The collaboration between music & film fascinates me. It is intangible, a relationship that at its best is about equality and innovation.
Some film music is dishonest and plain. It’s a demanding parasite that pretends to be a part of the filmic experience but it’s not. That kind of music sucks the emotion right out of you, leaves you with nothing.
I am focusing my blog on the work of contemporary filmmakers and musical collaborators, covering a handful of these relationships that go beyond the musically mundane. Film scores, soundtracks, silence, anything that works in tandem with cinema to create something other than the expected.
The project is called “a wonderful certainty”. I don’t know what you’re thinking exactly, but it might be something along the lines of…what the hell is that mean?
In a dossier on Nicholas Ray, Francois Truffaut, a filmmaker & critique in his own time, wrote these words in defense of the cinema of Nicholas Ray & Howard Hawks,
With Hawks we witness a triumph of the mind, with Nick Ray it is a triumph of the heart. You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I would make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don’t watch any more films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty. (Francois Truffaut, Translated by Liz Heron)
Writing with conviction, Truffaut spoke for the filmmakers who touched him, who brought him into the beyond. So it is for me, that the intersection between film & music will perhaps bring me somewhere remarkable.
If it does, I too want to write about it with “a wonderful certainty”.