@evanevans said:
If a song with ONLY great lyrics is not really a great song, than what is it? It's a poem. Good songs also have great music.
A movie with ONLY a great story was best left as a book.
Are movies with great stories great movies?
Are books with great stories gaurunteed to be a good movie?
Great screenplays emprically all that's necessary for a movie to be great?
The story has got nothing to do with a great film. Nada. It's all about the filmmaking. Stories are best left in books. In fact teh most poorly executed movies are usually those trying to just tell a story. Movies can and do more than that. I know of many films that succeed and have NO story at all. Some of them even with no score.
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Evan is absolutely right when he says this. We tend to see a film dislocated in its parts: story, dialogue, plots, actors, filmmaking, sound and music. that is not a cinematic experience: it is the sum of them all that makes a great film and gives us great pleasures and joy watching it. And that is why there is not that much great films. It is a very difficult artistic expression that needs to be envision as a whole but with the demanding artistry of every of its parts.
Reading a script - even Welles "Citizen Kane" (I have a copy at home)- is a boring thing that says nothing of the quality of the film, its emotional impact, the sheer pleasure of its filmmaking. Listening to its music alone has the same effect. -Sorry Mr Hermann!
I'll make my point with the music but it applies to every parts of a film.
Great film music has nothing to do with superb orchestrations or fantastic themes, not even with impeccable renditions. It has to do with the dialogue the music has with the other parts of a film.
The role of music in film is not the "orchestra in the pit". On the contrary film music plays the same part the chorus does in a greek tragedy or an Aristophane's comedy. It is either a commentary on the scene, a pause in the action, it act as the untold answer or the question. It gives us tools to comprehend the evolution of what is at stake or question the philosophical ideas the film is dealing with. It is this dialogue that makes a great music in a great film. Unfortunately most of the film music are only the contemporary extension of the much needed piano player in the silent film era. One of the role of the piano player at that time was to play over the sound of the projector. There is no dialogue only monologues and...noise.
So how does a chorus works? In various ways.
By contrast: in a battle scene the piano player is always playing the fanfare of the cavalry! That is just noise over noise, making the action bigger, faster, more violent. It is only underlying with a big felt marker what we already know or feel. Replace the fanfare by a "love song" or a lullaby or an "adagio for strings" and immediately the scene reach a great emotional and intellectual impact. The music gives us tools to question the morality of war, the implacable destiny of death. Put a "pop song" and we see the battle scene in all its absurdity. An old folk tune played by a simple instrument (a recorder, an accordion, etc.) and we feel the despair of the "ordinary man". These examples can be found in so many great films and always procure great emotions and sheer intellectual joy! ( See Terence Malik's "The Thin Red Line", Kusturica "Time of the gipsys")
Repetitions. Since film music is all about theme and not about its development (in a classical way) the repetition of it -the leitmotiv- is often used to reveal a moral or philosophical idea. George Delerue's endlessly repeated theme in "Contempt" of Jean-Luc Goddard, gives us a clue on the main character; despite his claiming he'll never have the will to change himself and regain the love of his wife. The whistle melody we hear constantly in Fritz Lang "M" tells us that no mater what we do, danger is always there and , the most frightening, it lies within ourself.
By its absence. Sometime not to put music where we would expect it is the best contribution music can have. In "Torn Curtain" of the great Hitchcock, the absence of any music in the scene where Paul Newman is painfully trying to kill the agent with the door of a stove in a farm house, an electrical iron cord and so on tells us how difficult it really is to kill someone, even if our own life is in danger. The silence makes the scene looks like a laboratory analysis with the crude and terrific yet real sounds of the fight. We are assisting, powerless, to a murder, and like Newman we feel as rats taken in their last corner. No music would have give us this emotion.
I could go on with the use of period or repertoire music for social or political resonances but what I want to say was only that good film music has nothing to do with good music and should always be hear in context with all the other parts of a film. As I said it is the sum of all those parts that makes such a great impact on us, emotionally and intellectually.
For me, listening to a cd of film music is like hearing just one channel of a group conversation.
Ciao.