plot. It is as if the music’s narrative forms a rival stream that takes over the space of the film, and even occupies our narrative-construction faculties: we forget about Frankie’s problems, and instead reconfigure our response to Heifetz’s performance in line with our normal experience of following the narrative of a piece of nineteenth-century concert music (with its prominent Spanish idioms) and listening to a violin virtuoso. Perhaps the audience watching in the cinema even felt the urge to applaud at the conclusion of the piece. Indeed, the power of the musical moment to break out from the cinematic frame in this way is explicitly referenced in a later portion of They Shall Have Music, in which Heifetz sends a film of himself playing to the school for the children to watch. Featuring performances of Heifetz’s transcriptions of Grigoras Dinicu’s Hora-Staccato and Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita, the children and their teacher (played by Walter Brennan) watch the film with rapt attention (rather like we may have done when observing the ‘live’ performance of the Saint-Saëns). When Heifetz finishes the Dinicu, the children applaud as if it is a live performance, only to be quietened by the teacher who recognizes that the violinist cannot hear them and will carry on regardless.

Moreover, it is not only Heifetz who isn’t acting in the Dinicu scene (indeed, the script of the film was not yet complete when Sam Goldwyn first put the violinist on the sound stage).¹² In all likelihood, neither are a large proportion of the children we see, since they are members of the Peter Meremblum Junior Symphony Orchestra, which performs several times in the film. The orchestra drew many of its players from the Neighborhood Music School in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles, itself not unlike the Chatham Square School in New York that prompted Irmgard von Cube’s story.¹³ Fiction and reality are thus decidedly blurred. These are real musicians, and the rapt attention of the student who cradles her violin in her arms as she watches the film while running her fingers over its fingerboard in sympathy seems perfe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Music
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Examples
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Film and Reality
• Part I The Real versus the Reel
• Part II Film and Life: The Mirror of Film
• Part III Film’s Musical Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index