Musical Moments as Narrative and Emotional Catalysts in Three Silent Films by Jacques Feyder

Abstract

As many studies have shown, the link between cinema, psychology and music played an important role both theoretically and practically during the French avant-garde of the 1920s in the work of Delluc, Epstein, Gance, Grémillon or L’Herbier. Jacques Feyder’s three films for the Franco-Russian production company Albatros—Visages d’enfants (1925), Gribiche (1926) and Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1928)—demonstrate his unprecedented mastery of the ‘musical moment’ both in its relationship to stories involving painful situations experienced by young children and in the way it rhythms emotion and affect. Feyder’s mise en scène and spectacular crosscutting techniques crystallise them, yoking the musical moment to a dream, or a mental image, or a simple celebration in a realist pseudo-documentary décor. This chapter elucidates these musical moments using theories related to subliminal auditory perception, deferred time intervals and baseline affective charges: the latter occur in Feyder’s silent films for which no original pre-existing accompaniment is known.

As many studies have shown, the link between cinema, psychology and music played an important role both theoretically and practically during the French avant-garde of the 1920s. Following my sustained interest in the uses of music as emotional catalyst in both silent and sound films, in this chapter, I consider Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder’s extremely original handling of the musical component as an intra-filmic narrative marker at work in some of his silent films. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw, thanks to the joint efforts of European and US archives and restoration labs, the emergence of finely restored versions with newly recorded musical scores for Feyder’s three late silent films, Visages d’enfants (Faces of Children, 1925), Gribiche (1926) and Les Nouveaux Messieurs (The New Gentlemen, 1928), two of which were produced by the Franco-Russian company Albatros (Albera 1995: 144). Notwithstanding their live or recorded musical accompaniment, which most certainly differed for each screening, the three films demonstrate Feyder’s mastery of the musical moment in its contrapuntal relationship to the narrative and in the way it structures emotion and affect.¹

A ‘craftsman’ as he modestly put it, Jacques Feyder (1885–1948) was nonetheless considered one of the great film directors of the 1920s and 1930s. He was critical of the French social and political environment but did so in aesthetically refined work, which included experimentation with avant-garde techniques, whether these were modest or costly prestige productions. He travelled, lived and worked in four different European countries and his career included a brief Hollywood interlude, mainly as a director for early foreign-language sound film versions. He directed cinema icons such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. His darker silent narratives announced Poetic Realism. One of that movement’s flag-bearers, Marcel Carné, was Feyder’s assistant on Les Nouveaux Messieurs, and Feyder’s one-time secretary, his compatriot Charles Spaak, was the author of many prominent screenplays of Poetic Realism, most notably Feyder’s classic La Kermesse héroïque (Carnival in Flanders, 1935).

Alongside French auteurs from the 1920s, Feyder expressed nuances of subjectivity and feeling within the wider ontological framework of film art. Intertitles or intradiegetic printed words (letters, signs, book covers), the only resources of natural language that could be relied upon in silent cinema, often play a purely prosthetic role in early film theory. The films of Delluc, Epstein, Gance, L’Herbier, and Dulac conspicuously ‘photogenise’ both intertitles and intradiegetic writing: Epstein describes words as ‘capturing an emotion or, lower on the stem, the sensation at the very moment they enter into the resonating chamber of the intelligence’ (Wall-Romana 2013: 131). Feyder’s silent naturalist films focusing mainly on children, namely Crainquebille (1923), Visages d’enfants and Gribiche, demonstrate his outstanding ability to bring to life passionate and poignant young characters, while using French Impressionist techniques, such as superimpositions, visually but also aurally relevant point-of-view shots and dream sequences, in order to express character subjectivity.

Feyder’s two feature films commissioned by the Russian émigrés’ production company Albatros bear the imprint of the company’s ambitions for controversial and challenging narratives and for aesthetic originality in a still hesitant inter-war French film industry context. Albatros became the hub of the French avant-garde, with experiments in all directions while turning its back on literary or pictorial cinema: the films shot in their Montreuil Hollywood-like studios are considered the paragons of a new aesthetics.

According to Marc Mélon (1998: 198), some dominant features are worth considering in Feyder’s work. Most characters in his films are ambivalent and ready to leave their family life, financial comfort and profession, so as to pursue their wildest dreams. The story lines focus on complementary concepts such as quest and loss, a man’s present and the bonds with his past. The films themselves oscillate between two universes, most often between opposite extremes: thus there are frequent comings and goings; characters hesitate to abandon the world they belong or are attached to and plunge into the unknown. The overall dynamic of Feyder’s narratives relies on the delicate balance between fantasy and reality; between the unappeased pursuit of happiness and the danger of getting lost; between the necessity of leaving and the obligation to remain; and between the wish to go on living or to die. The essence of Feyder’s style is to be found in this subtle and dense oscillation, difficult to seize, yet so rewarding, and which is frequently expressed in quasi-musical editing, often best illustrated in musical sequences as we see characters dance or sing.

In this chapter, I show how such musical moments in Feyder’s late silent cinema output are important narrative and emotional catalysts. Both within his melodramas and in his lighter comedies, the narration is, to use David Bordwell’s established theoretical terms, ‘subordinated to broad emotional impact’ and ‘will be highly communicative about information pertaining to the characters’ emotional states. The narration will be quite unrestricted in range […] so that the film can engender pity, irony and other dissociated emotions’ (1985: 70).

Feyder uses musical moments to diversify the narrative, while considerably increasing the degree of suspense and audience participation. I use the term ‘musical moment’ in Amy Herzog’s sense, as a moment ‘when music inverts the image-sound hierarchy to occupy a dominant position in a filmic work’, as a ‘point of rupture in the larger context of the film’ (2009: 7). I argue that within the modus operandi of a silent film, foregrounding musical elements also appears to be ‘the visualization of (the aesthetic experience of immersion), to embody the feeling of being carried away by the musical force bigger than any individual being’ (Herzog 2009: 28). The broadly accepted view of music meant to accompany silent films either through live performances or via gramophone recordings is that it relied, at least until the 1920s, on often rearranged pre-existing music by well-known classical composers (Anderson 1988: xiv–xv; Brown 2014: 598), and that it served to homogenise an otherwise disparate image track:

Sound did not articulate the image so much in points of synchronization as through musical continuity. The fundamental function of music was to underscore the underlying narrative structure, by establishing a musical unit of structure, the musical cue, that is extended across shots, binding them together into a larger unit. […] Music of the silent film belonged to the world of the the audience, the world of live performance, rather than the world of the film. (Buhler and Neumeyer 2014: 20)

My argument takes issue with this view. It is closer to the one developed by Laurent Guido in his seminal work L’Âge du rythme: he stresses the fact that ‘in many films of the 1920s it is frequently through a musical interpretation (party sequence, cabaret, concert) that passages from visual symphonies are developed’ (2007: 208). Elsewhere, Guido also widely comments on musicologist Paul Ramain’s (1895–1966) pioneering theories on ‘musicalism’ as a line of thought defining silent film parameters with elements belonging to the musical jargon: rhythm, melody, counterpoint, etc.: ‘Cinema has the property of making people feel emotions parallel to those generated by music. [...] Ramain therefore demands that concordance be based on a double synchronism, that of rhythm and that of feeling’ (2002: 67). Guido mentions that Feyder, alongside Abel Gance, was labelled by reputed historian Jean Mitry as an authentic ‘musicien du silence’ meaning that his silent films could stand comparison with the work of an authentic music composer (2007: 178).

My focus on silent films featuring musical moments, as developed in previous contributions (Nasta 1991, 2001), is based on a phenomenon psychologists such as Carl Rogers or Jean-Jacques Nattiez have described as subception, as opposed to perception, or in other words, subliminal auditive perception. When voices, songs, instrumental or dance music, screams and other noises are visually portrayed but not actually heard, one has to find a justification for the inaudible sound. Subception presupposes an indirect identification with stimuli and a partial recording of visual information. When the viewer partially perceives and identifies an image, some information is already there, previously recorded. Thus, in most silent films, subception is doubly articulated:

1) Internally, by means of very diversified auditive stimuli associated with visualised sounds from the diegesis and often related to the act of hearing or listening to specific noises or music. These stimuli can either facilitate narrative progression or suspend the diegesis to focus on the characters’ intentions and purely emotional states.

2) Externally: by inducing a particular type of audience participation, which can be both acoustical or affective. This amounts to stating that, in most cases, audiences—past or present—do not need a materialised sound/sonic counterpart in order to have access to the visualised discourse. (Nasta 2001: 96–97; Campbell 2011: 80–81)

So as to explicate more fully this kind of musical moment, I will also refer to the phenomenon of deferred analogy, which philosopher Bernard Stiegler derives from Jacques Derrida’s différance: a delay, deviation, suspension, mental time lag, an unconscious mediation through changed temporal parameters. In his essay ‘La différance’, Derrida argues that what is commonly associated in phenomenological terms with the ‘authority of the gaze’, is challenged, and hence suspended, by the overall experience provoked by sounds and/or music. On such occasions, Derrida suggests that story time is perceived differently on both the intradiegetic and on the extradiegetic levels. Following Derrida’s line of thought, Stiegler provides a relevant example that may also apply to our present survey: jazz icon Charlie Parker, who not only transformed jazz standards combining them with ‘lost’ black music popular tunes, but also created a new discourse by means of digressions and mental time lags, audiences thus performing a double hearing (Nasta 1991: 78).

Carl Plantinga has developed a related concept, that of the affective power of the audiovisual media, namely what he calls the baseline affective charges linked to mood and emotions, and occurring even when films use little if no music. Musical rhythms and harmonies communicate to the viewer and create a synesthetic affect (Plantinga 2013: 103). Similarly, Berthold Hoeckner argues that ‘music has both elements of transport and transportation just as it is both expressive and illustrative, a mixture of both affect and effect’ (2007: 168). I shall argue that subception, deferred analogy, baseline affective charges and synesthetic affect are characteristic of Feyder’s musical moments in Visages d’enfants, Gribiche, and Les Nouveaux Messieurs. Taken together, they help us to understand the complex layers of Herzog’s view of the musical moment as well as explain the impact of the musical moments in Feyder’s films.

Visages d’enfants

Visages d’enfants was praised by Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau for the high degree of lyricism and awareness of the world of children rarely equalled in cinema. The film is realistically shot on location in Switzerland’s Haut Valais with a mix of non-professional and professional actors. Its psychological and physical harshness partly explains its poor box-office ratings. The documentary-like location shooting with real peasant figures from the Valais is coupled with dynamic impressionistic editing and pacing.

Feyder’s preferred actor for his silent films centred on children, Jean Forest, plays Jean Amsler, whose grief after the early death of his mother is deep and incapacitating, especially after his father’s re-marriage with a young widow. The film focuses on the young child’s inner world, subtle nuances of feeling building up the film’s narrative architecture. Several sequences reveal a meticulous observation of reality, such as a long funeral procession where Jean is eventually seen fainting. Feyder maintains a delicate balance between the objective observation of the milieu and Jean’s feverish subjectivity. Consumed with remorse after an almost fatal deed against his stepsister, he tries to commit suicide, but is eventually saved by his stepmother during an episode of deep emotional intensity.

In an interview he gave to Cinémagazine, Feyder seemed proud of using locals for the marriage scene and explained why he insisted on them acting so naturally: ‘What the member of the audience looks for is a true, powerful effect, a visual impression strong enough to stir his spirit’. An essay from the same journal mentions that Feyder ‘had not shown children's faces but souls […] The technique is understated, the dances are skilfully rhythmed and the editing is really perfect’ (Phelip 1925: 254).

The climactic outdoor moment during which young Jean learns about his father’s re-marriage alternates with an intense musical moment: it features the wedding celebrations, mostly dances performed and played by extras from the rural community (see Fig. 4.1). A parallel montage shows Jean and the priest who has been counselling him, mowing the wheat in the fields. Throughout the entire wedding celebration sequence, internal emotional pacing and rhythm play an essential part: the peasant’s dance appears to be a traditional one (a three-count waltz pattern), the musicians (an accordionist and violinist) are led by an improvised conductor, while the re-married couple joins the anonymous dancing crowd. Pacing and rhythm are pivotal, because the married couples’ dancing gets more and more intense while the village folk dance and sing, clapping their hands and reinforcing the rhythmic energy. As neither Jean nor the priest plan to attend the wedding, the intertitles substituting the dialogue have an anticipatory added value:

Fig. 4.1

Visages d’enfants: The wedding celebration (Courtesy of Lobster Film)

• On your way back there will be some changes. Your father is getting married again.

• What should I call her? Mommy?

• You will call her mother.

During the whole sequence, subception is external, as Feyder wants us to experience the newly found happiness of the widowed father, while grasping the emotional impact the revelation of his re-marriage has on Jean. While the story is told by the priest, the wedding dances as shown in the parallel scenes indirectly ‘invade’ Jean’s subconscious. Thus, though not physically present at the celebration, Jean obviously experiences this moment internally as having unexpected consequences on his new family life. The musical moment is complicated and made even more impactful by deferred analogy: a mental time lag suspends the story, deferring its conclusion while creating an analogy between the turmoil of the mourning young boy and the way he reacts to the news of his father’s marriage celebrations. Such a musical moment is unique in the context of the filmed story and demonstrates to what extent silent cinema fulfils its true function, which is both to express the inner world and the most subtle nuances of an unhappy child’s feelings as well as the external reality of the wedding celebration.

Interestingly enough, Roland Cosandey mentions that no original accompanying music has been preserved, but that there must have been some musical scoring because nobody in the audience would have attended a screening without music (Cosandey 1986: 19). As noted by Guido, Swiss composer and music teacher Émile-Jaques Dalcroze criticised the musical performance of a Visages d’enfants screening he attended back in the 1920s, judging it much too pompous and emphatic. In Dalcroze’s opinion, using the music of theorist and creator of the Schola Cantorum, Vincent d’Indy, instead of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, would have been a much better choice for a compiled score (Guido 2007: 381).²

Gribiche

As was the case with Jean Epstein and René Clair, Feyder, whom Albatros director Alexander Kamenka considered ‘the greatest French filmmaker’, was invited to work at Albatros after agreeing to direct the adaptation of a rather conventional ciné-roman by Frédéric Boutet. A more understated work than Visages d’enfants, though not achieving the same heights of dramatic intensity, Gribiche’s narrative premise is sentimental and is as poignant, but more caustic and ironic in terms of subject handling. After committing a good deed when returning a handbag full of money, Gribiche (Jean Forest), a working-class youth from an unsettled home living with his widowed mother, is adopted by a wealthy socialite, Madame Maranet (Françoise Rosay), who aims to reform him. Much of the enjoyment derives from the interweaving of the two worlds: that of the modest Gribiche and that of the rich socialite. The young boy will eventually return to his original milieu, keeping only the positive side of his high-brow educational interlude. The director declared in a press clip that the film was aimed at a wide audience, as it presents both the common people of Paris during the National Day celebrations, in cafés and popular balls (bals de barrière) as well as the elegant milieu of an American billionaire.

The fluency of the film’s intricate narrative lines is indebted to highly dynamic editing techniques. Feyder alternates at a swift pace scenes from the department store, inside the taxi, on the busy streets, etc. The challenging of the initial storyline by the series of fantasised images invites the viewer to separate what is stated by the characters from what has been really going on at the very beginning. Thus, for example, when Madame Maranet decides to recount her own version of her meeting with Gribiche as a vagabond, it is clear to us that the event is the result of her powerful imagination.

The importance of hearing/listening/eavesdropping will later account for the fact that listening to music often implies and provokes emotional turmoil. During the film’s final narrative pivot, Gribiche is attracted by the revelry taking place on Bastille Day and wanders through the streets of Paris to end up at his mother’s place.

Crosscutting is again pivotal to the musical moment I wish to discuss. While having dinner in the sumptuous dining room showcasing lavish Art Déco sets, Gribiche hears the sound of fireworks which are explicitly shown in a parallel shot. ‘It’s July 14’, reads an intertitle after an intriguing exchange of looks between Madame Maranet and her adopted son. Feyder further implies that Gribiche is suddenly moved by some accompanying bal musette tunes all too common in such circumstances: he looks clearly excited and starts humming and simulating a dance movement (see Fig. 4.2). The bal musette and the jazz band’s sonorities activate an extended musical moment based on internal subception and, in Plantinga’s terms synesthetic affect: they arouse so much nostalgia and longing in Gribiche that he will decide to abandon his artificial world. Later on this longing will be confirmed by scenes that reveal his mother and her partner dancing at the ball he is eager to be part of.

Fig. 4.2

Gribiche: Humming and simulating dancing on remembering music (Courtesy of Flicker Alley)

Deferred analogy may help explain Feyder’s attachment to melodramatic subjects, where feelings prevail over most generic constraints. Feyder’s all-encompassing camera films the dancers, the band playing at full speed, and later the mother and her new partner. Nonetheless, the film’s dynamically rhythmed narrative is not limited to Gribiche’s affective universe. Madame Maranet’s servants are also seen leaving for the ball and spying on him, while the explanatory titles read: ‘There’s only one thing to do, to inform Madame’. Present, past and future are thus intertwined in a complex musical moment enhanced by subliminal auditive perception: the character overhears musical sounds, is moved by past memories and will eventually run off to join a multi-faceted national celebration.³

The parallel drawn between the material comfort and the joyful popular ball compelling Gribiche to leave does not only suggest a shift in the narrative, but also configures a multi-layered emotional phenomenon. Once Gribiche, frustrated, decides to join the popular celebrations after his fascination with musical entertainment, his inner dream universe co-exists with the outside world within a very refined ironic and observational frame.

The extended musical moment can also be read in what Marc Mélon defines as being an allegorical key. We are doubly engaged and our perspective is oriented so as to grasp more than a symbol, an allegory of an entire world (Mélon 1998: 197). One might argue that, as with subsequent similar films depicting binary universes such as Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) or Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), in which crosscutting alternates significant scenes from upper and lower classes, in Gribiche the dynamic editing legitimises the hero’s craving for a different world.

Les Nouveaux Messieurs

Les Nouveaux Messieurs is a sprightly comedy which was initially banned for its disrespectful treatment of the Chamber of Deputies. Similar in tone to René Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1928) and adapted from a successful boulevard comedy by Robert de Flers and Francis de Croiset, it was scripted by Charles Spaak. The storyline does not focus on the inner turmoil, on the dreams and musings of a young hero, as did the two previous films. It mercilessly derides the flaws of rival French politicians in a mixture of witty satirical comedy and sexual farce. Lenny Borger briefly sketches the plot as a ‘tug of war and a complicated albeit perverse love affair around a pretty actress/ballerina by two men, an aging aristocrat and a young left-wing electrician briefly appointed Labor Minister’ (Borger 2013: 6) The aspiring ballerina will eventually opt for the ageing politician for material reasons, an unusual decision for the time, all the more so because the film features explicit love scenes with the younger lover.

The film’s all-encompassing opening scenes skilfully cover a busy morning at the Opera House. They prove to what extent Feyder was fascinated by a location’s potential to showcase musical universes and by their capacity to shape new cinematic experiments, such as the musical moments I have been discussing. Pupils in ballet shoes are framed via sophisticated inserts, revealing a band playing, a chorus line led by its conductor, a piano, a ballet number with young ballerinas taught by an elder teacher. They are perfectly synchronised with what appears to be a ballet of extreme high and low camera angles, astutely framed by Georges Périnal’s extraordinarily mobile camera (Vezyroglou 1998: 123).

The most striking example of a musical moment as emotional catalyst occurs during a political event set up by the union organiser Jacques Gaillard (Albert Préjean). His girlfriend Suzanne Verrier (Gaby Morlay) encourages him to be politically assertive and takes the floor. At the same moment, Feyder provides the audience with a provocative double-bind dialogue line from an opponent. The line reads: ‘Qui n’entend qu’une cloche n’entend qu’un son’, meaning ‘Who only hears one bell only hears one sound’. Responding to this ‘invitation’, Suzanne instantly activates a mechanical organ. We understand that music literally fills the room, as everybody starts singing, humming and dancing in a syncopated rhythm, thus drowning the speech of the political contender.

In a further twist, Feyder superimposes images of a variety of instruments over the shot featuring the mechanical organ and its rolls. This diegetic musical moment that could be labelled as external subception has a double impact on the audience: it foregrounds the importance of experiencing music as an act of empowerment on the part of the characters. Moreover, it stresses the deferred analogy, the musical time lag between what is performed and experienced by the entire community and what emotionally ‘belongs’ only to Suzanne and Jacques.

With no other explanation, the previously commented collective line of action abruptly shifts to the subjective inner sphere of one of the ageing politicians in an openly oneiric sequence; it is reminiscent of those proposed by Feyder’s contemporary René Clair in his pioneering Entr’acte (1924). The scene unveils the mental space of Monsieur de Courcieux, an opera subscriber. He is seen dozing off and dreaming of ballet dancers in tutus invading the Palais Bourbon hemicycle by means of pioneering superimposed flashes and dissolves that anticipate Busby Berkeley’s flamboyant production numbers from early 1930s Hollywood musicals (see Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3

Les Nouveaux Messieurs: de Courcieux’s musical dream of ballet dancers invading the hemicycle (Courtesy of Flicker Alley)

This musical moment is complex in theoretical terms. In his survey Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry Christophe Wall-Romana notes that the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who had seen Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance at the Folies-Bergères in 1895, was struck by the fact that the ballet’s ‘allegory’ relies on the efficacy of kinaesthetic transference from the dancer’s body to the spectator’s affective and aesthetic response (2013: 67). This is also the case here: the hemicycle dream sequence actually activates both internal and external subception.

The orchestration of affect in Les Nouveaux Messieurs is not only determined by the viewer’s allegiance with a particular character, but also orchestrated by the narration, which provides the viewer with superior knowledge or engages a temporary ironic perspective on what the characters are doing (Plantinga 2013: 109). Thus, Feyder conceives another extremely dynamic collective scene revealing the Suzanne/Jacques couple dancing to a three-measure waltz rhythm. Mothers are even seen abandoning their newborn babies so as to join the collective dance. This distancing disrupts the emotional intensity of musical moments, which focus on inner thoughts, dreams or musings, thus providing the audience with a variety of unusual diegetic occurrences.

Conclusion

In the three analysed films, Feyder chooses musical moments to illustrate essential steps in the narrative of his films and almost simultaneously builds up an alliance between the effective nature of visuals and the affective bond musical occurrences create between characters and viewers. Music, either played, sung or performed to accompany popular dances or imaginary ballet performances (Les Nouveaux Messieurs) is not only, as Nietzsche feared in his comments on musical transportation, tied to carrying the dramatic situation; it is experienced both by characters, such as Jean in Visages d’enfants or in Gribiche (internally) and by the audience (externally) as an essential narrative and emotional paradigm, by means of subliminal auditive perception.

In an essay published for the Empirical Musicology Review, ‘Seeing Music? What musicians need to know about vision’ Michael Schutz rightly argues:

Visual information can influence the perception of auditory information and the way sound is cognitively evaluated. […] Expressive intentions related to sounds and based on gestures can offer more information than actual musical performances. The rating of the structural and emotional properties related to ballet choreography showed that emotional properties shared strong similarities whether they were performed by participants hearing only the music, viewing only the dance or both hearing the music and viewing the dance. (2008: 98)

This ‘affective’ parameter was at the core of numerous theoretical debates in France during the 1920s, most importantly the debates on ‘musicalism’ and filmic emotions, between rhythm and feeling. Paul Ramain suggests that ‘rhythm and feeling should stick to a two-fold synchronicity’ (Guido 2002: 68). Feyder’s carefully crafted balance between narration, affect and musicality leads to intense musical moments where the sight of characters engaging in musical activities such as dancing or singing, whether these are in the real world or merely dreamt, creates musicalised sites of emotion.

Working on Feyder’s perfect film balance between narration, affect and musicality, inevitably brings forth similitudes with a literary source: in film, as in literature, emotion appears as a catalyst between the reproducibility of the material form and the seeming etherealness of the aesthetic experience. While rememorating a pivotal musical moment, Marcel Proust’s opening lines from the cult classic Du côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) read⁴:

In other words, we had moved. Certainly the servants had made no less noise in the attics of our old home; but she knew them, she had made of their comings and goings familiar events. Now she faced even silence with a strained attention. And as our new neighbourhood appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard on to which we had hitherto looked had been noisy, the song (distinct at a distance, when it was still quite faint, like an orchestral motif) of a passer-by brought tears to the eyes of Françoise in exile (Proust 1996: 2).

Notes

• 1. DVD editions: Visages d’enfants (1923), Lobster Films, ed. Serge Bromberg, 2015 with Cinémathèque Française, Eye Amsterdam and Cinémathèque Suisse as partners in restoration, score by Antonio Coppola and Octuor de France; Gribiche (1925) & Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1928) as part of French Masterworks: Russian Emigrés in Paris 1923–1928, scores by Rodney Sauer & Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and respectively Antonio Coppola and Octuor de France, David Shepard and Jeffrey Masino, eds. Flicker Alley, 2013, digitally restored by the Cinémathèque Française and Film Preservation Associates.

• 2. Three other scores have been composed to accompany restored versions of Feyder films, but only Antonio Coppola’s is available on the restored DVD versions. The score composed by Coppola does not really match the visuals. Charles Janko, a Dutch composer who also specialised in silent film scores, composed one with the Octuor de France (including percussions and piano) and almost at the same time Dirk Brosse composed another one in Ghent for the first presentation of the restored version in 1988.

• 3. The score for the DVD/restored version of Gribiche, released in 2013, belongs to Rodney Sauer: his technique consists in drawing from pieces from various collections, including popular tunes of the day and music by silent-movie composers whose pieces were sold in photoplay music catalogues. Compiling each score, he tries to support each scene emotionally with music while also keeping in mind the entire arc of the film. However, as was the case with Coppola’s score for Visages d’enfants, Sauer’s compilation score does not take over the three-count waltz bal musette rhythm the audience watches onscreen, or the four-count fox trot. Neither does the arranged score reproduce the small jazz band diegetically visualised in breathtaking low angle shots.

• 4. As a matter of fact, Jean-Paul Sartre also isolates music as having a unique relation to time and space. His childhood memories—which Gillian Anderson also takes over in her survey on the accompaniment practices in silent film—directly relate to the silent film medium and its relation to music and emotions: ‘On rainy days […] at the last moment, we would decide to go to the movies […]. Above all I liked the incurable muteness of my heroes. But no, they weren’t mute, since they knew how to make themselves understood. We communicated by means of music: it was the sound of their inner life’ (Anderson 1988: xv).