Edgard Varèse Inside Hollywood and Out

For all his smouldering looks, the composer Edgard Varèse never had the most fruitful relationship with the silver screen. Despite persistent attempts, he never wrote a feature soundtrack. Even today, while contemporaries like Bartok and Webern, responsible for equally forbidding bodies of work, can lay claim to a string of posthumous cinematic credits, only Woody Allen has found a use for Varèse. In the sombre Bergman tribute Another Woman, he matched the sweeping theremin and strident brass of Ecautorial to one of Gena Rowlands's more unsettling fantasy sequences. Adam Harvey, in his book about the music of Allen's films, makes a point of insisting that this must be a rare insistence of Allen using music "purely for its effect" and surely not because he enjoyed listening to the music himself.

But in the early twenties he did act, largely uncredited, in a number of silent films. Most notably, his heavy brow appeared in the role of a policeman, alongside John Barrymore, in John S. Robertson's (1920) Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. The musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, has cut scenes from the film to some of Varèse's own music and put it on YouTube. It gives you a startling idea of just how effective and expressionistic a soundtrack composer he might have been, had he ever been given the chance.

The composer's overtures to the studios reached their peak in the 1930s, a decade during which he seems to have completed more press interviews than actual musical works. Finally, having hawked his wares round the backlots and hobnobbed at as many parties as he could bear, at the end of the decade he even penned a manifesto of sorts, entitled 'Organised Sound for the Sound Film'and published in The Commonweal. Here  he wrote of music as an "art-science", with a brief mention of "all the recent laboratory discoveries which permit us to hope for the unconditional liberation of music" (hinting, perhaps, at what may have been his real motivation for working in cinema - the chance to investigate recent progress in graphical sound techniques). None of which seemed to do any good, however; until several years later, when an old acquaintance first met through The Commonweal's editor Walter Anderson, finally got back in touch. 

Boris Morros, Hollywood producer, music director, and Russian spy, was, in 1946, working on a romantic comedy called Carnegie Hall, involving the New York Symphony Orchestra and such notables as Leopold Stokowski and Artur Rubinstein. He asked Varèse to compose a short piece for a particular scene and the composer immediately began work on a kind of musical skit involving quotes from his own work and a few famous pieces from the repertoire emerging haphazardly out of a bed of improvisation around the note A.

Morros, a former Paramount music director and producer of Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces and Julien Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan, had been named as a KGB agent in a letter sent to J. Edgar Hoover three years earlier. In December of that same year, 1943, the writer Martha Dodd and her husband Alfred Stern met with Morros in order to invest $130,000 in a music publishing company that would serve as a front organisation for a Soviet spy ring.

By the time Morros got in touch with Varèse in 1946, things were perhaps not going so well for Morros. The Boris Morros Music Company had collapsed and the KGB had come increasingly to view its putative boss with suspicion. In June of 1945, after a series of minor indiscretions, the Soviet secret service had ordered Morros be deactivated, only for the latter to come back to them, a year or so later, with a suggestion to start up a film distribution venture - if they would just be willing to invest a few hundred thousand dollars. In fact, this proposal was an FBI sting operation, the Feds having approached Morros in early 1947 and recruited him as a double agent.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, Morros had cooled to the idea of hiring Varèse, a composer somewhat notorious for his never-completed so-called "Red Symphony", Espace. His music never appeared in Carnegie Hall (which went on to be quite a success) and the work he had begun for it remained unfinished. Until many years later, that is, when his student and protégé, Chou Wen-Chung completed a performing score for the piece which now holds a place amongst Varèse's complete works under the title, Tuning Up.

Mahler (1974)

Ken Russell's somewhat Grand Guignol biopic of the fin-de-siecle Austrian composer offers us, rather like the old Comic Strip Presents..., Robert Powell as Woody Allen as Gustav Mahler, via Laurel and Hardy, Al Jolson,  the Marx Brothers, and, of course, Visconti. What we get, however, from the rather curious musical passages in the film, supposed to illustrate visually various excerpts from Mahler's music such as the Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen, remind us that Mahler's music marks possibly the last point in history where it is acceptable for progressive music to take as its model or muse some vaguely anthropomorphised image of 'Nature' - a mainstay of music aesthetics since Aristotle's Poetics, common, though articulated differently, to both sides of the 'War of the Romantics' in the mid 19th century. By the time we get to Erwartung, composed two years before Mahler's death, nature is no longer something gay and innocent, but a terrifying threat to the psyche. Four years later, Russolo's Art of Noises banishes, conclusively, the natural world from the avant-garde, and so it stayed throughout a twentieth century defined, musically, by noises both inspired by, and crafted out of, machines and the urban sprawl.

"When Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget that you're grown."

One of the best bits in Eddie Murphy's Raw is a skit early on in which Murphy recounts being chastised on the telephone by Bill Cosby for using so much foul language doing stand-up. Afterwards Murphy calls Richard Pryor, "And Richard was like, 'Tell Bill Cosby to suck my dick!'" The way he gets, just perfectly the vocal mannerisms of Cosby, and especially Pryor, betrays hours spent studying their records as a child. The mimicry is all in the voice - he doesn't really get them physically. It's a little like what Simon Reynolds is talking about in The Guardian - a portrait of the artist as a consumer. A similar thing happens towards the end of Woody Allen's much-maligned homage to the Hollywood musical, Everyone says I love you (the title itself is a homage to the Marx Brothers). Interestingly, it's all set up by the music: a scene before features an instrumental snatch of 'You brought a new kind of love to me', the song each of the three Marx Brothers sing in order to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business, next a big musical set-piece opens with a couple of dozen dancers, all dressed as Groucho, singing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' (from Animal Crackers) in French. Then we have Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, talking intimately with Groucho disguises on, in the midst of a party where everyone has a Groucho mask. The dialogue itself is very Woody Allen but just a few times Woody throws in a few smirks and raised eyebrows that are just perfectly Groucho, betraying exactly the same obsessive watching and re-watching of old Marx Brothers films as Eddie Murphy with his Richard Pryor records. Curiously, when a comic pays his respects to another comic, he borrows the style and mannerisms (form) but not the actual gags (content), whereas a band will tend to cover another band's song (content) but will be expected to do so in there own style (form). Of course, there is a certain taboo amongst stand-ups around 'stealing' another comic's material and doing impressions is a common feature in comedy routines, whereas musicians are expected to develop their own style, their own 'voice', but playing covers is accepted as educative. However, what happens in a hypothetical situation in which Eddie Murphy is doing an impression of Bill Cosby chastising him for using swear words in his act, and as Cosby chastises Murphy he starts to impersonate him, so we have Murphy impersonating Cosby impersonating Murphy. Or what if the specific bit of Murphy's act that Cosby has a problem with is the bit where he does an impression of Bill Cosby, so we end up with Murphy doing an impression of Cosby doing an impression of Murphy doing an impression of Cosby ad infinitum. We find ourselves back in the territory of Douglas Hofstadter's 'strange loops'. How might this work in music? Already, with Allo Darlin', we have a kind of meta-music, a music with other music nested within it. If I (or, even better, Johnny Cash) were to then cover 'Heart Beat Chilli' with its reference to 'I Walk the Line', then we reach a kind of meta-meta-level, but still not the kind of tangled hierarchies we find in Gödel, Escher, Bach. 

These kinds of Epimenidean structures turn up a lot in marxism - Vladimir Tatlin's Escher-like Monument to the Third International springs immediately to mind. Or take Zizek's analysis of the relationship between politics and economics (in In Defense of Lost Causes), such that politics is determined in the last instance by the economy, but by an economy which is itself a political-economy, an economics imbedded in, and imbued with, politics. Of course, Zizek delights in seeming paradoxes like this, but it is interesting to see these kind of self-referential loops turn up even in the critics of marxism. Doesn't Simone Weil's image, for her critique of the logic of proletarian auto-liberation, of a horse riding itself, recall somewhat Escher pictures such as 'Drawing Hands'?

"Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."

Almost immediately after posting that last missive, I started to think more about this idea of the flatness of the cinematic image and how this is either exploited or compensated for in the work of different directors. Experimental film, such as the work of Stan Brakhage, struck me as one area where, perhaps under the influence of Clement Greenberg's formalist aesthetics of painting, the flatness of the screen becomes the very object of the film. Sure enough, a post over at Tativille locates precisely this quality in the work of another avant-garde film-maker, Nathaniel Dorsky. Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, I watched Bananas. 

Woody Allen's third feature as director (his Duck Soup, right down to the farcical courtroom scene, displaying wonderfully, as Zizek says of the Marx Brothers' film, "the madness, the "fun," the cruel irony, which are already present in the totalitarian state.") features none of the traits of extensivity and intensivity identified in the previous post; the camera, and the characters, tend, almost universally, to move from side to side, never coming towards the lens or being chased away by it. Nothing leaps out at us, nor are we ever really invited in. 

Over the next few days, watching a few more of Allen's films, I came to regard this degree of pictorial flatness to be characteristic of his work as a whole. There are significant exceptions to this rule, and watching closely the working of the cinematic style when it deviates from this style can be potentially illuminating with regard to the film in question. 

Take The Money and Run, like many of Allen's earlier films, is essentially a generic pastiche, only whereas, say, Love and Death, parodies just one genre, Take the Money and Run runs the whole gamut, from thriller to romance, via western, biopic, documentary (with the documentary interview, a recurring trope in Allen's films, later to be replaced by the psychoanalyst's couch, and one of a series of devices he uses to palm off lengthy expository dialogue), western, slapstick, and prison break, with, perhaps appropriately, intensive movements on the purse about to be snatched, or the thief being chased by the camera down an alleyway, when we are in the 'thriller' mode, and an extensive leap out of the frame as the convicts rush to make their escape. 

By Interiors (another pastiche you might say, only this time not of a genre but a director - Bergman), we see lingering shots of all sorts of blank surfaces, characters tend to dress in the same colours as the matte interiors around them, almost fading into the walls behind them. Hannah and Her Sisters, likewise, is characterised by a growing concern with various types of screen, from windows and mirrors to, of course, the silver screen itself (with the only extensive moment in the film coming when the characters go to watch Duck Soup at the cinema and the Marx Brothers leap out at us, singing and dancing). The only moment where anyone really walks towards an unmoving camera, any sense of the image coming towards you is undercut by scores of joggers running in the opposite direction.

Though Crimes and Misdemeanors shares the earlier films' obsession with using screens and surfaces to frame the action, there is a certain camera move, on several, particularly emotive, moments in the film, moving in to a tighter shot of the subject(s), drawing the viewer right up to the neck of the character(s). This seems to be precisely in order to spite the manifesto for comedy espoused by the sitcom producer, Lester (Alan Alda), "Don't get too close to the pain... If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it ain't." In a sense, Allen is here giving us his own comic manifesto in negative, and many of his films from the 80's and 90's seem intent on proving, not always successfully, that you can get close to the pain and still be funny. In certain scenes in Crimes and Misdemeanors, we also start to see the first signs of the almost total neglect the camera seems at times to show towards the characters in several of Allen's films of the 90's, most notably Deconstructing Harry. 

By the time he gets to Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen has developed a directorial style so ambiguous and chaotic that it seems to prefigure the computer-generated 'Automavision' which Lars von Trier claims to have created for The Boss of it All. Shots jump about haphazardly, crossing the line and cutting off heads, whilst actors walk off-screen mid-speech leaving the camera facing a blank wall. This apparent cinematographic insouciance is belied, however, by a similar zoom in close to that in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the difference being that here the move is always into the face of Woody Allen's character, in order to tell us that the fractured directorial style is a reflection of the lead's fractured psyche.

The principal exceptions to Woody Allen's general tendency towards this kind of cinematic flatness are those films, such as Bullets Over Broadway or Celebrity, whose subject is the spectacle itself. In Celebrity, despite the tabloid frenzy of the plot, the camera remains, on the whole, at a slight dignified remove, as if to distance itself from its own content. But, of course, in a film where everyone is famous, the real 'stars', Nicole Oliver (Melanie Griffiths) and Brandon Darrow (Leonardo DiCaprio), still have the power to leap out of the frame towards us like the genuine cinematic spectacle they represent. Similarly, in Bullets Over Broadway, it is again generally the 'stars', Helen Sinclair (Diane Wiest) and Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent), who leap out off the stage and out of the screen at us, but also the gangsters - for the very point of the film seems to be about the synchronic exchangeability of actors and gangsters, artists and murderers, the way each feeds off the other's reflected glamour. Perhaps the most notably extensive moment, however, comes in a scene with the camera placed low, a train comes towards us, practically running the camera over. We are reminded, of course, of cinema's origins in precisely this kind of extensivity - the Lumiere brothers' L'Arriveé d'un train à La Ciotat.