Notes on Music and Film (3)
Listen to the podcast Beyond the Bony Labyrinth, ep. 21: The fine art of mickey-mousing
Beluister de podcast Voorbij de oren, afl. 10: De schone kunst van het mickey-mousen.
Imagine the following film scene. From high above, we see a car driving through a barren and desolate mountain landscape. At the same time, we hear voices, a man and a woman arguing. It sounds like we are sitting in the back seat.
Any somewhat seasoned film viewer will not hesitate to make the connection between image and sound. The visual and auditory perspectives contradict each other; but it is above all the rules of a coherent story that govern our expectations, and we do not hesitate to combine the two perspectives in our perception. We do expect that both perspectives will coincide at some time – if not, the result is a disconcerting alienation.
Suppose we now see the arguing couple up close, from the back seat –but the sound is not quite in sync. This is something we will not interpret as an artistic device. We will probably think it’s is a technical glitch.
In terms of perspective, the film director has great leeway. In terms of synchronisation, it listens very closely – especially when it comes to speech. The strict coordination of sound and image is the minimum of realism we expect in cinema: the synchronicity of eye and ear mirrors that of reality. Without it, we get the feeling that our perception is unhinged.
What seems to be a matter of course in perception: the synchrony of hearing and seeing, is not a straightforward matter technically. The specific requirements of photography and sound recording are not easily reconciled. Just think of The Dueling Cavalier, that movie-within-the-movie in Singing in the Rain, as a demonstrating of what may go wrong when sound is added in a silent movie studio. It may remind us of the brief moment in film history when synchronized sound was an option, but not a matter of course.
“Audiovisual counterpoint”
In their famous Statement on Sound (1928), the Soviet film directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov expressed their concern that theatrical, synchronized dialogue would destroy what they called “the culture of montage”: the freedom to create new meanings through unexpected combinations of diverse elements. Freedom from realistic synchrony should allow for “an orchestral counterpoint of visual and aural images” (Buhler 2018: 26, 27).
The musical term ‘counterpoint’, the combination of two or more distinct musical voices in orderly harmonic progressions, is here applied to contrasting messages in two different media. But the significance of harmonious ‘voices’ tends to get lost in that transfer. In practice, what it amounts to is mostly contrast (or ‘dissonance’, to stay with musical terms, as Eisenstein et. al. in fact speak of ‘discord’; Chion 2019: 36, Buhler 2018: 27). Typical are instances of ironic juxtaposition, as when Shostakovich “scores a scene in which the heroine sobs out her agony to a party official with light-hearted, percussive music…” (Kalinak 2010: 59).
There is, of course, a big difference between the cinematic functions of sound – dialogue and so-called ‘sound effects’ – and those of music. While sound is generally the product of what is happening on or off the screen, audiences are used to accepting music that has no clear origin in the action, the cinematic equivalent of music from the orchestra pit in the theatre. In opera and film, music is supposed to have a meaningful relationship with the visible events; but that relationship may be of many kinds. What the music does – that is for the spectator a continuous guessing game, played mostly unconsciously, and often with no precise answers.
Breaking the sound barrier
The distinction between sound effect and music is profound, but not rigid; and when there is a strong connection between music and image, that distinction may easily become blurred. This is inevitable when the sound world is represented exclusively by music, as is the case in opera. This implies that everything that makes sound does so musically (or should). First and foremost, that is the human voice: speaking becomes singing. But it applies to all sounds. From the clanging of swords to the splashing of water – whenever a sound is needed, it is provided by the orchestra, in a ‘musicalised’ form. In opera, all stage sounds that are not in the score are musically destructive.
But what is much more interesting: when music takes control of the total sound world, it can make us hear events that in reality are silent, such as human gestures and especially emotions.
It is in the early animated cartoon that sound effects are most consistently drawn into the realm of music, and vice versa. Cartoon music constantly breaks the sound barrier, the fine line that separates ordinary sound from music. All the real sounds of the action – all the beeps, boings, wooshes and splashes – are embedded in the music, just as in the printed cartoon they are embedded in language.
Precisely this, according to Adorno and Eisler (Composing for the Films, 1947), is the source of the peculiar musical humour (Witz) of the cartoon. Music is reduced, for a moment, to sound object. One might call it ‘the objectification gimmick’. Music is momentarily reduced to a sound object. This is not only an aesthetic shock (of art versus reality), but also a cognitive one: sound is a physical phenomenon outside us; music exists only in our imagination, as a mental phenomenon, just as the person is distinct from the body. (Imagine being told by your beloved: What a beautiful body you are!)
For Adorno and Eisler, this is the manifestation of a broader cultural phenomenon: a process of “technification”, which in the animated cartoon “has most deeply penetrated into the function of music” (2006: 133, my transl.). It is in itself already “somewhat comical” when music – ‘live’ by nature, something that exists only in the act of making music – is commodified, transformed into an endlessly reproducible object.
That proposition is unlikely to make much of an impression on a contemporary audience. Technification has advanced so much further that the old cartoons have an endearing theatricality. Still, that Witz remains effective: the fact that music can break the sound barrier without harm to its musical integrity. As in those movies the characters always bounce back, no matter what hits them.
It is not surprising, maybe, that the early cartoon avoids dialogue, but is full of on-stage music, music that is created by the characters themselves. On-stage or (‘diegetic’) on-screen music is at the same time music (evidently), and sound – because as sound it belongs to the world that is represented. Music-making is in these cartoons a grim obsession: Mickey’s whistling, drumming and honking in Steamboat Willie (1928) is as fanatic as his grin. He even turns his fellow animals into helpless musical instruments: a new twist to the objectification gimmick.
Rarely, maybe, have music and cruelty been such close companions.
“Harmful duplication”
The term mickey-mousing has quickly become standard for the close synchronization of music with screen events. It carried a pejorative meaning almost from the beginning (Goldmark 2013: 230); but that had little to do with animal ethics. One reason is that in close synchronization music becomes too noticeable. It can even come to dominate the image – something unacceptable in classic Hollywood screen drama.
In the context of traditional musical aesthetics, the practice runs up against a concern that upgrading the sound effect to music, implies a degradation of music to mere sound – the Witz of Eisler and Adorno.
The practice also clashes with the idea that the audiovisual media should have their own integrity. According to Adorno and Eisler, music should not double what is already in the image: “harmful duplication” (schädliche Verdopplung) may be the result when music takes on an “illustrative” function (2006: 19). This is particularly reprehensible when those musical illustrations have degraded to cliché signals: the “Aha, nature” experience. (Aha, Romans/American Indians! Aha, jolly Irish!)
The alternative to such illustrations is, again, ‘dramaturgical counterpoint’. The term has an aura of the learned, complex, and abstract. But it is not easy to imagine instances in which music and image relate as quasi-independent ‘voices’. Maybe the scene I’ve described above may count as a contrapuntal moment: image (car on the highway) and sound (couple quarrelling) are synchronous in the story line, but represent different perspectives.
In most cases, however, counterpoint boils down to contrast. And counterpoint in this sense may become a cliché as easily as is the case with musical ‘illustrations’. Just think of one of the worst ‘contrapuntal’ clichés in contemporary cinema: elegiac music set to scenes of extreme violence.
It has not escaped notice that Hanns Eisler’s own film scores may blatantly contradict the principle, even in the examples highlighted in Composing for the Films. His music for Joris Ivens’ silent documentary film Rain (Regen, 1929), composed in 1941, has been called “unremittingly descriptive” (Cook 200: 64). The wind is here rendered (“reproduced”, “translated”) by violin trills; shaking tree branches by a phrase in the piano; rain drops by second intervals; and a downpour by a tremolo (Adorno and Eisler 2006: 110-111).
Eisler’s score has a second life away from the screen as a chamber music piece titled 14 Ways of Describing Rain (Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben). If this really is what it is, a description, then as film music it must be even more ‘doubling’ than any ‘illustration’. What is the point in describing what is visibly there?
Eisler’s 14 Ways might be called modernist mickey-mousing; and the may be nothing wrong with that. As an essay in advanced film music aesthetics however it is curiously anachronistic: the film Rain belongs to the silent era, when music had the privilege of not adding to, but being the sound world.
(Ivens’ Rain was originally released without sound; the Dutch composer-writer Lou Lichtveld wrote the first score in 1932.)
Tom-and-Jerrying
Mickey-mousing may have a reputation for being vulgar, crude and simplistic, but it becomes truly interesting when we start asking how exactly music relates to the worlds of sound and vision. In other words, when we consciously play the guessing game: why music?
Take, for instance, The Invisible Mouse, a 1947 Tom and Jerry cartoon with music by Scott Bradley.
About halfway the film we see a matchbook that seems to be dancing in the air, held (as we know) by the invisible mouse. The tauntingly good-humoured march tune that accompanies its movements supposedly expresses the mouse’s mood and intention. When a match seems to bend all by itself and then breaks away from the carton, the tune ‘bends down’ with it in what must be an auditory manifestation of the visible movement – even though in reality the bending is noiseless. It is an auditory image (‘illustration’?) of bending, rather than a bending noise. The match is struck with a realistic woosh, but when the flames break out, an orchestral trill presents an auditory ‘flickering’ that again has no plausible realistic origin. It may also express excitement; but whose could it be? The cat is still blissfully asleep; the mouse is out of the frame; maybe it’s ours?
When the fire bell rings, it is, we must assume, an internal alarm in the cat, who finally realises that his toes are on fire, and hastily extinguishes them in the aquarium. But when the piano is played by invisible hands (or feet), it is ‘on-stage’ music. In this way, from moment to moment the music displays an amazing spectrum of functions. Most remarkable is that we grasp all this intuitively and immediately.
That it can all be be seamlessly integrated into the musical continuity, is above all due to the steady pulse which reigns over the rhythm. The images have been timed to a clear beat, as a dance, in the first stage of design. We may easily follow the beat even without hearing the music.
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Adorno, Theodor W., and Hanns Eisler. 2006. Komposition für den Film. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Buhler, James. 2018. Theories of the Soundtrack. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chion, Michel. 2019. Audio-Vision : Sound on Screen. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cook, Nicholas. 2000. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Goldmark, Daniel. 2013. “Drawing a New Narrative for Cartoon Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, 229–44. Oxford University Press.
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