The Music Documentary on Martin Luther King Day

The Music Documentary on Martin Luther King Day

The influence of American culture on silent film music was wide reaching; conversely, so was the influence of silent film music on American culture. Audiences were exposed to existing classical music, some for the first time, as well as popular and newly composed works. New instruments were developed, an accepted musical practice was conceived that is still evident in today’s film music, the US Copyright laws were refined, and an entirely new genre of American music was born. These innovations made the music documentary possible.

There are as many different types of music documentaries as there are styles of music, but one of the first instances of music actually being combined with “film” in the United States took place in 1894. New York sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George H. Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song “The Little Lost Child.” Thomas photographed people acting out the song; the photographic images were then printed on glass slides and painted in color by hand. Musicians played and sang the song live in the theater while the slides were projected on a screen by means of a magic lantern. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the “illustrated song,” the first step toward music video. Thanks to illustrated song performances, “The Little Lost Child” became a nationwide hit, spawning a huge industry. At one time, as many as 10,000 small theaters across the United States featured illustrated songs. For music publishers, it was a gold mine. Marks, a former button salesman, and Stern, a one-time necktie hawker, became Tin Pan Alley titans.

Some of the earliest American music flicks, so-called “promotional shorts,” featured the jazz stars of that time. Among the jazz world’s most flamboyant luminaries was Cab Calloway. The Hi-De-Ho Man’s signature tune “Minnie the Moocher” served as the soundtrack to Max Fleischer’s 1932 Betty Boop cartoon episode of the same name. Calloway also recorded “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “The Old Man of the Mountain,” which were likewise featured in Betty Boop animated shorts.

Through rotoscoping, an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement frame-by-frame, Calloway not only lent his singing voice to these cartoons, but his dance steps as well. He appeared in a series of Paramount “shorties” in the 1930s, where he can be seen performing a gliding backstep dance move – a precursor to Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk.” The orchestras of Calloway and Duke Ellington appeared on film more than any other group of the era.

According to Richard Brody, Shirley Clarke’s 1985 documentary, Ornette: Made in America reveals much about the seminal jazz innovator. In this amazing music documentary Clarke joins an impressionistic portrait of the musician with an informative overview of his life, work, and ideas. The documentary also poses painful questions about a mid-career artist whose restless curiosity is yoked to the glory and burden of a public persona—questions that apply as well to Clarke and her methods.

The film’s fractured, collage-like composition is anchored by Coleman’s 1984 visit to his home town of Fort Worth, where he received official tributes and performed his orchestral work with the local symphony and his own band. Dramatized reconstructions of his youth, filmed performances from the sixties onward, and discussions with him and other musicians and associates (including William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) mesh with Clarke’s diverse array of video manipulations and her flamboyant, rapid-fire editing, which break through the reportorial evidence to evoke the visions and fantasies from which Coleman’s music arises. Clarke relates Coleman’s grandly transformative multimedia projects (including one involving satellite transmissions) to her own; his troubled effort to rehabilitate a Lower East Side building highlights the free-flowing connection of art and life. Although not explicitly eco in their themes, these music "documentaries" showcase an urban environment to which musicians respond in multiple ways.

Changing Views of Nature in Rosetta, Wendy and Lucy, and The Girl

In both 20th and 21st century movies, nature and culture are bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and sometimes deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.

In Nicholas Ray's great film noir On Dangerous Ground (1952), for example, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted. This perspective on the nature/culture binary, however, changes in several recent films with women at their center. In Rosetta ( Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 1999), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), and The Girl (David Riker, 2012) the nature/ culture binary blurs or reverses in less explicit ways. 

Rosetta promotes a separation between nature and culture but valorizes the bourgeois lifestyle "culture" will allow over the lack of security found in what counts as "nature" in the film. The Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) of the film's title fights to escape the hopeless "natural" life she and her mother survive in a trailer park on the other side of a forest lining a highway. The 18-year-old title heroine (a remarkable nonprofessional) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother,  suffers from stomach cramps, and battles to find a steady job that will free her from the burdens a hard life outside of culture. In a powerful scene in her one friend's apartment, Rosetta's mantra highlights the drive for identity showcased in the film. Over and over she tells herself, "Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You've got a friend. I've got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall in a rut. I won't fall in a rut. Good night. Good night."

Wendy and Lucy also reverses the binary, but only for the film's protagonist Wendy (Michelle Williams). The film recalls the dangers associated with wild nature in films such as Agnes Varda's Vagabond (1985). In Vagabond,  Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) becomes so tied to the natural environment that she is nearly lost in it, buried in winter weeds on the side of a road. In Wendy and Lucy, Wendy Carroll has left a home behind to search for a job and a new life in an Alaskan cannery. When her car breaks down in an Oregon town, her dog is stolen when she ties it outside a grocery store. During the rest of the film, Wendy seeks to reunite with her dog Lucy, but when she finally finds it living happily on a farm, she leaves it behind. The pastoral environment does not offer Wendy solace in this haunting film, but it does offer Lucy a happier life than she can provide.

The Girl  comes closest to reinforcing the traditional view of nature and culture presented in films with masculine protagonists. Here, however, the binary is not between nature and culture but between two rural ecologies separated by boundaries. In The Girl Ashley (Abbie Cornish), a young rural Texan mother who loses her child to foster care, begins smuggling Mexicans across the border. After a failed smuggling attempt, Ashley is left with a Mexican mother's daughter Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez). Ultimately, Ashley returns Rosa to her grandmother's rural home. In The Girl, the Mexican village is idealized despite its poverty. Ashley's rural Texas home becomes livable only because Ashley secures Rosa's future. Now she too can work to reunite with her child, the film suggests. All three of these films complicate the traditional views of nature and culture to differing degrees. Perhaps because of its female director, Wendy and Lucy provides the most complex vision of the binary, highlighting how individualized our responses to it may be.

Dark City as Film Noir

Dark City as Film Noir

 Dark City shifts our focus from aliens (the characters) and the film’s narrative to its setting—all because the Strangers’ study of humanity occurs in a 1940s noir city rather than a site contemporary to the film’s date of production. This noir setting is meticulously staged, from the interior and exterior mise-en-scene with its low-key lighting and stereotypical noir figures like the detective, the femme fatale and the hero/victim to the low angle deep focus camera shots so prevalent in film noir since Citizen Kane(1941). All these noir elements of the mise-en-scene are contrasted with the Strangers themselves and their habitat—shot, lit and staged in horror style—and with the Shell Beach scene Murdoch creates, complicating views of constructed versus natural space, as well as genre. As in film noir, the most prominent characters in Dark City reflect a nearly hopeless world: the displaced hero/victim, the femme fatale, the detective.

It is style, however, that sets film noir apart from earlier detective films. Stylistically, the film acts as homage to noir. Shooting styles draw on those perfected in Citizen Kane, which Andrew Sarris sees as one of the first and most influential noirs, calling it one of the “two-pronged noir breakthrough[s]” (104). Low-key lighting, extreme camera angles, deep focus, wide-angle lenses, and depth of field are all drawn from Kane and the later noir films it inspired. The arched rooms and hallways shot from low angle camera positions recall Gregg Toland’s cinematography in Citizen Kane’s varied locations. And the figures, buildings and interior props—all precisely replicating a 1940s milieu—are dramatically illuminated to maximize cast and attached shadows, including those figures shot in silhouette. Noirs are shot mostly at night in a decaying—and wet—urban milieu. Many scenes are shot from low angle camera positions to further set the mood with wide-angle lenses that increase depth of field. Many of these techniques are drawn from German Expressionism, emphasizing the chaotic world in which trapped characters seek meaning. Dark City’s city setting fulfills all aspects of this description of film noir.

The city duplicates the 1940s urban noir atmosphere with its dank, dark and decrepit streets and buildings and sleazy interior hotel rooms and night clubs. Noir figures abound in this dark city, beginning with John Murdoch, the mentally displaced hero/victim in search of salvation and self-realization. Women figures, too, take on the noir roles of either torch singing femme fatales like Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and prostitutes like May (Melissa George) or virtuous virgins like Anna (also Jennifer Connelly), even though the female roles are so flattened in this constructed space that they look almost sexless. As in many noir films, a police detective, Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt), serves first as Murdoch’s (the hero’s) pursuer, and then as a source of his salvation. And even Dr. Schreber’s character aligns with the corrupt doctors of noir who drug heroes like Phillip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in Murder, My Sweet (1944).

Sound, too, in this cityscape, brings to mind noirs like Fury (1936), Kiss of Death(1947), Out of the Past (1947), They Live By Night (1948), and Gun Crazy (1949). Characters’ speech patterns follow those of noir figures, since their reactions to horrific events are almost emotionless. Nightclub music, too, harks back to 1940s and early ‘50s jazz. Background effects sound hollow and muted, as if heard through penetrating thick fogs and continuous rains.

Dark City’s cityscape and the narrative surrounding it most resemble that of films

 like On Dangerous Ground (1952), a Nicholas Ray film in which Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted.

     The earliest views of John Murdoch in Dark City set him up as a lost noir hero/victim in search of himself, a character-type who recalls Jim Wilson. He wakes up in a seedy hotel room, parallel to noir openings in which heroes awaken from drunken stupors and wonder, what happened to me? The interior landscape he views reinforces this noir mise-en-scene that includes noir costuming and interior setting, including his 1940s overcoat and the beat-up interior of his hotel room. An arch dominates the scene, another noir motif repeated in the film, especially in the many low angle shots of hallways lit from the side as in films like Crossfire (1947) and T-Men(1947).

Camera shots of Dr. Schreber in the phone booth, too, highlight the noir style with its depth and shadow detail. Here lights go on and off for even more dramatic effect. And in Schreber’s office, too, lighting and camera angles enforce strong silhouettes. The police station where the Inspector and Emma discuss Murdoch’s case also draws on the noir style, this time because hot lights are always in full view, never blocked by the figures, for a forced perspective of frames within frames shot from extreme low angles. This meticulous set design continues even in shots of the prostitute May’s seedy apartment where we see beaded curtains casting moving shadows and, in earlier shots, May’s lined stockings casting shadows that look like bars. All these scenes, even though shot in color, simulate the black and white of noir by finding patterns of dark and muted color that amplify the noir mood.

But like Jim Wilson, John Murdoch seeks to escape the decay of the city and the empty seediness of his role there. Like many characters in film noir, Murdoch feels trapped by forces beyond his control, in this case literally trapped by the city the Strangers have constructed to study him and the other captured humans. And like Jim Wilson, Murdoch seeks solace in a non-urban setting, the Shell Beach depicted on the post card he finds in his suitcase. Devoid of memories and, it seems, of a sense of self, Murdoch, like Wilson, frantically battles the city and its makers while searching for salvation outside the city and its underworld. As in On Dangerous Ground, a virtuous woman contributes to the salvation Murdoch eventually gains, but unlike Wilson, Murdoch must create the “natural” ecosystem that eventually saves him and the rest of the city’s inhabitants, a change that puts the eco-edge on this multi-genre film.     

The battle Murdoch does eventually win, however, forces him into another ecosystem that proves unsuccessful, the underworld of the Strangers that draws on the visual motifs of the horror genre. In this realm, faces are lit from below and colors of the lighting change from browns and yellows to ghastly blues and greens, and other darker tones, exaggerating the whiteness of the all-male Strangers’ faces. This underworld, with its assembly lines and baroque torture chamber wheels out of a Frankenstein lab, draws on both German Expressionist films like Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) and Hollywood’s Frankenstein, (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).  Science fiction plays a role in this realm, as well, since the Strangers act like the parasites depicted in films like The Hidden and control humans through the technology of their machines and their memory-filled syringes, but the underworld still looks like a horror film, perhaps as a way to highlight the Strangers’ alien presence. Yet both the noir and horror settings prove to be ecological nightmares for the Strangers seeking rejuvenation through their human studies.

Eco-Doc Poetry

the simple pleasure of existence

two men hunt insects

pulling beetles from a knothole

dragonflies:

strength

courage

bravery

fireflies:

unrequited love

we learn from insects

their numbers are much fewer now

one stamps a tree trunk

crickets with weak wings cannot cry

Zoo Dreams

Nenette,

Red-haired

Forty years old

captured in Borneo

peers outward

bored.

“If she dies, we’ll miss her.”

Nenette

makes faces

in breath steam.

Distant voices

fight

against layoffs.

Nenette

lives

in the “now,”

“drained of curiosity.”

a captive

behind glass.

Reel Indian

If you owned hell

and Arizona,

you’d live in hell

and rent out Arizona.

To you

this is bad land

rock

scrub

desert

a hard land

The sun has sucked out all the good.

You can’t farm it

You can’t carve it out

so you damn it to hell.

To him it’s almost human

a living active thing.

a good place to make his fight.