ABOUT THIS BOOK
Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory. Film, Music, Memory reveals that this change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. As films were consumed by growing American and European audiences, their soundtracks became an integral part of individual and collective memory. Berthold Hoeckner analyzes three critical processes through which music influenced this new culture of memory: storage, retrieval, and affect. Films store memory through an archive of cinematic scores. In turn, a few bars from a soundtrack instantly recall the image that accompanied them, and along with it, the affective experience of the movie.
Hoeckner examines films that reflect directly on memory, whether by featuring an amnesic character, a traumatic event, or a surge of nostalgia. As the history of cinema unfolded, movies even began to recall their own history through quotations, remakes, and stories about how cinema contributed to the soundtrack of people’s lives. Ultimately, Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that music has transformed not only what we remember about the cinematic experience, but also how we relate to memory itself.
REVIEWS
"Hoeckner's book offers a set of meticulous and original readings of films across a wide spectrum of cinema and a thesis linking recorded film music with broader work on memory. This is a major intervention in film sound, opening ears to the work of memory that recorded and synchronized sound make possible within and between films as varied as Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema and Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. For film buffs and audio professionals as well as film scholars, Film, Music, Memory will be a constant source of new inspirations."
— Sean Cubitt, author of Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
"Film, Music, Memory is superb. There are no books in soundtrack studies that are remotely like it, as it approaches film music from the angle of memory and its representation in film. Hoeckner shows us how images and situations stick to music, and this stickiness is why music is so adept at recalling characters and ideas, but more importantly it is why music is absolutely crucial to cinematic representations of memory."
— James Buhler, author of Theories of the Soundtrack
"The musical evocation and manipulation of memories has become a recurring and increasingly popular theme in modern film scoring; this book is a striking and distinctive exploration of how music shapes notions of our past and our present as refracted through film. Drawing on a remarkable depth of knowledge, Hoeckner puts forward several innovative theoretical tools to provide us with a new manner of engaging with how music, media, and memory interact."
— Daniel Goldmark, editor of The Grove Music Guide to American Film Music
"Film, Music, Memory convinces by skillfully demonstrating the theoretical implications of its titular 'triad' through the keen analysis of select examples from films. Hoeckner impressively guides his readers with though the issues arising from these films by navigating with commanding elegance the complex terrain between philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, musicology, as well as cinema and media studies. Not least, the book’s design is exquisite, with numerous figures and musical examples meticulously illustrating observations in the text."
— MEDIENwissenschaft (translated from the original German)
"In this wide-ranging survey of the role of memory in film music, Berthold Hoeckner offers a variation on Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious and argues that 'sound and music can store images and serve as acue for retrieving them.' Grouped around the notions of storage, retrieval, and affect, the seven chapters (plus introduction and coda) discuss films by Woody Allen or Alexander Kluge, Godard or Fellini, Chris Marker or Max Ophuls, etc—typically juxtaposing older films (from the 1940s and 50s) with more recent titles (from the past two or three decades). Hoeckner’s chapters discuss recording, flashback, replay,fixations, and other (simultaneously thematic and technical) phenomena that characterize film as an audiovisual medium."
— Quarterly Review of Film and Video
"Berthold Hoeckner’s Film, Music, Memory is an invigorating read which provides a detailed, critical, different and original dialogue on the manners in which film music plays a role in determining one’s’ experience of certain films or more simply the relation that music has to cinema and memory. With great criticality Hoeckner shows how cinema’s innate visualism is entwined with the auditory faculties of film music which allows for a representation of human memory to flourish."
— Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0001
[La Jetée (1962);We Bought a Zoo (2011);Walter Benjamin;technological reproducibility;representational technology;optical-acoustic unconscious;involuntary memory;future anterior]
The Introduction establishes how studying the nexus of film, music, and memory participates in a shift from traditional ontological and methodological approaches in film studies toward a “field paradigm” that is concerned with “novel interpretation over systematic theory” as well as a “topical emphasis within a particular critical field” (James Buhler after Francesco Casetti). As cinema became aware of its impact on cultural memory, music took on a vital role in the storage, retrieval, and affective experience of personal and collective remembrance. This warrants an extension of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to that of an optical-acoustic unconscious. If photography and film could reveal something that would otherwise not be visible due to the limits of our perceptual apparatus, the addition of music and sound enabled film to capture, store, and release aspects of reality previously inaccessible to our audiovisual sensorium. This is exemplified in a striking quotation of an iconic moment from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962)in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo (2011) shows how sound and music can photographic stills into live action, thereby by animating memory images into moving pictures.
This chapter is available at:
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1 Record Recollections
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0002
[The Legend of 1900 (1998);Penny Serenade (1941);technological reproducibility;memory objects;autobiographical memory;medium self-consciousness;thingness;phono-photograph;Henri Bergson]
Chapter 1 demonstrates how vinyl recordings that served as a mnemonic tool for the storage of autobiographical memory have been used as a plot device to illustrate how film created new forms of audiovisual memory. Through the technological reproducibility of temporal objects, records became not only instrumental in the transition from live to canned music; they were also deployed in sound films to show how cinema attaches a permanent visual component to auditory recollection, thereby creating a kind of a phono-photograph akin to the workings of Henri Bergson’s memory cone. The chapter’s case studies focus on films that exemplify a new mode of such medium self-consciousness. The Legend of 1900 (1998) dramatizes the momentous shift from episodic memories residing uniquely in the musician’s body to being stored externally in vinyl recordings produced for the masses after the turn of the century. Penny Serenade (1941) uses an album of phonographic records to narrate the story of a marriage, where the records become memory objects whose thingness may retain a connection to the contingency of the remembered event.
This chapter is available at:
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2 Tertiary Rememories
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0003
[The Final Cut (2004);Intervista (1987);La dolce vita (1960);retentional finitude;temporal objects;rememory;tertiary memory;total memory;future anterior;Bernard Stiegler]
Chapter 2 investigates in some depth Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “tertiary memory” and its implications for the industrial production of temporal objects, such as films and music. Two case studies explore Stiegler’s assertion that cinema and life converge in the temporality of consciousness, whereby the remembrance of past events—involving a process of montage akin to post-production in creating movies—is rendered as a temporal object with the help of music. The first example is Omar Naïm’s The Final Cut (2004), a sci-fi drama and critique of commercial memory that revolves around a brain implant capable of recording every sensory impression in a person’s life. After a person’s death, the complete footage is reviewed by a cutter who eliminates unsavory episodes using music to suture uplifting moments into an uplifting “rememory” video of for friends and family. The second example from Federico Fellini’s semi-documentary Intervista (1987) in which Anita Ekberg and Marcello Marcello Mastroianni watch their younger selves in clips from La dolce vita (1960). Amid the continuous stream of interlocking music from both films, the actors reliving the past in the present amplifies their experience of a paradoxical “future anterior” (Roland Barthes) which both defies and defers to death.
This chapter is available at:
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3 Double Projections
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0004
[Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) (1955);The Patriot (1979);Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1989);double projections;critical interference;formal synchronicity;musical buoyancy;Alexander Kluge;Jean-Luc Godard;Hanns Eisler]
Chapter 3 introduces double projection as a phenomenon that occurs when well-known music calls up preexisting associations on the viewer’s mental screen while watching a movie. With the advent of film, such music-induced double projections proliferated, creating a qualitatively new experience of intertextuality. While compilers of early film scores worried about such "interferences" when recycling well-known songs or operatic numbers, film makers soon began to exploit the potential of intentional reference and allusion. The two case studies of this chapter focus on the potential of critical interference and formal synchronicity in the montage films of late modernist European cinema: Alexander Kluge’s quotation in The Patriot (1979) of Hanns Eislser’s score for the Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955); and Jean-Luc Godard’s use of of a phrase from Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, op. 11 in his Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-89). In as much as intertextuality has become rampant in both modernist and post-modernist media, the chapter concludes with the suggestion that music may at times become buoyant and free itself from being visually overdetermined.
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4 Auratic Replays
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0005
[Play it Again Sam (1972);The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985);Sleepless in Seattle (1993);auratic replay;cinematic experience;habitual spectators;mnemonic innervation;Miriam Hansen]
Chapter 4 shows that repeated watching of movies gave rise to their reenactment, with music conjuring up memorable scenes and spurring attempts by habitual spectators to replay them in real life. Film music catalyzed mnemonic innervation—a variant of the "mimetic innervation" Walter Benjamin saw as a vital effect of cinema by turning viewers' minds and bodies into audiovisual recording and playback devices. Case studies focus on a subgenre of films in which canonical movies have become part of people's lives by supplying them with plot elements, dialogue, and music: Play it Again, Sam (1972) as inspired by "As Time Goes By" from Casablanca (1942); The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as framed by "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat (1935); and Sleepless in Seattle (1993) as cued by Hugo Friedhofer score from An Affair to Remember (1957). The phenomenon of such music-driven auratic replay supports to Benjamin’s claim that cinema reconfigured the experience of reality by activating viewers' mimetic and mnemonic capabilities (Miriam Hansen). Amid a rapidly growing consumption of movies, film music has thus come to fulfill an important role in linking cultural and individual memory by blurring the boundary between soundtracks of films and the soundtracks of life.
This chapter is available at:
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5 Panoramic Flashbacks
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0006
[Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948);panoramic flashback;hypertrophic memory;homodiegetic narrator;amnesia;cinematic unconscious;Max Ophüls;Daniele Amfitheatrof]
Chapter 5's point of departure is accounts of total recall in near-death situations, which began to include terms like “flashback,” “replay,” and “slow motion” after the invention of film. The potential for dream and memory sequences in early cinema eventually spurred the convention of panoramic flashbacks where dead protagonists recount their life as homodiegetic narrators with directorial omniscience. The single case study of this chapter is Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) focusing on the extensive role music came to play in the adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella for the screen. Its unusual story, told from beyond the grave, in a letter to an amnesic pianist (Stefan), gives rise to highly self-conscious cinema in which music itself is a vital medium of remembrance. Documentary evidence from the film’s production, including the shooting script and a copy of the score by Daniele Amfitheatrof, suggest that Ophüls created Lisa as a proxy of the director. Lisa’s hypertrophic memory not only allows her to recall every moment with Stefan cued by diegetic music playing during their encounters; but the music is also woven into the underscore to suggest that its mnemonic powers constitute an integral part of her narrative control.
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6 Freudian Fixations
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0007
[Little Voice (1998);The Seventh Veil (1945);traumatic fixation;narco-analysis;musical transference;medium unconscious;vocal impersonation;regressive listening]
Chapter 6 focuses on cinematic representations of traumatic fixation which illustrate how the histories of cinema and psychoanalysis converged in films about psychiatric treatment and psychoanalytic theories of film. Drawing on Thomas Elsaesser’s view of Sigmund Freud as a media theorist, two case studies demonstrate how the female musician was viewed as an unconscious medium for the storage of childhood trauma, whose cure requires cathartic abreaction through recall in a repeat performance. This plays out in the context of a British culture at different historical moments—after World War II and after the Thatcher years—where the influence of American popular culture through mass media was seen as symptomatic of a larger malaise. Once psychoanalysis had gone culturally mainstream by the 1940s, The Seventh Veil (1945) assumed that the similarity between psychic and cinematic apparatus was scientifically sound, so that film could render the treatment of a traumatized pianist through narco-analysis and the effect of musical transference in repeat performances. In Little Voice (1998), by contrast, a hysteric teenager adept at vocal impersonation becomes suspect and subject to satire, suggesting that the obsessively regressive listening to her father’s record collection delays her psychosexual development.
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7 Affective Attachments
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226649894.003.0008
[I Remember Mama (1948);To Kill a Mockingbird (1962);George Stevens;Robert Mulligan;Roy Webb;Elmer Bernstein;economic trust;racial trust;uncanny queerness;affective attachment]
Chapter 7 broadens the book’s concern with film music’s contribution to cultural memory toward its role in cultural politics by focusing on two mid-century American films where the transition to modern society involves the creation of trust. While George Stevens’s I Remember Mama (1946) is a parable of economic trust, Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is a morality tale about racial trust. Both films are narrated by a daughter remembering her mother or father, thereby bringing into focus how trust emerges through affective attachment between child and parent; in both films, the formation and representation of such attachment involves the music by film composers Roy Webb and Elmer Bernstein, respectively. By shaping nostalgic memories of attachment, music itself became attached to these memories and thereby influenced the viewer’s trust in the narrator and, by extension, in film as a medium. As a quick heuristic for trust judgments, both composers scored caregivers—including ethnic, racial, and uncannily queer others—as trustworthy figures with whom children (and viewers) could form attachments whose lasting effects would shape the personal attitudes and actions essential for a functioning modern society.
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