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Saved by Ian Stephens
on November 15, 2009 at 10:01:10 pm
Traditionally, films as they have come to be structured employ musical pieces, collected as a film score, to accompany and enhance the visual components of the film. This score is traditionally non-diegetic (meaning that it is meant to be outside of the film's reality, rather than a part of it), and it is from this interaction between the elements ofmise-en-sceneand music that vital cinematic energy can be produced.
History
In talking about the origins of musical accompaniment and films, Paul Chihbara notes that, "Movie music was not born in the movie theatres, but in the worlds of opera, musical theater, and vaudeville" (americancomposers). While the idea of music underscoring and accenting events was lifted from these other performative mediums, film music had a much more essential function in the era of silent film: to provide nearly all of the sound experienced while watching the film. It also, as Chibara practically observes, "was a necessary mask" for the noisy projectors of the time. When diegeticfilm soundbecame an integral part of cinema, the relationship between film music and the images and sounds of the events on screen allowed for more nuanced and conscious interplay to unfold.
Context
In Jean Cocteau's masterful adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete in its original French), the film's score acts to enhance and complete the already-alluring elements of its mise-en-scene.
In the scene above, the atmospheric tension is increased by the eerie composition of Georges Auric (also pictured above). By employing a strange chorus of voices in addition to the musical instrumentation, the music's connection to the film's aesthetic is solidified. An important element employed byCocteauin his construction of the magical spaces of The Beast is the humanization of normally inanimate objects (such as candelabra, doors, statues, etc). We see Belle, who is watched by the busts on each side of the door, exploring the room. However, this experience of being magically observed is deepened by the ethereal and humanistic qualities of the film's music. The film further complicates this relationship by placing a feral growl in the film's sonic palette, and having Belle seemingly react to it. Whether is sound is diegetic or non-diegetic is not firmly established- if anything, this interaction between displaced sound and character blurs the lines between the score and the cinematic reality. This works to deepen the magical, sensational qualities of the space. Ultimately, The musical voicings explore this space, like Belle, and interact with the otherworldly concept of still objects adopting human qualities.
Another engaging example of innovative musical score is present inStanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of employing the traditional film orchestra to provide dramatic backing for his space voyaging, Kubrick instead collected a vivid, distincly classical collection of pieces that lend his film a formal, epic quality. More unique is the film's very punctuated and limited use of non-diegetic film score
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