Sounds Like Helicopters

Matthew Lau

Description

Classical music masterworks have long played a key supporting role in the movies—silent films were often accompanied by a pianist or even a full orchestra playing classical or theatrical repertory music—yet the complexity of this role has thus far been underappreciated. Sounds Like Helicopters corrects this oversight through close interpretations of classical music works in key modernist films by Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Beginning with the famous example of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, Matthew Lau demonstrates that there is a significant continuity between classical music and modernist cinema that belies their seemingly ironic juxtaposition. Though often regarded as a stuffy, conservative art form, classical music has a venerable avant-garde tradition, and key films by important directors show that modernist cinema restores the original subversive energy of these classical masterworks. These films, Lau argues, remind us of what this music sounded like when it was still new and difficult; they remind us that great music remains new music. The pattern of reliance on classical music by modernist directors suggests it is not enough to watch modernist cinema: one must listen to its music to sense its prehistory, its history, and its obscure, prophetic future.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Fundamental Continuity

1. What Happens to an Apocalypse Deferred: Coppola, Herzog, and Schwarzenegger as Readers of
Wagner’s Ring

2. The Imperfect Wagnerite: Luis Buñuel and Romantic Surrealism

3. “A Film Should Be Like Music”: Stanley Kubrick and the Condition of Music

4. Too Soon, Too Late, and Still to Come: Jean-Luc Godard and the Ruins of Classical Music

5. Before a Winter’s Journey: Michael Haneke’s Critique of Film Music in The Piano Teacher

Conclusion: Modernist Cinema’s Family Tree

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Histoire de la musique
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Película fotográfica
• Visual culture
• Art music
• History of classical music traditions
• Classical architecture
• History of film
• Musique savante
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438476322
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sounds Like Helicopters

Sounds Like Helicopters
Classical Music in Modernist Cinema

Matthew Lau
Cover: Apocalypse Now (1979). Zoetrope Studios / Photofest.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lau, Matthew, 1978– author.
Title: Sounds like helicopters : classical music in modernist cinema / Matthew Lau.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052658 | ISBN 9781438476315 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438476322 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture music—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML2075 .L36 2019 | DDC 781.5/42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052658
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mom and Dad, who took us to the movies and violin lessons
“Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!”
—André Bazin (“The Myth of Total Cinema” 21)
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Fundamental Continuity
1 What Happens to an Apocalypse Deferred: Coppola, Herzog, and Schwarzenegger as Readers of Wagner’s Ring
2 The Imperfect Wagnerite: Luis Buñuel and Romantic Surrealism
3 “A Film Should Be Like Music”: Stanley Kubrick and the Condition of Music
4 Too Soon, Too Late, and Still to Come: Jean-Luc Godard and the Ruins of Classical Music
5 Before a Winter’s Journey: Michael Haneke’s Critique of Film Music in The Piano Teacher
Conclusion: Modernist Cinema’s Family Tree
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illustrations Figure 1.1 Helicopter Valkyries in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, United Artists, 1979). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 1.2 Dynamo in The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, TriStar Pictures, 1988). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 2.1 A surreal Tristan in L’age d’or (Luis Buñuel, Vicomte de Noailles/Corinth Films, 1930). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 2.2 Learning to respect private property in Las Hurdes (Luis Buñuel, Ramón Acín/Kino Video, 1933). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 2.3 The bourgeoisie entering paradise in The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Producciones Gustavo Alatriste/Criterion Collection, 1962). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 2.4 The bourgeoisie at a public bathroom in The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, Greenwich Film Productions/Criterion Collection, 1974). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 2.5 Window shopping to Wagner in That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, Greenwich Films/Criterion Collection, 1977). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.1 Private Lawrence and Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1987). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.2 Alex reacts to Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1971). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.3 A razor cuts an eye in Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, Les Grands Films Classiques/Transflux Films, 1929). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.4 Marion’s lifeless eye in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, 1960). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.5 The routine problems of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.6 Lady Lyndon hears Schubert one last time in Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1975). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.7 Revealing masks in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1999). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 3.8 Giving up your inquiries in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1999). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 4.1 Godard listening to his new film in Prénom Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, Sara Films, 1983). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 4.2 Mozart for farmworkers in Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, Comacico/Criterion Collection, 1967). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 4.3 Roxy looks on in Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, Wild Bunch/Kino Lorber, 2014). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 5.1 Sensing a rival in The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Arte France Cinema/Criterion Collection, 2002). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 5.2 The origin of film music in The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Arte France Cinema/Criterion Collection, 2002). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 5.3 Waiting her turn in The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Arte France Cinema/Criterion Collection, 2002). Digital frame enlargement. Figure 5.4 Departing on her winter’s journey in The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Arte France Cinema/Criterion Collection, 2002). Digital frame enlargement.
Acknowledgments
Joshua Wilner, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Peter Hitchcock supported this project when it was a dissertation and have given valuable advice since. Mark Schiebe and Lily Saint read the earliest drafts. Leah Anderst helped with the revisions when it was almost done.
Eli Spindel and my friends at the String Orchestra of Brooklyn have forced me to keep practicing just to play half as well as they do. Roy Malan has been my most generous mentor of all.
The CUNY Graduate Center awarded me a dissertation fellowship in 2010–11. The CUNY Research Foundation funded this work with a book completion award for 2019–20. The English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center supported my general intellectual development. My colleagues and students at Queensborough Community College have challenged and inspired me to mature as a teacher and writer.
Finally, to my parents, Tom and Diane Lau, and my brother David Lau, my sister-in-law Laura Martin, and my nephew, “the genius,” Carlos Martin Lau, you all know how much you mean to me. Like Cordelia, I can only love and be silent.
Introduction
A Fundamental Continuity
“It Scares the Hell Out of the Slopes”
W AGNER’S “R IDE OF THE V ALKYRIES ” in Apocalypse Now (1979) is emblematic of the complexity of the role played by classical music in modernist cinema. A complexity that is thus far underappreciated by modern film music scholarship and criticism. As Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) explains it in the film, he plays Wagner from loudspeakers attached to helicopters during an absurd mission to capture the surf break at “Charlie’s Point” because it inspires his men and “scares the hell out of the slopes.” But rather than intimidating the Vietcong, Wagner lets them know Kilgore and company are coming. Though the music makes victory seem inevitable for Kilgore’s cavalry, in the ensuing battle several helicopters are downed, and the enemy is only subdued when air support napalms the jungle perimeter. Kilgore wins the battle, but is less certain of winning the war. “Someday,” he muses shirtlessly before a surf, “this war is gonna end.”
The decision to use Wagner is often mistakenly credited to director Francis Ford Coppola and assumed to be an ironic allusion to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 racist historical epic, The Birth of a Nation , and its use of the same music during its climactic Ku Klux Klan cavalry attack on African Americans (Smith 221, M. Cooke 427). In fact, it was Apocalypse Now ’s screenwriter and former NRA board member John Milius who chose Wagner for the film’s infamous helicopter assault sequence. Milius chose Wagner for his screenplay not just to satirize a war adrift or for the irony of the perceived contrast between the music and the machines, but because of the similarity he felt he heard between Wagner’s vanguard orchestral timbres and the sounds of helicopters (the emblematic modern vehicle for conventional military forces). An admirer of Wagner’s music, Milius observed archly in an interview with Coppola, “Wagner just lends itself to helicopters for some reason.”
Milius’s idiosyncratic perception underpinning Hollywood’s signature image of the Vietnam War is therefore both ironic—drawing attention to itself in a foolish and surreal spectacle—and appropriate—in the way the helicopters sound and act like Wagner’s Valkyries as they administer “death from above.” Similarly, Coppola’s sequence based on Milius’s screenplay, as a morally and politically ambivalent masterpiece and the film’s true “heart of darkness,” both satirizes and celebrates the war as a misguided excess of an empire. The Wagnerian soundtrack could not have been more fitting, for no other composer inspires harsher denunciations or greater reveries. Wagner’s legacy remains bitterly contested, with some rejecting his music as fundamentally anti-Semitic and fascist. So, too, if Hollywood’s mystification of the conflict is any indication, the United States has yet to come to terms with the bitter legacy of the Vietnam War. Apocalypse ’s helicopter assault scene brings these disputes together without resolving or diminishing their arguments.
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, Milius and Coppola used Wagner to capture the history of the Vietnam War not as it really happened—psychological operations (“psy-ops”) involved playing rock music from helicopters, not Wagner—but as it flashes up in our cultural memory at a moment of danger (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 255). The moment of danger was the years just after the war ended when the struggle began to interpret it in Hollywood. Coppola’s film contrasts with Hal Ashby’s antiwar film Coming Home (1978), a love story set away from the battlefield among disillusioned, d