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Scoring Häxan University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities MA Heritage Studies: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image (RE)SCORING HÄXAN Supervisor: Annet Dekker Second Reader: Eef Masson Thesis of: Fabrizio D’Alessio E-mail: [email protected] Student Number: 11311487 Amsterdam, 4 February 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER 1: SILENT FILM WITH MUSIC, A TRADITION OF NOVELTY 6 1.1 A theoretical gap between film and music 7 Looking for the added value 7 Cinema as event 9 1.2 (Re)scoring silent films, a new-old practice 11 Historically-accurate versions 12 Novel versions 13 CHAPTER 2: (RE)SCORING HÄXAN 15 2.1 Häxan, what is it? 15 A tormented reception 16 2.2 The phantom ‘first night’ of the Witch 19 Authentic conjectures 19 Back in time through DVD’s multiplicity 21 Surrounded by sounds in a Home Theatre 22 2.3 How does the Devil talk? 24 Into the gap 24 The voice of the Devil 25 Cult as event 27 2.4 A kiss of life for the Witch 30 Hypermediated performances 31 Songs for synchresis 32 Electronic sounds for contemporary audiences 33 CONCLUSION 34 BIBLIOGRAPHY 37 2 INTRODUCTION The practice of adding music to a silent film is as long as cinema. Up until the standardization that came with the introduction of sound, music for the silent film was “an independent, ever-changing accompaniment” (Marks 6). From theater to theater, many different musicians worked on the same single silent picture, the form and style of accompaniment would vary from country to country, even theatre to theatre, and evolve and change over time. Orchestras and individual musicians (who improvised or used specially composed film music), traveling lecturers, actors reading dialogues behind the screen made each and every film screening of the same film a unique performative event. Nowadays, live or recorded musical scores added to silent films range from the original and historically reconstructed orchestral or piano music, if this has been preserved, involve commissioning a new musical composition or improvisation, or use a collage of existing compositions. This current culture of dealing with old silent films on the one hand engages an aim for retaining ‘original intentions’ or ‘the author’s wishes’, approaching film as a firmly historical entity, bound by its own time of production. On the other, there is a profoundly different notion that silent film exists to be ‘updated’ and made into a living, breathing contemporary object (Donnelly 13-4). As music as an addition is able to remove or add to the original intentions of the film significantly, this phenomenon has opened up the possibility for silent films being re-contextualized through new music. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze how these musical reinterpretations of silent films are structured and realized, focusing on their different modes of production and reception, trying to detect the added value that music brings to silent film. My hypothesis is that the added value can be established not only by the music, but also by how it is produced and performed, and by other heterogeneous sonic elements of the (new) score like a voice- over narration or songs. Chapter 1 will outline problems regarding the theoretical analysis of the relationship between film and music and introduce a theoretical framework based on Michel Chion’s concepts of cinema as an audiovisual relationship and Rick Altman’s theorization of cinema as event for examining the practice of adding music to a silent film. In Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (1994), Michel Chion (French music composer, professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music) elaborates a consistent terminology focused on the audiovisual relationship. According to Chion the most important result of the relation between image and sound is the added value, meaning “the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression (…) that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (5). The added value is an additional aesthetic level that sound can bring to an image and vice versa, and has a transformative effect over film. Chion developed forced marriage, a method for the analysis of the interaction of sound and image that consists in changing the music that accompanies a sequence of images in a film. When the combination of sound and image is altered the interpretation of a scene can change completely by adding a different soundtrack to the same images. I will show that this method can be especially useful to show the relationship between silent film and its (new) scores. With Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992) Rick Altman (professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and author of several studies on the history silent film sound) inaugurated a performative turn in film sound studies, which led to a stronger contextualization and historization of film production conditions and film exhibition 3 circumstances, taking into consideration information that until then were mostly unrecognized in the usual processes of film and that led to view and analyze also the context of its creation, performance, and reception. Altman’s elaboration of cinema as event provides the theoretical framework to analyze the different modes of performance and how it is produced and received. The sound performance that accompanied silent film screenings consisted, and still consists, of many different elements. The interaction between these elements is as important as the elements themselves. A mode of performance in the context of silent film sound therefore means a special constellation of devices, a special approach to certain practical problems, economical as well as aesthetical. In these different modes various ways of addressing the audience, diverse relationships to a single film and a different approach to sound and music can be observed. In the second part of the chapter I will present a broad categorization of the contemporary practices of (re)scoring silent films based on different historiographical approaches: the historically-accurate (that tend to focus on 'authenticity' and fidelity to the historical context of the film's initial release) vs. the novel versions (that try to update the film and to expose it to a newer, younger audience). I will use some of the notions developed by Chion as a starting point for trying to answer to the following question: what is the added value that results from applying a forced marriage between (new) music and a silent film and how does it manifest? Altman’s elaborations are useful to expand these questions so to include in the analysis also the stages of production-performance-reception of cinema as event: what are the elements that must be taken into consideration to analyze the different results of diverse exercises of forced marriage, using music of different genres from different eras, recorded with different techniques and technologies, performed in different exhibition spaces and intended for different audiences? After presenting the history and the characteristics of Häxan, a Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen in 1922, which I take as a case study, chapter 2 will expose the analysis of three of its different scores. Rather than performing a musical or filmic analysis, I will focus on a silent film with added music considered as event, and on the added value it brings to the film. Within each of the subchapters I will provide information on historical and theoretical features which centrally inform the category of each score, and outline the ways in which they are structured and realized, the technologies involved and the heterogeneous elements of sound that are most effective for the reinterpretation. Subchapter 2.2 will focus on the characteristics of the historically-accurate practice of rescoring silent films and then analyze the reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment of Häxan’s Danish premiere, supervised by film music specialist Gillian Anderson and presented in 2001 in the Criterion Collection DVD edition with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration, and how this technology is used to recreate the immersive soundscape of the original performance through three-dimensional sounds in a “home theatre” environment. In Subchapter 2.3, I will analyze the score of Witchcraft Through the Ages (a version of Häxan made by Anthony Balch in 1968) focusing on how a new score far removed from the original context of a silent film can re-contextualize it, updating the film for a new audience, and altering its cultural reputation and status. Balch’s reinterpretation is probably the first known case of adding anachronistic music to a silent film after the silent era and uses not only music but also a voice-over narration by cult writer William Burroughs. Subchapter 2.4 will focus on the performative aspects of live musical accompaniment of silent films and then analyze the live scoring of Häxan with pop electronic music by the 4 Dutch band Kinetophone, seen (and heard) at EYE Filmmuseum in April 2017 during the Imagine Film Festival. This reinterpretation is characterized by the use of songs and electronic music that is particularly effective in attracting a new audience of young people. In the conclusion I will expose the results of my research, my personal considerations about the continual musical reinterpretations of silent films and highlight the need for academic studies to take this mutability into account through the comparative analysis of multiple scores of the same silent film that can provide an informed knowledge of the elements that structure the rescoring practice, which could be used for making it more effective in attracting and interacting with contemporary audiences.
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