Abstract
This chapter shows how a song can fuse different layers of time in a moment of time out of time and affective excess, and in so doing becomes a crystal-song, echoing Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image. This is linked to Roland Barthes’s notion of the “grain of the voice” and “punctum,” and contrasted with Amy Herzog’s “musical moments.” The chapter explores in detail mainly non-diegetic crystal-songs in two broad areas: the film in which a song is foregrounded by repetition or by mention in the dialogue; the film in which composers or singers are foregrounded by being both part of the music track and the dialogue, leading to sustained attention on one or more of the songs associated with them.
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Notes
- 1.
“Don’t Let Me Love Him.”
- 2.
“The crystal-image is the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual” (Deleuze 1989, 82).
- 3.
“What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or as whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in two into a present which is passing and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity of the present with the past that it will be, of the past with the present that it has been” (1989, 274).
- 4.
“The actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection…There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual” (1989, 68). He returns to the issue of the flashback when discussing Lola Montès. The flashback is “un effet secondaire” because what counts is “le dédoublement des temps, qui fait passer tous les présents et les fait tendre vers le cirque comme vers leur avenir, mais aussi conserve tous les passés et les met dans le cirque comme autant d’images virtuelles ou de souvenirs purs” (1985, 112) (“a secondary procedure…what counts…[is] the dividing in two of time, which makes all the presents pass and makes them tend towards the circus as if towards their future”; 1989, 84)
- 5.
“The mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field” (1989, 70).
- 6.
“He’s the one you want,” “you can’t resist him,” “you’re going along with it” (literally, you’re letting yourself be caught up in his game).
- 7.
“A perfect crystal-image where the multiple mirrors have assumed the actuality of the two characters who will only be able to win it back by smashing them all, finding themselves side by side and each killing the other” (1989, 70)
- 8.
“The body in the voice as it sings” (1977, 188).
- 9.
“The third meaning” (1977, 52).
- 10.
“A signifier without signified…Outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlocution” (1977, 62).
- 11.
“A sort of anaphoric gesture without significant content” (1977, 62).
- 12.
“A structuration which slips away from the inside” (1977, 64)
- 13.
“The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (1982c, 96).
- 14.
“The crystal-image is as much a matter of sound as it is optical…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, 92–93).
- 15.
Deleuze has written extensively on music, but not systematically. Several scholars have given accounts of this work, but none of them have focused on popular music of the type represented by the songs I am analysing. See Pinhas (2001), Bogue (2003), Buchanan and Swiboda (2004), Herzog (2010), Hulse and Nesbitt (2010), Redner (2011).
- 16.
Deleuze does not talk much about the technology of film, such as the split screens that interest me here. This has not prevented scholars from implementing productive Deleuzian schemata for genre cinema (Powell 2005) and non-Hollywood cinema (Martin-Jones 2011), these scholars specifically talking about split screens amongst other techniques (Powell 2005, 56; Martin-Jones 2011, 108 and 121). See also Walsh 2008 who explores the way in which split screens are related to Deleuze’s concepts of the actual and the virtual.
- 17.
“For Renoir, the force of life is on the side of the presents which are launched towards the future, on the side of the gallop…whilst the ritornello has the melancholy of that which is already falling back into the past” (1989, 93).
- 18.
“A bit Hitchcock-like.”
- 19.
“It makes for a film that’s a bit dissonant. And that what was I was thinking. The bizarre, the off-beam.”
- 20.
“I had the idea that the dialogue should be talk over, a bit like Bashung so as to reinforce the idea of the fantastical everyday.” The reference is to the singer Alain Bashung, who does not so much sing as declaim his lyrics. A perfect example is his remarkable song “Vénus” from the album Bleu pétrole (2008), to which I refer in my dedication to this book, and again in my conclusion.
- 21.
“We’ve been drinking buddies for twenty years, but we don’t really know each other.”
- 22.
“The key phrase of the film.”
- 23.
“A water lily growing in her right lung,” a surreal metaphor for cancer.
- 24.
“Cycling.”
- 25.
“A Little Girl.”
- 26.
“When the present isn’t going anywhere you have to put some petrol into the past.”
- 27.
“Hello Mademoiselle, you are so beautiful that I would prefer not to see you again.”
- 28.
“That’s my future husband.”
- 29.
“What about the present?”
- 30.
“What Remains of our Loves?”
- 31.
“More anchored in the contemporary world.”
- 32.
“Just to stick a lightweight moral to the film and in passing give it just a bit of heft.”
- 33.
“This story about generations begins with my father, travels through me and rightfully ends up with my son. Add to that the fact that my brother Gilles’s in-laws are in the film as well and you’ll understand that family ties are really important for me.”
- 34.
“The Decision.”
- 35.
http://www.top-france.fr/html/hebdo/cadre.htm, accessed 8 May 2016.
- 36.
“Swann’s Way.”
- 37.
“Ten Years Before.”
- 38.
“That you’ve grown old.”
- 39.
“Nothing original in a retro summer holiday film…We’ve seen it before, except here (the director) has caricatured the local Bretons. The result is more grotesque than funny.”
- 40.
“This old-fashioned cinema that tastes of lukewarm herbal tea.”
- 41.
- 42.
“A music-song.”
- 43.
“It was absolutely essential that the passage of time be represented in this film.”
- 44.
“Someone who knows you very well and who loves you all the same.”
- 45.
“It’s the first time that a song imposed itself after the film had been scripted. It’s true that when I heard this song, I told myself that it was telling the same story as me. Above all, it was celebrating nature, landscape, rebirth, life that carries on whatever happens. I thought that it was a tremendous complement for the story and as music is very important in all of my films, I didn’t think twice, I took it saying to myself that it would be the commentary of the film.”
- 46.
“A promise of life;” “a bit solitary.”
- 47.
They are not the only references to the music we hear in the film. We hear Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” over the opening credits. In the same sequence as the comments on Moustaki, Jacques shows Natalie his cameras, he picks one out and tells her that he photographed Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong when they were recording together, and that since then he listens to nothing else (0.22). We later hear the duo singing “Cheek to Cheek” (0.27) as Frédéric arrives at the house, and he comments on the music. Our attention is constantly drawn to the songs in the film. However, those by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong are not crystal-songs; the first is over the opening credits, and the second is mostly muted backsong as characters speak.
- 48.
“Love, Love.”
- 49.
“The greatest composer in the world, a living legend, my absolute idol.”
- 50.
“I thought it was a lovely touch to have his music in the first encounter, to allude to him all the time, before he appears in the flesh at the end…I think that in life we often fall in love thanks to songs and especially thanks to those by Michel Legrand.”
- 51.
Literally, “your name makes the windmills of my heart turn.”
- 52.
“The voyage around the world of a sunflower as it blooms/Your name makes the windmills of my heart turn.”
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Music
“À bicyclette.” 1968. Yves Montand (pf.). Pierre Barouh, Francis Lai (comp.). © Editions Saravah/Editions 23.
“After Laughter (Comes Tears).” 1964. Wendy Rene (Mary Frierson, pf.). Johnny Frierson, Mary Frierson (comp.). © Irving Music.
“Amour, amour.” 1970. Michel Legrand (comp.). © Michel Legrand/Warner Chappell.
“Baluba Shake.” 1966. Brunetta (pf.). Gorni Kramer, Alberto Testa (comp.). © Kramer.
“Bang Bang.” 1968. Janis Martin and Her Boyfriends (pf.). Clavelle Isnard (comp.). © Ridgetop Music/Tinut.
“Chess Anybody.” 1968. Michel Legrand (comp.). © MGM.
“Décision, La.” 1976. Dave (pf.). Frank Farian, Fred Jay, Patrick Loiseau(comp.). © Première Music.
“Dix ans plus tôt.” 1977. Michel Sardou (pf.). Pierre Billon, Jacques Revaux, Michel Sardou (comp.). © Art Music.
“Du côté de chez Swann.” 1975. Dave (pf.). Michel Cywie, Patrick Loiseau (comp.). © Première Music.
“Eaux de mars, Les.” 1973. Georges Moustaki (pf.). Antônio Carlos Jobim, Georges Moustaki (comp.). © Polydor.
“Goodbye Marylou.” 1989. Michel Polnareff (pf.). Jean-René Mariani, Michel Polnareff (comp.). © Oxygene Music/EMI Music.
“Holy Water.” 2013. Brighter Later (pf.). Jaye Kranz (comp.). © Jaye Kranz
“I Will Wait for You.” 1964. Michel Legrand, Nana Mouskouri (pf.). Norman Gimbel, Michel Legrand (comp.). © ATV Music/Universal Music.
“Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, The.” 1981. Scars (pf.). Robert Allan, John Mackie, Paul Mackie (comp.). © Chrysalis Music.
“Love Attack.” 1966. James Carr (pf.). Quinton M. Claunch (comp.). © Screen Gems/EMI Music/Rise Music/Ridgetop Music.
“My Baby Just Cares for Me.” 1930. Ange Fandoh (pf.). Walter Donaldson, Gus Kahn (comp.). © Donaldson/Bregman Vocco and Conn/EMI Music.
“My Rifle My Pony and Me.” 1959. Dean Martin (pf.). Dmitri Tiomkin, Paul Webster (comp.). © WB Music
“Ne me laisse pas l’aimer.” 1964. Brigitte Bardot (pf.). Francis Fumière, Jean-Michel Rivat (comp.). © Les Nouvelles Éditions Méridien.
“Nel cimitero di Tucson.” 1968. Gianfranco Reverberi, Gian Piero Reverberi (comp.). © Universal Music.
“Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” 1942. Charles Trenet (pf./comp.). © Francis Salabert.
“Sombreros et mantilles.” 1938. Annie Cordy (pf.). Chanty (Léon Depoisier), Jean Vaissade (comp.). © Méridian.
“Spring.” 1999. Mia Doi Todd (pf./comp.). © Domino Publishing.
“Try Me.” 1966. Esther Phillips (pf.). Jimmy Radcliffe, Buddy Scott (comp.). © Campbell Connolly.
“Une petite fille.” 1962. Claude Nougaro (pf.). Jacques Dalin, Claude Nougaro (comp.) © Le Chiffre Neuf/Première Music.
“Vanina.” 1974. Dave (pf.). French version by Patrick Loiseau of “Runaway”, Del Shannon, Max Crook (comp.). © Belton Street Music/Appoline Avenue Music/Mole Mole Music.
“Warmth of You Beside Me, The.” 1967. Len Chandler (pf./comp.). © Edward B. Marks.
“What a Difference a Day Makes.” 1934. Dinah Washington (pf.). Stanley Adams, Maria Grever (comp.). © Edward B. Marks Music.
“Windmills of Your Mind, The.” 1968. Noel Harrison (English)/Michel Legrand (French) (pf.). Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman (English) and Eddie Marnay (French) (comp.). © EMI.
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Powrie, P. (2017). Hearing. In: Music in Contemporary French Cinema . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52362-0_6
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