From narrative to cognitive : forms and dramatic functions of underscore music in French New Wave movies
Résumé
In French 1960’s cinema, the function of music in films was reassessed by a branch of New Wave filmmakers. During those years, the numerous downsides of neoclassic tonal music, used until then in French cinema, were questioned again from the aesthetical & ideological point of view, in a similar way of the leading theoricians of the 1930’s French avant-garde movement. For few New Wave directors like Rivette, Resnais, Chabrol or Truffaut, position regarding the place and use of music in films was primarily linked to the notion of ‘auteur’ (filmmaker as an author and “author’s policy” that they previously defended during the criticism debates of the middle-fifties within the Cahiers du cinema review). However, film music was an element that New Wave filmmakers didn’t know in mainly cases. Apart from a few exceptions, film directors of the time struggled with the unfamiliar musical techniques and knowledge appearing at the end of a work that had been created, from beginning to end, almost entirely by them alone. It’s thanks to the assist of new generations of composers (Delerue, Legrand, Duhamel, Jansen, Solal…), that new music pieces were adopted, better aligned with the brevity requirements related to editing, which was more flexible and less academic (i/e elliptical editing, a-synchronism in diegetic music, use of jazz and avant-garde 12-tone scores like the “sound scores” produced for the Robbe-Grillet movies...). The aim of this paper is to identify and categorize these major emerging trends in film scoring and their dramatic function.
La presente edición aborda temáticas ya consolidadas en ediciones anteriores, como la relación de géneros musicales concretos con el cine, el análisis historiográfico de diferentes etapas de la música cinematográfica en España, las metodologías de análisis del audiovisual y las aplicaciones didácticas. Además, el VI Simposio Internacional “La Creación Musical en la Banda Sonora” pretende reunir propuestas de estudio sobre el musical en España, la música en televisión, el videoclip, los videojuegos e Internet, así como las nuevas prácticas de producción y consumo derivadas del entorno digital.
