Searching for the Right Music

Today we're going to continue our exploration of film sound. Below you will find five movie clips, or, rather, the same clip five times. It is the opening shot from the John Ford film The Searchers. Each version has a different background score. Your task is to copy and paste the following questions into a Word Document. Then, following the directions and answer the questions.  Be sure to NOT listen to all of the clips before looking at the questions. The questions will instruct you view/listen to each clip in its own time. Answer the questions thoroughly. I'm looking forward to reading you thoughtful analyses. When you are finished, print out your responses and turn in one Tuesday. (Do NOT post your answers in the comments below.) Obviously, any work you don't finish in class is homework. Good luck and have fun.

Searching for the Right Music

Analysis Questions

1.  View/listen to the ASTURIAS VERSION. (A) What tone does the music set in this version? (B) Take a few sentences to describe the story of the film as you imagine it from this version.

2.  View/listen to the DANCES VERSION.  (A) What tone does the music set in this version? (B) Take a few sentences to describe the story of the film as you imagine it from this version.

3.  View/listen to the WILD VERSION.  (A) What tone does the music set in this version? (B) Take a few sentences to describe the story of the film as you imagine it from this version.

4.  (A) Of the three versions you've listened to so far, which is the most appealing? Why?  (B) Which is the least appealing? Why?

5.  (A) Describe the tone and style you imagine the ORIGINAL VERSION to be like. View/listen to the ORIGINAL VERSION. (B) How close were you? Explain.

6. Obviously, non diagetic music has the potential to radically influence the meaning of a film. Discuss the use of background music - for better or worse - in a movie that you've either seen recently or has really stuck with you. In other words, discuss the effectiveness of background music in another film, and explain in detail how it improved or degraded the quality of the film. Again, be specific.

BONUS   View/listen to the BAMBOLEO VERSION and discuss your reaction. Better than the rest? Worst? First impression? Effect on the story? Etc.





ASTURIAS VERSION



DANCES VERSION



WILD VERSION



BAMBOLEO VERSION



ORIGINAL VERSION

The Chase Is On

So this week we're looking at editing, and how a film editor manipulates time within a film. We just finished watching Run Lola, Run, which pretty much uses every editing trick in the book in an attempt to get us on the edge of our seats while Lola runs her guts out to save Manni - slow motion, graphic matches, flashbacks, dissolves, jump cuts...you name it.  Below you will find three film clips. They are all chase scenes, but each is from a different era. The first is from Buster Keaton's 1926 silent film The General. (Watch it on mute. Someone has dubbed Ozzie Osbourne over it.) The second is from the 1971 film The French Connection. And the third clip is from 2005's The Island directed my Michael Bay. Your task is the following: watch each clip, paying particular attention to the editors' use of editing techniques. (Have your study guide out for reference as you go.) Next participate in an online discussion over the next few days. Throughout the discussion, we will be answering the following questions:

1. How are the scenes different with regards to editing techniques and pacing?
2. How has chase scene editing changed over the decades?
3. Which scene is best edited?
4. What scenes use what techniques and for what effects?

Jet Bike Chase
The Island — MOVIECLIPS.com

Bonus Clips - Below you will find two additional clips. Both are from Gone in 60 Seconds. The first is from the original 1974 version; the second is from the 2000 remake. These can be a part of the discussion too, if you like.

The Runaround

Want some extra credit? Here's an analysis of Run Lola Run. Give it a read, and then check back in with me at the end.

Movie Maid

Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs.  Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.

"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.

Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.

Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."

Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.

Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.

The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.

Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.

Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?

Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.

Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:

1. Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game?
2. Is Lola a feature-length music video?
3. If Lola is a movie, which genre applies?

Answer a question for extra credit. Post it below. Answer two for more credit.

What do you want to learn?

class is pretty open ended, so we can cover whatever you like. (Within reason, of course.) Down  below I'd appreciate you letting me know what material you'd like us to cover. Let's stay away from lists of specific films focus instead on genres (sci-fi, animation, comedy, western, etc.), time periods (silent era, 1960s, etc.), countries (Japanese cinema, British cinema, French cinema, etc.), filmmakers (Kubric,the Cohens, etc.), whatever.


Chime in as often as you would like over the next few days and let me know what you think.