"Sound and Vision"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
Some of the most compelling film music of the past
year appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael
Giacchino’s score for the TV show “Lost”—the tale of several dozen
plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural,
“Tempest”-like island—has unsettled millions of American viewers with
an eerie array of orchestral sounds: fluttery four-note figures,
shivery tones produced by bowing strings near the bridge, nasty
glissandos on the trombone, and, at moments of maximum tension, a low
plucked note on the harp. According to convention, harps are called
upon to herald angels or other vessels of goodness. Giacchino makes the
instrument gaunt and deathly, much as Mahler did in the last song of
“Das Lied von der Erde.” In general, Giacchino has done such a bang-up
job of generating menace that the scriptwriters may have a hard time
satisfying the expectations that he has created. Something mighty grim
will have to crawl out of that lush jungle in order to justify those
twangs of terror.
Composers usually enter the filmmaking
process late in the game. They’re given a few weeks to add music to the
mix, often under strict instructions as to mood and style; they’re
essentially applying a finishing coat of aural stimulus. But music can
do much more than echo the action on the screen. It can evoke hidden
lives, unknown destinies, unseen histories, forgotten voices. The
greatest filmmakers have all understood the complicating significance
of music, and one measure of their greatness is their willingness to
delegate power to composers. When Eisenstein made “Alexander Nevsky”
and “Ivan the Terrible,” he had Prokofiev as his house composer, and he
would sometimes wait until Prokofiev had finished a certain segment
before filming the corresponding scene. He wanted to chain the camera
to the notes. Orson Welles followed Eisenstein’s practice on “Citizen
Kane,” hiring the young New York composer Bernard Herrmann. For the
final sequence of the film, which shows the destruction of Rosebud in
the fireplace of Kane’s castle, Welles had Herrmann’s cue playing on
the set. He later said that the score was fifty per cent responsible
for the film’s success.
Music can take control of the
image; it can also suggest a world separate from the image, or expose
the image as a lie. Shortly after sound came in, Eisenstein and other
Soviet directors wrote a manifesto declaring that soundtracks should
create “sharp discord” with the visual dimension, in order to cultivate
critical thinking on the part of the audience. (That’s not quite what
Stalin had in mind, of course.) One early illustration of the practice
was Shostakovich’s 1929 score for “The New Babylon,” a story of the
Paris Commune. At the end, when the Communards are killed by a firing
squad, Shostakovich responds not with a tragic utterance but with a
distorted version of Offenbach’s Can-Can. Giacchino’s music for “Lost,”
in its own non-Marxist way, plays this same game of estrangement.
Dispatching the ghosts of Schoenberg, Xenakis, and other
twentieth-century sonic terrorists into an island paradise, it touches
on the universal modern suspicion that surfaces are not what they seem,
that the center does not hold, that it ain’t necessarily so.
When
the images themselves are terrifying, music can bring about an even
trickier reversal, providing ironic reassurance or genuine compassion.
Stanley Kubrick’s decision to play “We’ll Meet Again” over a montage of
nuclear annihilation at the end of “Dr. Strangelove” is one famous
example; another is Oliver Stone’s use of Barber’s velvety “Adagio for
Strings” over scenes of carnage in “Platoon.” Harold Budd and Robin
Guthrie, in their score for the new Gregg Araki film “Mysterious Skin,”
do something wholly unexpected: as a horrendous story of child abuse in
a Kansas town unfolds, the music sways toward a state of irrational
bliss, as if to numb the pain. Music, in these cases, doesn’t show the
image as a lie; instead, it is itself the lie we tell ourselves in
order to survive.
Lincoln
Center’s Great Performers series recently presented a mini-festival
titled Sound Projections, in which live ensembles played alongside
silent movies, both classic and modern. The series began with a vintage
radical Soviet film, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “The End of St. Petersburg,”
for which Alfred Schnittke supplied a score in 1992. Pudovkin was one
of the directors who had argued for freethinking musical narratives in
film, and it was fitting that Schnittke, the master surrealist of
late-twentieth-century music, should have subverted Pudovkin’s story of
the education of a Bolshevik hero with all manner of brooding
ostinatos, kitschy digressions, and anarchic pileups of tunes. The Asko
Ensemble gave a committed, demented performance. The Ensemble
Intercontemporain, from Paris, one-upped them by presenting Benedict
Mason’s 1988 score “ChaplinOperas,” a kaleidoscopic companion piece for
three classic Chaplin silents. It’s a dazzling, dizzying, ultimately
wearying exercise in free association, as chaotic in technique as
Chaplin’s films are clean.
The Lincoln Center series
culminated in a blast of Glass: “Koyaanisqatsi,” “Powaqqatsi,” and
“Naqoyqatsi,” a trilogy of documentary film fantasias conceived by
Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass. (The live performances were
courtesy of the Philip Glass Ensemble.) The titles are Hopi Indian
words approximately meaning “life out of balance,” “life in
transformation,” and “life as war”: the aim is to see human
civilization in its mundane entirety, without reference to politics,
culture, or history. There is no dialogue or plot; scenes of high-tech
American cities, poverty-stricken Third World streets, frenzied
factories, and empty canyons unfold in dreamlike motion. The images are
sometimes sped up and sometimes slowed down. Humanity comes off as an
insectoid species, though not without certain redeeming features.
Glass’s trademark arpeggios and carved-in-granite chords generate a
ritualistic, vaguely ancient air, circling back, time and again, to an
abiding sadness.
“Koyaanisqatsi,” which was shot during
the nineteen-seventies and released in 1983, is the masterpiece in the
series, and a singular event in film history. There is no more potent
example of a score dominating a film. The relationship between
filmmaker and composer extended Eisenstein’s ideal to the nth
degree: Glass watched the footage and wrote some music, Reggio and his
editors listened to the music and reworked the footage, and the process
went on until the appearance of fusion was total. In an interview that
accompanies the “Koyaanisqatsi” DVD, Glass provides his own eloquent
definition of the film-music art: he calls it “observing accurately the
distance between the image and the music.” In other words, instead of
trying to make image and music serve the same ends, you play one
against the other, letting the disparity become an emotional experience
in itself.
Glass’s solutions to the challenge of
“Koyaanisqatsi” are riveting. The opening is famous and majestic: a
deep bass voice chants the title phrase in monotone while an electric
organ turns slow pinwheels above it. As the camera of Ron Fricke, the
cinematographer, floats across immense Western landscapes, a flute
plays a lonely figure in open intervals, perhaps in tribute to the
prairie music of Copland; then the bass chant returns, sounding very
much like a sad, angry god. A later sequence, devoted to various forms
of transportation, dwells for a long time on slow-motion footage of a
jumbo jet taxiing on a tarmac. Glass responds to this grungy image with
music of exhilarating quickness and lightness, high female voices
predominating. In later sections, Glass abandons his attitude of cosmic
detachment and picks up the racing rhythms of Fricke’s cinematography.
To depict the decay and destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex,
in St. Louis, the composer writes a monstrous neo-Baroque moto
perpetuo, which, as the buildings fall, devolves into nothing more than
descending scales. (This footage has become more haunting with time;
Minoru Yamasaki, who designed Pruitt-Igoe, was also the architect of
the World Trade Center.) During the twenty-minute frenzy titled “The
Grid”—crowds swirling, traffic churning, televisions flickering, hot
dogs and Hostess Twinkies being exgurgitated from production
lines—Glass and his musicians become manic machines, firing off notes
like so many 0s and 1s. The distance between sound and image
disappears, and the viewer is left with little space in which to think
or breathe.
When I saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in college, I
dismissed it as a trippy, slick, MTV-ish thing, to which some
well-meaning soul had attached hippie messages about the mechanization
of existence and the spoliation of the planet. At Lincoln Center, I
understood it as something else altogether—an awesomely dispassionate
vision of the human world, beautiful and awful in equal measure. What
made the difference, apart from the fact that I was no longer a facile
collegiate ironist, was the experience of hearing the music live, with
Kurt Munkacsi’s sound design adding heft and definition to every
gesture. For all the deliberate coldness of some of Glass’s writing,
“Koyaanisqatsi” is deeply expressive; its blistering virtuosity is
often the only sign of emotional life on display, excepting a few wan
smiles on the faces of pedestrians who hurry through Times Square.
“Powaqqatsi”
and “Naqoyqatsi,” the sequels, don’t match the force of the original,
though they are absorbing throughout. Glass supplies many passages of
cool, aching beauty, but the urgent side of his early style, the
technique of eviscerating repetition, is diminished. As a whole, the
trilogy mimics the uneven shape of the composer’s career, which has
ranged from achievements of staggering originality (“Music in Twelve
Parts,” “Einstein on the Beach,” the Violin Concerto) to statements of
baffling neutrality (a world-music cantata entitled “Orion” is the
newest instance of the latter). These days, he often seems trapped in
his formulas; he writes “Philip Glass music” in place of music that
happens to be by Philip Glass. But he has won his place in history, and
he may figure out a way to knock us sideways once again.
Still from Koyaanisqatsi, dir. Godfrey Reggio, cinematography by Ron Fricke.
