CINEMA
Making tracks
Tony Palmer
I remember once attending a BBC lecture course for radio producers, which, among other things, offered advice on the use of music in radio drama. There are three possibi lities, intoned our bleary instructor: you can use it to set the scene, illustrate the mood and establish a theme; you can use music to punctuate the text and/or suggest the passing of time: and finally you can sometimes use music at the end to lift the spirits and imply a denouement even if none has occurred. Staggered by the profundity of these insights, I reeled back before the creative might that was the BBC.
But lest you think that the visionary quality of these revelations is the sole prerogative of the BBC, pause for a moment to consider just how the cinema is gripped by this same breadth of musical education. There is the syrupy theme song, which often has little to do with the film to follow but which easily gets to No 1, thus dishonestly advertising an indifferent movie (actually, the song was most probably written for another film altogether, so who needs the film?); there are the all-purpose mushy chords slopped in by the lazy director who couldn't figure out what else to do to salvage his lousy movie; and of course you can guarantee that even when the hero has raped his mother and killed his sister, a triumphant restatement of the main theme will blossom forth if only because they don't play The Queen any more, at least not around my way.
All three methods beloved of our BBC hacks, however, have in common that each involves the film or drama being more or less completed before anyone gets around to thinking about the music, indicating that, as far as the film director is concerned, music fulfills only a secondary function. Sir William Walton, for example, was commissioned to write the incidental music for The Battle of Britain. Those who heard the result affirm that it was his finest film score to date. Alas, his music was rejected, partly because it would not fit on an LP and the film producer's contract said he had to supply to the distributor enough music to fill two sides of an LP. So much for art.
But when a director like Ken Russell comes along and suggests that maybe the music should be chosen and recorded first (as happened in The Music Lovers) in order that the pictures can be cut accurately to an already established soundtrack, he is greeted with howls of disbelief by those legions of antique film technicians who tell him that it's not done that way. But the fact is that The Music Lovere most powerful moments are due entirely to this simple trick of using a piece of music whose dramatic structure ensures a thundering climax, and then making sure that the pictures fit.
Two films on view this week illustrate in their different ways this musical predicament. Shaft ('X ' Ritz and limited release) opts for the BBC method. A striking theme song, crisply orchestrated by its composer Isaac Hayes, bangs away from the start using pretty pictures of our Negro hero plodding round New York in search of members of the criminule classes. They could have been any pictures and they could have been cut together in any one of a dozen ways. It's not so much that it's badly done because it isn't; it's just that it's been done so many times before to the extent now that the pictures, subpect mater and theme song seem wholly interchangeable. Except in so far as the music increases the commercial potential of the ' product ' (I forgot to say they're not called 'movies ' any more), thus giving the whole an increased and spurious glamour, it's difficult to know what such music adds.
And then there is Fiddler on the Roof (U' Dominion), all three weepy hours of it. In this case the music was there from the beginning, so director Norman Jewison's method was predetermined for him. All that remained was to orchestrate visually what Jerry Bock had written down long, long ago. I say all,' which sounds more condescending than it's
meant to be. Jewison faithfully records what Hollywood thinks it must have been like to have been Jewish in datenineteenth-century Russia. Isaac Stern plays the fiddle (literally) and, as his wife remarked recently, this film will be treasured by Jews everywhere as an historical document, simply because it explains how Zionism has come to be the emotional clap-trap it has. Tradition? Maybe, but only half the truth as Topol with his perpetual twinkle suggests. Ossie Morris, with his extraordinarily delicate photography in browns and blacks, comes nearer to the actual feeling of Anatevka than most of the rest put together. But it's the music which triumphs. After all, it was there first and had it not been so we would have had no film. Sorry, product.
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