Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe

Ewa Mazierska, Zsolt Gyori, Ewa Mazierska, Zsolt Gyori

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501365027
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501337185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Eastern European History

Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe is the first collection to discuss the ways in which popular music has been used cinematically, from musicals to music videos to documentary film, in Eastern Europe from 1945 to the present day. It argues that during the period of state socialism, moving image was an important tool of promoting music in the respective countries and creating popular cinema. Yet despite this importance, filmmakers who specialized in musicals lacked the social prestige of leading 'auteurs' and received little critical attention. The resulting scholarly prejudice towards pop culture created a severe shortage of critical studies of the genre.

With the fall of state socialism - and with it, the need for economically viable film and media industries - brought about an unprecedented upsurge of films utilizing popular music, and a greater recognition of popular cinema as a legitimate object of study. Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe fills the gap and demonstrates why the popular music-cinema interface needs to be theorized with respect to the political, ideological, and social forces invested in popular culture.

1

1968 Leftist Utopianism in The Young Girls of Rochefort and Hot Summer

Evan Torner

1968 wasn’t just about politics! … An ordinary life was lived, but … thanks to politics, everything suddenly became more colourful.

František Sládek (2008), on the Prague Spring

Of all the genres and ideologies paired with the globally pivotal year of 1968, musicals are not the first that come to mind. Despite the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture being awarded to the film adaptation of Carol Reed’s Broadway musical Oliver! (1968) and William Wyler’s Funny Girl (1968) reaping the second largest box office share of the year, contemporary film history has overlooked the significance of such films in favour of the year’s philosophically provocative genre films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), emergent youth activist films such as The Strawberry Statement (1970), American documentaries like Fred Wiseman’s High School (1968) and, most importantly, politically left-wing European New Wave films exemplified by Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1968). This emphasis is perfectly understandable, given film studies’ principal interest in works that generally lend themselves to Althusserian (ideological) and Lacanian (psychoanalytic) readings, as D.N. Rodowick (1994: 28) describes at length in The Crisis of Political Modernism. Since the early 1970s, film studies have canonized those films and articles dealing with the medium’s aesthetic psychological and social deep structures. Within this evaluative system, musicals as a genre are frequently seen as both normative and even reactionary in their dual reliance on established institutional infrastructure and the tropes of popular entertainment in order to ‘distract’ their audiences from socio-economic issues with song and dance; in a few words, they are assumed to be anti-modernist and actively consenting to hegemonic practices within global society.

In this chapter, however, I argue that the 1968 utopian goal of re-shaping society as a community comprised of artistic, free-thinking individuals is hard-wired into the European musicals shot prior to the fateful events in Prague and Paris of that year, namely in Jacques Demy’s French/US co-production Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) and Joachim Hasler’s East German pop vehicle Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968). In contrast to the self-reflexive and politically agitational scripts, montage and sound editing of left-wing cinematic fare emerging from the years surrounding 1968, Demy and Hasler’s musicals create spaces of achieved utopia through their use of vibrant colours, upbeat music, pleasurably reconfigured genre conventions, and architectural unity. Yet while Rochefort experiments with generic boundaries and subtly distanciates the audience through affective abundance in the manner of Douglas Sirk, Hot Summer remains aggressively apolitical in its cinematic form to depoliticize the capitalist-inspired youth culture at its core. Thus, while the Hollywood musicals of 1968 – Oliver! and Funny Girl, in particular – reify class struggle and the American dream through traditional musical narratives, Rochefort explores the generic possibilities – and Hasler the generational possibilities – of realizing a classless utopia in cinema.

Political modernism and the 1968 musical

Scholars such as Tim Bergfelder (2005) and Johannes von Moltke (2005) have only recently begun to highlight late-1960s European cinema as not only the locus of accepted auteurs such as Antonioni or Godard, but also as a major producer of cheap genre productions to be distributed on the global market, particularly espionage films, westerns, and a few musicals. Prior scholarship on the period, such as that of Timothy Corrigan (1983) or Stephen Heath (1981), focused on aesthetic experimentation in modern art cinema by established auteurs because of the very legacy of 1968 on film studies: emphasizing the work of those directors who politically ‘activate’ their audiences through aesthetic self-reflexivity. Such a notion of political modernism in the cinema typically revolves around the philosophy and works of Bertolt Brecht. His debate with theorist György Lukács in the 1930s solidified the boundary between two very different representational strategies that would break the ‘commodity fetishism’ and reification of hierarchical social relations via cultural products (Jameson 1988). Brecht sought to denaturalize the imaginary spaces of the theatrical world by systematically calling attention to the apparatus of cultural production, whereas Lukács sought a kind of oppositional realism in which concrete events could be dramatically linked to abstract socialist principles. Brechtian aesthetically self-reflexive art versus Lukácsian ‘socialist realist’ art became a major axis of argument in left-wing circles on both sides of the Iron Curtain, uniting countries such as France and East Germany in intentions to depict revolutionary class struggle through less-deceptive forms of representation. Thanks primarily to the French and Czech New Wave films of the 1960s accompanied by eloquent writers in the journals Cahiers du cinema and Screen, the Brechtian aesthetic has dominated left-wing filmmaking for the last forty years, and academic film criticism has been looking at political modernism through the lenses of the ‘V-effect’ – historicizing the time-image within material relations of production – and the thematization of socio-economic problems through cinematic conventions.

Left-wing musicals such as Rochefort and Hot Summer thus pose a theoretical dilemma for both sides of the Brecht and Lukács debate. On the one hand, the musical genre itself, with its direct-camera address, fanciful song-and-dance routines that mobilize entire populations to precisely accompany them and overly pronounced colours, stands as the most self-reflexive of all established genres. Yet any Brechtian quality of this self-reflexivity is mitigated by the genre’s inherent obsession with itself and its naturalized elimination of the fourth wall: direct-camera address and costumed unreality are, after all, what make musicals musicals. From the Lukácsian point of view, musicals constitute an accepted genre within popular culture, such that socialist realist aesthetics can be integrated into them without breaking the connection between abstract Marxist ideals and their reification, as seen in the Soviet iterations of the genre created by Grigori Aleksandrov and Isaac Dunayevsky in the 1930s.¹ The issue for the socialist realists, particularly in East Germany, was rather the extensive legacy of musicals and musical comedies under the National Socialist UFA cinema, with which the feature film branch of the East German Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft (DEFA) was to make a clean break.

But both Brecht and Lukács might have agreed that most musicals, above all else, provoke utopian optimism about the social relations within their diegeses, favourably organizing society under certain musical principles rather than prioritizing historical or contemporary class struggle. Films with sung music tend to showcase it, with images of human faces and bodies, montage, melody and lyrics unifying the narrative. Even the musical segments in the latter section of Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s 1932 feature film Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?, for example, cinematically align with the content of the music sung: Berlin workers march in unison while singing the Solidarity song, and worker-athletes compete in a sports montage with Ernst Busch’s voice ‘Learn to Win!’ underscoring their training efforts in the present for a larger communist victory in the future. Instead of establishing a contrapuntal, politically modernist relationship between soundtrack, musical text and image to provoke self-reflexivity as they do with Helene Weigel’s ‘Song of the Spring’ earlier in the film, Brecht and Dudow ultimately bring all these elements together to reinforce a particular socio-political viewpoint: the revolution lies in the organized marching and singing of young people. Modernist separation of elements may politicize the past and the present, but unity in song and movement is to lead the workers to a future beyond class boundaries.

In terms of how Brechtian self-reflexivity impacted future generations of filmmakers, 1968 itself proved theoretically important in the political conception of music vs. image, genre vs. avant-garde, of colour vs. line, and of carefully crafted utopias and dystopias vs. disjointed portraits of the present. Godard’s British-financed documentary on the Rolling Stones, One Plus One (1968), foregrounds microphones and recording technology as both integral to filmmaking and problematic in their subjectivity. In Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp (1968), classical music begins seemingly at random within a long opening tracking shot, calling into question the narrative link between soundtrack and image. The film also contains an extended wedding sequence and an aborted chase sequence, both of which foreground genre tropes and then expose them through controlling their duration in the montage. Vera Chytilová’s Sedmikrasky (Daisies, 1966) subverts generic restaurant romance scenes, train departure farewell scenes, and even a cabaret sequence to explore the apocalyptic limits of the avant-garde. Daisies exploits the bright Eastmancolor stock used on Rochefort to simultaneously underscore and undermine the sense of a unified narrative in its DaDa farce, while Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) use the same stock to encode the primary colours with socio-political ramifications. I define utopia here as a cinematic space in which an unchanging, equitable and pleasant set of societal circumstances dominate the narrative,² with an appropriate example being Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) and its emphasis on genuine love and community shared within a polyamorous collective before dooming the same to a cataclysmic end.

For the purposes of contextualizing Rochefort and Hot Summer – both created shortly before 1968 – in terms of their contemporary cinematic discourses, one should mention that both Demy and Hasler recast the musical genre in terms of its strengths – its unification of music and image, self-reflexivity as a genre, employment of colour to emphasize and de-emphasize the dominance of the line, and ability to create an idealized form of the present – while struggling with the genre’s weaknesses, namely musicals’ closed-form narratives centred around heterosexual marriage, tacit promotion of capitalist consumption and trivialization and/or omission of contemporary social problems. The utopias intended in these musicals were the future imaginaries of 1968, as outlined by András Bálint Kovács: individual freedom over collective repression, dismantled social and cultural hierarchies for mankind’s benefit, and the general assumption that ‘the only imaginable future of the society is what seems impossible from the dominant social and ideological structure’ (2007: 352). These were to be musicals of the slightly impossible, in the hope that the impossible would soon become possible.

The question of how musicals, ruthlessly choreographed, constructed and consumerist as they are, can even create a ‘better’ world for their viewers should be addressed. Rick Altman (1987) classifies musicals under the three sub-genres of show musicals, folk musicals and fairytale musicals so as to clarify how the present, past and otherworldly can be transformed into escapist spaces through standard song-and-dance routines. Each sub-genre leads to plot resolution through a different self-sustaining discourse: the show musical leads one through the creation of a work of art that is simulta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe
• 1 1968 Leftist Utopianism in The Young Girls of Rochefort and Hot Summer
• 2 Representing Modern Romania in the Musical of State Socialist Period
• 3 Worlds that Never Were: Contemporary Eastern European Musical Comedies and the Memory of Socialism
• 4 Pop Music, Nostalgia and Melancholia in Dollybirds and Liza, the Fox Fairy
• 5 When the Golden Kids Met the Bright Young Men and Women: Rebellion, Innovation and Cultural Tradition in the Czech 1960s Music Film
• 6 ‘Music isn’t Music, Words aren’t Words’: Underground Music in the Hungarian Cinema of the New Sensibility
• 7 Socialist Night Fever: Yugoslav Disco on Film and Television
• 8 Disco Polo and Techno According to Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz
• 9 Musical Variations in Karpo Godina’s Alternative Cinema
• 10 Polish Music Videos: Between Parochialism and Universalism
• 11 ‘She Stole it from Beyoncé!’: Transnational Borrowing in Bulgarian Pop-folk Music Videos and Audience Reaction to the Practice
• 12 Postsocialist Social Reality in Hungarian Rap Music Videos
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright