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Music in Contemporary French Cinema

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Abstract

After a discussion of the concept of historical authenticity for the composed score, this chapter shows how music in the French heritage film functions. It supports the visual track by its utopian connotations of “open” maternal landscapes; it uses chamber music and classical compilation to narrow space down in dystopia; using the work of Michel Foucault (heterotopia), Homi Bhabha (third space) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (deterritorialisation), it shows how music can create a “third space”, a heterotopic space of displacement that fractures the utopia/dystopia binary, creating a nomadic, indeterminate and constantly fluctuating space. Third space music opens space out laterally through temporal or idiomatic mismatch, or the introduction of “foreign bodies” that question the notion of continuity between the image-track and the music-track.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See amongst others Higson (1993), Monk (2002), Higson (2003), Leach (2004), Voigts-Virchow (2004), Voigts-Virchow (2007), Monk (2011), Vidal (2012).

  2. 2.

    See Monk 2011, 10–28 for a discussion of the evolution of the debate, and Powrie (2000) for “alternative heritage.”

  3. 3.

    “Historical reconstruction, literary adaptation, swashbuckler, melodrama, family saga, biography.”

  4. 4.

    “While the 1993 film was built around Raimu’s star persona, the 1993 version, while also focusing on Chabert, played here by Gérard Depardieu, describes with much more precision the locations in which the action takes place—a lawyer’s office, an aristocrat’s apartments, the crockery of a sumptuous dinner.”

  5. 5.

    Oh Elslein, dear Elslein.”

  6. 6.

    Transfigured Night.

  7. 7.

    “The Miller and the Brook.”

  8. 8.

    Mera cites Tous les matins du monde, to which I have already alluded. This does not exclude other uses, of course, whether of the composed or the compiled score. Robynn Stilwell explores the way in which Patrick Doyle’s “Classical” piano composition played by Marianne in Sense and Sensibility uses the sonata form “to fit the dramatic demands of the sequence, as well as using them to inflect the drama itself” (Stilwell 2000, 231).

  9. 9.

    “Cultivate the authentic.”

  10. 10.

    “Poppy Fields.”

  11. 11.

    “The Force of Destiny”; the opera was first performed in 1862.

  12. 12.

    “Ungrateful Heart.”

  13. 13.

    Why do you say those bitter words?…/Why do you come and say those words that hurt me so much?

  14. 14.

    “Colours do not move a people” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 348).

  15. 15.

    “The gallop and the ritornello are what we hear in the crystal, as the two dimensions of musical time, the one being the hastening of the presents which are passing, the other the raising or falling back of pasts which are preserved” (1989, 93).

  16. 16.

    “We call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes” (1987, 323).

  17. 17.

    “Counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (1984).

  18. 18.

    “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of a rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad” (1987, 9).

  19. 19.

    “Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities’, even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it” (1987, 11–12).

  20. 20.

    Harold in Italy.

  21. 21.

    “Lovers, spouses.”

  22. 22.

    “All the jewelry, the tie-pins, the costumes and laces are authentic…I used to go to the flea-market and to get what I needed.”

  23. 23.

    Dom za vesanje (1988) and Arizona Dream (1993). After the break-up of Yugoslavia, he worked in France, scoring a film starring Adjani, Toxic Affair (1993), before working with her again in La Reine Margot.

  24. 24.

    See Powrie (2003) for a discussion of the way rock stars are “always ‘out of place’, disjointed, disarticulated” (57).

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  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom

    Phil Powrie

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Powrie, P. (2017). Space. In: Music in Contemporary French Cinema . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52362-0_2

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