Axial cut

In a recent post Bordwell provides some nice examples of what he calls the axial cut. This reminds me of a section of my camera movement paper which I paste it below.

On the surface camera movement and editing present two mutually exclusive options for the filmmaker in a given situation. From an establishing shot we can either track in to a tighter composition, or we can simply cut to it. Camera movement decisions come in the profilmic scenario, whereas montage decisions exist in the postfilmic. This means there is a limit to which the editing room can deal with camera movement. Montage, with all its power, cannot change a shot with fixed framing to a shot with mobile framing. It can divide a shot with camera movement into pieces, but it cannot construct a camera movement out of shots that have no camera movement in them (except for an illusion of it). Yet from the perspective of filmic experience these two do have an interesting overlapping, which we shall discuss in the following.

Perhaps it would be instructive to start from a term: plan-séquence. The term was coined by French postwar critics, including notably Andre Bazin. Whereas the idea of shot (plan) initially refers strictly to a field of view, that is, a spatial construction, the notion of sequence adds a temporal dimension to it. For this very reason Jean Mitry believes it is a monstrous terminology because the two are incompatible[1]. But what Mitry takes as the reason of this apparent incompatibility is exactly its path of reconciliation. What is important here is not that the term implies a camera movement, but rather, it designates the camera movement as a sequence of successive shots, where the principle of montage takes effect. In other words, if we define a sequence as an assemblage of shots, then the sequence shot could be regarded as an in-camera assemblage.

To regard camera movement as a form of montage is far from my whimsical invention. Many have recognized Rope as a practice of implicit editing, with unfavorable results. Bazin, for example, sarcastically remarks that “each time we are struck by his [Hitchcock] effectiveness, it is because he has managed, at the cost of a thousand hardships, to create the impression of shot and reverse shot or a close-up where it would have been easy to use a single take like everyone else.”[2] Reisz and Millar, too, criticize that “the camera movement does not contribute to the [dramatic] effect, it merely delays it by a meaningless—and psychologically inappropriate—device.”[3]

Conversely, the result achieved from montage to motion continuity often yields commendation. To everyone’s praise Eisenstein uses three successive shots of stone lions for an illusion of motion continuity. An example of montage as a form of camera movement can be found in The Birds (1963). When Lydia Brenner comes into a room pillaged by intruding birds, the discovery of the body of this unfortunate farmer is presented as three shots in rapid succession, one closer than the other, riveting our attention to his empty eye sockets. Now imagine the alternatives: a camera movement, a track in. The impact, the sense of violence would be considerably weaker (A quick zoom sits in between the two). Nevertheless it can be argued that these three shots are taken out from a camera movement and in our perception of this montage we mentally reconstruct such a movement (recall our discussion of Serene Velocity). The shock, therefore, comes from a violent suppression of the intermediary images.

 

And another small passage:

Serene Velocity (1970) essentially shows the same sensation. Only here the sense of movement is achieved by zooming, or to be precise, by the discrete use of a zooming lens, for what is involved here is rather an illusion of zooming. The case exemplifies an extreme of what we have been discussing here—camera movement as the continuous change of perception. One might object with good reason that this movement is not continuous at all. In fact, as the film proceeds, the distance between the two focal lengths increases, so that this discontinuousness is made more and more salient. Nevertheless if we still perceive this movement as a “compression” of space (instead of two distinct spaces), then its unfolding is still continuous in a sense. Our knowledge of its discreteness is therefore counter-perceptual. Also, what this case shows us is that there is no clear boundary between camera movement as a spatial trajectory and as sensation. If in Serene Velocity the discontinuousness creates sensation, the sensation in its turn dilates this discontinuousness by perceptually gluing two incongruent poles together and builds in our mind an imaginary trajectory between them—a process no different from the essential one of cinema to render 24 still frames into movement. Wavelength, on the other hand, dilates the continuousness and by doing so transforms camera movement as a spatial perception into a temporal perception.

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[1] Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, 64.

[2] Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty, 114.

[3] Reisz and Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 234.

On Film Music: Stravinsky vs. Raksin

This article is from Film Music Society (including the picture above), I so love it that I decide to copy it in its entirety. For the original see

http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/features/2003/102403.html

Igor Stravinsky on Film Music
What is the function of music in moving pictures? What, you ask, are the particular problems involved in music for the screen? I can answer both questions briefly. And I must answer them bluntly. There are no musical problems in the film. And there is only one real function of film music – namely, to feed the composer! In all frankness I find it impossible to talk to film people about music because we have no common meeting ground; their primitive and childish concept of music is not my concept. They have the mistaken notion that music, in "helping" and "explaining" the cinematic shadow-play, could be regarded under artistic considerations. It cannot be.
Do not misunderstand me. I realize that music is an indispensable adjunct to the sound film. It has got to bridge holes; it has got to fill the emptiness of the screen and supply the loudspeakers with more or less pleasant sounds. The film could not get along without it, just as I myself could not get along without having the empty spaces of my living-room walls covered with wall paper. But you would not ask me, would you, to regard my wall paper as I would regard painting, or apply aesthetic standards to it?
Misconceptions arise at the very outset of such a discussion when it is asserted that music will help the drama by underlining and describing the characters and the action. Well, that is precisely the same fallacy which has so disastrously affected the true opera through the "Musikdrama." Music explains nothing; music underlines nothing. When it attempts to explain, to narrate, or to underline something, the effect is both embarrassing and harmful.
What, for example, is "sad" music? There is no sad music, there are only conventions to which part of the western world has unthinkingly become accustomed through repeated associations. These conventions tell us that Allegro stands for rushing action, Adagio for tragedy, suspension harmonies for sentimental feeling, etc. I do not like to base premises on wrong deductions, and these conventions are far removed from the essential core of music.
And – to ask a question myself – why take film music seriously? The film people admit themselves that at its most satisfactory it should not be heard as such. Here I agree. I believe that it should not hinder or hurt the action and that it should fill its wallpaper function by having the same relationship to the drama that restaurant music has to the conversation at the individual restaurant table. Or that somebody's piano playing in my living-room has to the book I am reading.
The orchestral sounds in films, then, would be like a perfume which is indefinable there. But let it be clearly understood that such perfume "explains" nothing; and, moreover, I can not accept it as music. Mozart once said: "Music is there to delight us, that is its calling." In other words, music is too high an art to be a servant to other arts; it is too high to be absorbed only by the subconscious mind of the spectator, if it still wants to be considered as music.
Furthermore, the fact that some good composers have composed for the screen does not alter these basic considerations. Decent composers will offer the films decent pages of background score; they will supply more "listenable" sounds than other composers; but even they are subject to the basic rules of the film which, of course, are primarily commercial. The film makers know that they need music, but they prefer music which is not very new. When, for commercial reasons, they employ a composer of repute they want him to write this kind of "not very new" music – which, of course, results in nothing but musical disaster.

I have been asked whether my own music, written for the ballet and the stage, would not be comparable in its dramatic connotation to music in the films. It cannot be compared at all. The days of Petrouchka are long past, and whatever few elements of realistic description can be found in its pages fail to be representative of my thinking now. My music expresses nothing of realistic character, and neither does the dance. The ballet consists of movements which have their own aesthetic and logic, and if one of those movements should happen to be a visualization of the words "I Love You," then this reference to the external world would play the same role in the dance (and in my music) that a guitar in a Picasso still-life would play: something of the world is caught as pretext or clothing for the inherent abstraction. Dancers have nothing to narrate and neither has my music. Even in older ballets like Giselle, descriptiveness has been removed – by virtue of its naiveté, its unpretentious traditionalism and its simplicity – to a level of objectivity and pure art-play.
My music for the stage, then, never tries to "explain" the action, but rather it lives side by side with the visual movement, happily married to it, as one individual to another. In Scènes de Ballet the dramatic action was given by an evolution of plastic problems, and both dance and music had to be constructed on the architectural feeling for contrast and similarity.
The danger in the visualization of music on the screen – and a very real danger it is – is that the film has always tried to "describe" the music. That is absurd. When Balanchine did a choreography to my Danses Concertantes (originally written as a piece of concert music) he approached the problem architecturally and not descriptively. And his success was extraordinary for one great reason: he went to the roots of the musical form, of the jeu musical, and recreated it in forms of movements. Only if the films should ever adopt an attitude of this kind is it possible that a satisfying and interesting art form would result.
The dramatic impact of my Histoire du Soldat has been cited by various critics. There, too, the result was achieved, not by trying to write music which, in the background, tried to explain the dramatic action, or to carry the action forward descriptively, the procedure followed in the cinema. Rather was it the simultaneity of stage, narration, and music which was the object, resulting in the dramatic power of the whole. Put music and drama together as individual entities, put them together and let them alone, without compelling one to try to "explain" and to react to the other. To borrow a term from chemistry: my ideal is the chemical reaction, where a new entity, a third body, results from uniting two different but equally important elements, music and drama; it is not the chemical mixture where, as in the films, to the preordained whole just the ingredient of music is added, resulting in nothing either new or creative. The entire working methods of dramatic film exemplify this.
All these reflections are not to be taken as a point-blank refusal on my part ever to work for the film. I do not work for money, but I need it, as everybody does. Chesterton tells about Charles Dickens' visit to America. The people who had invited him to lecture here were astonished, it seems, about his interest in fees and contracts. "Money is not a shocking thing to an artist," Dickens insisted. Likewise there will be nothing shocking to me in offering my professional capacities to a film studio for remuneration.
If I am asked whether the dissemination of good concert music in the cinema will help to create a more understanding mass audience, I can only answer that here again we must beware of dangerous misconceptions. My first premise is that good music must be heard by and for itself, and not with the crutch of any visual medium. If you start to explain the "meaning" of music you are on the wrong path. Such absurd "meanings" will invariably be established by the image, if only through automatic association. That is an extreme disservice to music. Listeners will never be able to hear music by and for itself, but only for what it represents under the given circumstances and given instructions. Music can be useful, I repeat, only when it is taken for itself. It has to play its own role if it is to be understood at all. And for music to be useful to the individual we must above all teach the self-sufficiency of music, and you will agree that the cinema is a poor place for that! Even under the best conditions it is impossible for the human brain to follow the ear and the eye at the same time.
And even listening is itself not enough, granted that it be understood in its best sense; the training of the ear. To listen only is too passive and it creates a taste and judgment which are too general, too indiscriminate. Only in limited degree can music be helped through increased listening; much more important is the making of music. The playing of an instrument, actual production of some kind or another, will make music accessible and helpful to the individual, not the passive consumption in the darkness of a neighborhood theatre.
And it is the individual that matters, never the mass. The "mass," in relationship to art, is a quantitative term which has never once entered into my consideration. When Disney used Sacre du Printemps for Fantasia he told me: "Think of the number of people who will thus be able to hear your music!" Well, the number of people who will consume music is doubtless of interest to somebody like [impresario] Mr. [Sol] Hurok, but it is of no interest to me. The broad mass adds nothing to the art, it cannot raise the level, and the artist who aims consciously at "mass-appeal" can do so only by lowering his own level. The soul of each individual who listens to my music is important to me, and not the mass feeling of a group. Music cannot be helped through an increase in quantity of listeners, be this increase effected by the films or any other medium, but only through an increase in the quality of listening, the quality of the individual soul.
In my autobiography I described the dangers of mechanical music distribution; and I still believe, as I then did, that "for the majority of listeners there is every reason to fear that, far from developing a love and understanding of music, the modern methods of dissemination will . . . produce indifference, inability to understand, to appreciate, or to undergo any worthy reaction. In addition, there is the musical deception arising from the substitution for the actual playing of a reproduction, whether on record or film or by wireless transmission. It is the same difference as that between the synthetic and the authentic. The danger lied in the fact that there is always a far greater consumption of the synthetic which, it must always be remembered, is far from being identical with its mode. The continuous habit of listening to changed and sometimes distorted timbres dulls and degrades the ear, so that it gradually loses all capacity for enjoying natural musical sounds."
In summary, then, my ideas on music and the moving pictures are brief and definite:
The current cinematic concept of music is foreign to me; I express myself in a different way. What common language can one have with the films? They have recourse to music for reasons of sentiment. They use it like remembrances, like odors, like perfumes which evoke remembrances. As for myself, I need music for hygienic purposes, for the health of my soul. Without music in its best sense there is chaos. For my part, music is a force which gives reason to things, a force which creates organization, which attunes things. Music probably attended the creation of the universe. LOGOS.

Raksin’s response Jan 1948 The Musical Digest

I live in a land where deference towards one's elders is scarcely the rule; young people grow up to think in terms of a man's essential worth rather than his seniority. "Essential worth" is, of course, a fancy generalization. It is a variable, a term that permits too many subjective responses. Nevertheless, the essential worth of a man like Igor Stravinsky is hardly disputable – when he is writing music. In the role of critic, however, his greatness is questionable. His recent pronouncements make this abundantly clear.
In writing of a man who was composing Le Sacre du Printemps the year I was born, I must first make clear my great admiration for his genius and for the music he has created. It is not with this that I would quarrel, but with his opinions on artistic matters that appear to be quite beyond his understanding.
In his interview with Ingolf Dahl, which appeared in the Musical Digest of September 1946, Mr. Stravinsky contends that "there is only one real function of film music – namely to feed the composer." Aside from the fact that I have found this function a consistently useful one, there are other less personal reasons for holding it in respect.

Mr. Stravinsky's music may indeed be more expressive than he himself suspects. For even when he sets out to say nothing he succeeds in saying much about himself.

One wishes, as he reads the oftentimes sad history of music, that it might have operated on behalf of Mozart and Schubert. The world has so often neglected its great men that one looks with pleasure at the composer who eats regularly as a result of the indulgence of a wealthy patron or of an organization (sometimes called commission), or by composing or orchestrating for the ballet. In a world where man does not live by double-fugues alone, perhaps the composer who works in films is most fortunate of all. At least he works as a composer and does not wear himself out teaching dolts, concertizing or kowtowing to concert-managers, dilettantes and other musical parasites.
While he may sometimes work with people whose intelligence is somewhat below that of Leonardo da Vinci, this is in no way different from the "Classic" position of the composer, who has always had to cope with employers or patrons who were fundamentally unmusical, from the Archbishop of Salzburg to Louis B. Mayer. The whole struggle of the new generation of American composers has been just this: that they should be able to live from their work as composers. If film music makes this possible, so much the better.
Mr. Stravinsky is absolutely horrified at the esthetics of film music. "I find it impossible to talk to film people about music," he says, "because we have no common meeting ground; their primitive and childish concept of music is not my concept." So long as he assumes the position of godhead in esthetic matters, there are, of course, no grounds for argument. What is primitive and childish is often open to question. Mr. Stravinsky appears to be using against film music the same arguments that were directed against his own ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, when it first appeared. And if complexity and maturity be the opposites of the qualities that Mr. Stravinsky so despises, he will have great difficulty in convincing all critics that these are the typical qualities of his own music.
A popular, non-technical magazine is hardly the place to be quoting musical examples; otherwise it would be easy to set Mr. Stravinsky's words against his music. For now, it must be sufficient to wonder aloud how the second movement of his Symphony in Three Movements and parts of Scènes de Ballet fit in with his dicta. It has always been interesting to see how often an artist's stated principles are contradicted by his art.
It is an inevitable corollary of Mr. Stravinsky's esthetics that film music, as he sees it, cannot "be regarded under artistic considerations." He said no; I say yes. Impasse. But it is an impasse arising out of a dogmatic assumption with which he could trap the unwary. Evidently Mr. Stravinsky's definition of art is a restrictive one, and if he can maintain it, he has indeed succeeded where philosophers have been frustrated for centuries. He, of all people, should beware of such restrictive definitions. A genuine orthodoxy, sanctioned by theories and accomplishments of generations of great artists before his own time, might conceivably exclude most of his own art. Mr. Stravinsky's definitions must perforce be broad ones, lest he find himself a pariah among those to whom he would appear as a god. Neither Mr. Stravinsky nor I will decide these matters. They will be decided through the same process of selection that constantly refines and revitalizes our musical heritage. Such selective processes have a way of disregarding respectability, theories and venerable age, and of deferring only to essential worth.
The doctrine of essential worth, if I may presume so to dignify the idea, is not one that requires definition. It is quite satisfied with illustration. If one cannot say what it is, one can at least say what it does. It has freed artists from oppressive esthetic standards of both the past and present. It has repeatedly sent the status quo crashing into ruins. It has broken the charmed circle and destroyed the exclusiveness of the daisy chain. It has assured universality and immortality to any piece of music that is good, whether it be a symphony, a popular song or a sequence in a film score. More than that, it has made room in the contemporary musical scene for Mr. Stravinsky.
It is true, of course, that a sequence of film music may not measure up as a musical entity – that is, it may not satisfy the logic of "pure" music. But it may, nevertheless, remain a good piece of film music; and as such, it may be as worthy of artistic consideration as other music for, say, the opera, or the ballet or the dramatic stage. If one were to quibble with Mr. Stravinsky's music as he quibbles with Hollywood's, it would be fair to ask just what "pure" logic is satisfied by the final bars of Petrouchka. By themselves they are hard to justify, but in the context of the ballet they are inevitable. So with film music: many a sequence derives its meaning from the context of the film and the rest of the music. The "wall-paper" theory of film music which Mr. Stravinsky so glibly expounds may help him to maintain the defensive position of a neo-classicist who does not wish his preconceived attitudes to be affected in any way by facts. But it cannot be other than ridiculous to the film-goer, to whom the function of film music is an actuality which he does not need to be convinced of, since he experiences it.

Does the man who grew up in the land of Tchaikovsky and Moussorgsky really ask what is sad music? Ask the artist who painted Guernica what is horror, the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm what is exaltation.

"Put music and drama together as individual entities," says Mr. Stravinsky, "put them together and let them alone, without compelling one to try to 'explain' and to react to the other." Then, contradicting himself, he explains that his ideal is "the chemical reaction where a new entity . . . results." Aside from the fact that Mr. Stravinsky thus rules out almost all of the operas the world has learned to love in favor of his own esoteric preferences, it seems sheer presumption to say arbitrarily that this reaction never occurs in film music. Anyone who has ever seen the silent footage of a film in its rough cut and then the final scored version can testify to the transformation. The expressiveness of film music has frequently been derided; too often it overstates the case. But to deny its eloquence requires an extreme degree of insensitivity.
Here one runs into another of Mr. Stravinsky's dogmas, the statement that "music explains nothing, music underlines nothing." This may be for Mr. Stravinsky a satisfactory defense of his own aversion to expressiveness. But it hardly conforms to the facts. Mr. Stravinsky's music may indeed be more expressive than he himself suspects. For even when he sets out to say nothing he succeeds in saying much about himself. And this is why he has come to be recognized as one of the great masters of our day. What we revere in his music is precisely what he has explained and underlined about himself, not what he has hidden from us.
Pursuing his idea, Mr. Stravinsky goes on to ask, "What is 'sad' music?" I confess that I find this question narrow, contemptuous, disillusioned, insensitive, precious – and deaf. Does the man who grew up in the land of Tchaikovsky and Moussorgsky really ask what is sad music? Ask the artist who painted Guernica what is horror, the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm what is exaltation. Mr. Stravinsky seems hardly the one to pause for an answer to such questions, for his esoteric point of view excludes the simple, direct and accessible aspects of art.
I do not hold to the extreme opposite of insisting that every note of music must have some "significance" – social or otherwise – in order to justify it. This approach to art is as intolerable as it is dull. But somehow it seems closer to the realities of life than a philosophy of detachment and scorn.
No one can quarrel with Mr. Stravinsky's prerogatives as an artist, or with his analyses of his own music. They are interesting but not final. Just as Mr. Stravinsky has searched deeply for the intrinsic quality of the music of Pergolesi in Pulcinella, so do we who listen to Stravinsky's music search for the meaning that it has for us. These meanings, I suspect, are far greater than Mr. Stravinsky prefers to acknowledge. Consider, for a moment, the Introduction to the second part of Le Sacre, or Jocasta's aria, Oracula, Oracula, from Oedipus Rex. Examples fall over themselves to be heard, but if I may hark back to an earlier paragraph of this article, let us forget the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm, and ask the composer of the last movement of the Symphony of Psalms, with its Hallelujahs, what is exaltation?
That Mr. Stravinsky is not unaware of the significance of his music is demonstrated by his acceptance of Ingolf Dahl's program notes for the Symphony in C Major, which included the following sentence: "One day it will be universally recognized that the white house in the Hollywood hills, in which the Symphony was written and which was regarded by some as an ivory tower, was just as close to the core of the world at war as the place where Picasso painted Guernica." Many of us were greatly surprised when Mr. Stravinsky approved this passage; some questioned its validity, which now seems to this writer more apparent than it was at first. The important thing is that Mr. Stravinsky, by his approval, admits to this significance.
The difference between the meanings that a composer intends and the meanings that an audience infers constitutes the very richness of art. Speaking of his Scènes de Ballet, Mr. Stravinsky says, "the dramatic action was given by an evolution of plastic problems." This is undoubtedly true – although one notes that he uses the word "dramatic" in describing the action. But it is not the whole truth. For not all of the problems of today's composers are plastic problems. Many of them are dynamic problems presented by events of the composer's inner and outer life. Expressive music does not have to dig very hard into the history of musical art to find examples in abundance. One can find them even in Mr. Stravinsky's music – in the opening of the Symphony in Three Movements, for instance, in the outer movements of the Symphony of Psalms, in the Pas de Deux of Scènes de Ballet, with its sentimental trumpet solo. These may have been plastic problems to Mr. Stravinsky; but the finished product, as we hear it, is packed with feeling and emotion.
On the basis of his music, Mr. Stravinsky, who has fathered the latest cult of inexpressiveness (an earlier one was sired by Nero), seems himself not quite able to fulfill the membership qualifications. This may come as a great blow to him, but the gulf between his own music and that of the films is neither so wide nor so impassable as he would like to imagine. A man who writes such pretty thirds and sixths, whose music from the ballet, Firebird, is soon to be the subject of a tap dance in a film, and whose new ballad, Summer Moon, may soon be a contender for Hit Parade honors, is hardly in the best possible position to espouse austerity.
I must now point out again that I admire and respect Mr. Stravinsky as a great composer. But as a critic of music in films he leaves much to be desired. Any Hollywood composer can tell him what is really wrong with film music. Mr. Stravinsky himself has pointed out none of the real defects. He has succeeded only in expressing an esoteric and snobbish attitude.
"Music," says Mr. Stravinsky, "probably attended the creation of the universe." Certainly. It was background music.

Editor's final note: According to Raksin, Stravinsky was dismayed at the rebuttal, exclaiming "What's with Raksin? Why does he attack me?" – although the two ultimately remained friends. Recently recalling their public squabble, Raksin commented, "You know, he said music doesn't express anything. I do not agree with that. But the point is, he's Stravinsky and I'm not."

Hollywood mentality

 

I have always defended Hollywood cinema. This is not to say I am blind to its vices. When more and more French films are starting to have a Hollywood mentality, things become hard for me to swallow. Recently I saw a film called Ne te Retourne Pas. No, I have to report that I was unable to finish the film. And this is because I was constantly disturbed by this mediocre, unimaginative and clichéd understanding of human value. First there is this setting of a bourgeois nuclear familiar with its stereotyped family gatherings and career encounters. Then there is the husband’s deeply assuring baritone voice and his anxious looks, as if he would help if he knows where to put his feet in. But as usual, when it comes to tell the story of a woman on the verge of nervous breakdown, the husband is mentally thousands of miles away, curiously disabled and peripheral to the emotive experience of our heroine. In this film the way one experiences emotion is so fake (comparable to another film that I just saw, Coppola’s Tetro) that I soon lose interest in wherever the story can potentially go.

No, this is not Hollywood; this is contemporary French cinema.

I am not suggesting that filmmakers should always go for absolutely unusual stories. In the good old days, different mentalities can be found behind the same story. Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet is the exact example. Whereas a Hollywood counterpart, Lost Weekend, focuses on how the guy does the job, with the help of all the caring people around him, naturally—what a splendidly humane place is America!—a genuinely French film on the subject depicts a b&w gritty world of antagonism where not a weekend but a life is lost. It is not that our hero has no friends—he does have, some of them rich, some sincere, some female—what more can you ask? Yes, he does ask for more. And he is paralyzed by having to wait for the future to come. A friend says in the film “I wallow in her warmth like pig in a trough”. This is adulthood, and he doesn’t want to be part of it. He doesn’t want to go to New York.

There are some interesting things to say about Ne te Retourne Pas though. It has little to do with the film, but mainly with Sophie Marceau. I have always regretted the fact this generation of French filmmakers have a different taste for actresses. They have little use for a beautiful face such as the one possessed by Marceau. Her films—and I have seen a lot—are mostly mediocre, despite that some of them are well made (Firelight,Fanfan), some interesting in a special sense (all by Zulawski). Compare her to Moreau I find Moreau is too overtly sensual—pay attention to her lips. Yet Moreau was able to secure many roles that have an intellectual identity. Sophie is far less lucky. Now I see an alternative solution for her: she really becomes more and more like Joan Fontaine.

Desire in noir

 

In a noir film the narrator’s identity largely decides the path that the rest of the film will take. The major options are cop (C) and private eye (P), which are concurrent to this day. There is no reason one should entirely replace another since they have respective contexts of operation. Of course these two categories are vulnerable to subversions. Essentially, the C represents law, or at least justice; the P operates on a code that he knows instinctively. If both of them can be regarded as aggressive male individual out there, the degree in which they repress their sexual desire is different. Bounded by his official identity, just like the sheriff in Western, the cop detective is prevented from an ultimate fulfillment of his sexual desire. The P detective, conversely, is luckier. Whenever he returns to his office, unlike his cop counterpart, who has nothing but the typewriter waiting there, there is always a mysterious woman waiting for our private investigator. In this sense, the office that he needs to return so frequently becomes an erotic rendezvous, a convenient locus for tryst. Our private eye does not fare far from a gangster: in both genres desire is regulated by moral code. Yet in the case of the gangster, the ultimate goal is to possess, or to destroy, whereas the private detective always survives.

Laura achieves a maximum externalization of a cop’s desire; it also achieves its maximum repression. The fact that McPherson lingers in Laura’s apartment day and night, probing into her diary and personal correspondence, staring at her portrait (I guess Vertigo picks this bit up), pouring drinks from her cabinet—I am sure he uses her bathroom after all those drinks, but that verges on obscenity—is most unusual for a Detective Lieutenant. His burning desire is ruthlessly pointed out by Waldo, who made it clear that he needs to kill Laura because he cannot tolerate a dirty cop kissing her. On the other hand, Carpenter, such a vulgar figure, represents virtually no threat for him. One wonders why McPherson is such a threat to Waldo—we know he and Laura are unlikely to get together; Carpenter, in contrast, is engaged to Laura—and why McPherson, on his part, takes rather Carpenter as his enemy. But when he finally kisses her on the lip I understand the difference: Waldo competes for the intensity of desire whereas McPherson is concerned with physical possession.

As a genre Noir develops from the gangster and the detective genre. But in regards to the role women play it mostly inherits from the latter. Whereas in gangster movies woman are mostly feminine decorations, trophies of a masculine aggressiveness, in detective genre the woman’s role is constantly under transformation—the desire itself keeps changing forms. It is hard to say which comes first, whether the role change triggers the form of desire, or vice versa. Our male protagonist is not infallible, in fact he is doomed to fall, to get involved, and to become a part of the mess he is investigating. But he will survive because he know when to detach himself, to relinquish his desire, which is obscure from the very beginning, in contrast to the gangster’s explicit one. In Maltese Falcon Bogart says, I won’t because all of me want it and you count on it. Thus the detective exemplifies an ordinary man who resists his own wishes, and refuses to be manipulated.

In Kiss Me Deadly Mike takes as his responsibility to rescue young women, not because he needs to gather intelligence from them, but also because that is part of his perception of the world. The film indulges us with this Fellinistic perception, but it does give us glimpses of an alternative, which is promptly named “feline perception”. Think about Christina, her hysterical laugh; and when she calms down, what does she do? She swallows a locker key in the toilet of a gas station and writes a letter to our protagonist which reads, “Remember me”. This note creates initially a confusion—although Mike quickly figures it out, to my amazement—because what we usually associate with remembrance is not physiological but psychological qualities. It is as if Christina was talking about remembrance in the Egyptian’s sense—embodied by a mummy. Moreover, when she talks about body, she does not mean the surface of her body, but the interior, the bowels. Note in cases of male fantasy, a female’s aura is focused on the surface of her body—nobody would fall in love with the inside of a woman, albeit ironically the ultimate purpose is to attain this inside.

Therefore, what is striking about the male fantasy depicted in this film is that not only it shows a male-centered world where women either work for him or want to seduce him, but also an anxiety that underlines this male complacency. Kiss Me Deadly is a sublime instance of castration anxiety visualized. This anxiety turns true when the Lily Carver character transforms into Gabrielle—a Pandora figure, as Dr. Soberin kindly reminds an obtuse audience—under the auspices of curiosity and greed; she becomes an empowered monster who is momentarily invincible, but as the Hollywood myth has it, sprints to its total destruction; monsters never rule happily thereafter.

The decline of the oval mask.

 

The abundant use of mask in early cinema is one of the formal devices that have disappeared completely through the course of stylistic evolution. It is not so much because the intention to manipulate, to direct the audience’s attention has been regarded as inappropriate, or too explicit, but that it runs against the nature of our pictorial perception. It is therefore rather surprising to see that in Gance’s La Roue, mask has an almost abusive usage. There is one shot with Norma’s face in the center of the screen where the mask follows the contour of her face, leaving everything else out. This, I assume, is to intensify our attention to the face by eliminating the rest. But first, it can be done by simply putting her face in a background that is not lit or out of focus, and thus creating the contrast. Plenty such shots in the film show that Gance is not ignorant of the method. Yet however it seems that he believes an accentuation through lighting, through composition is simply not enough. Naturally the shape of anything round can be said to have a structural significance since it is the shape of wheel. But ultimately what is intriguing is that the oval frame, by no means natural to our vision, is an established convention to evoke a certain mode of visual perception, namely, that of portrait. The curve and decorative frame seems to be able to soften the figure presented and to implant it into a sensuous past.

 

We say now that since our attention is naturally directed to the center of the frame and the human expression, any attempt to reinforce this tendency is perceived only as a digression that calls too much attention to itself. But the use of mask in La Roue to a certain extent suggests that this has not always been the case. The dominant pictorial perception of the previous century, as well as centuries before it, insists on a “framed” perception.

 

It is perhaps in this spirit that the use of the mask in La Roue is not limited to landscape/portrait. When Machefer comes to visit Sisif, all shots of him and his point of view (even in flashback) are in oval mask. In this case the oval mask seems to convey a sense of comedy, or an apologetic gesture of being digressive. It is in fact an alien mood given the tragedy that immediately precedes it and therefore has to be bracketed somehow.

Liebelei

 

It was last year that Laura Mulvey came here and gave a lecture titled

“Desire and Death in Three Films by Max Ophuls".

Mulvey identifies two types of man in Ophuls’s films: the womanizer and the military man. The latter is the guardian of the linearity of the narrative as well that of the symbolic order; the former brings sexual liberation to the woman and therefore is obliged to confront the military man. This results in the final duel where the womanizer is killed and order (both social and narrative) restored. Mulvey further abstracts these two nicely into the pair of desire/death and finds its prototype in Mozart’s Don Juan.

Much of this actually makes sense, although its oversimplification is obvious. It is those who desire that feel the death most. Desperately, lovers want to verbalize their wish to escape death. And that is why in Ophuls the couple in love keeps bringing up the notion of eternity.

Another direction leads to the birth. If we can suggest something even bolder than Mulvey we might say that Fritz also wants to go to a state of pre-birth, or infancy. In the new DVD released in UK there is a scene where Fritz complains about the furtiveness of their rendezvous and the baroness almost sympathetically agrees that she will come to him if he gives her the key. The 35mm print we saw, as well as the lousy VHS doesn’t have this. Also significant is that at one moment Fritz buries his face in her blossom, like a child and his mother.

In Liebelie, the same Waltz is used in the scene where Fritz and Christine dance and the immediately following scene where Fritz dances with the baroness. Although the music is produced differently—in the former case by a mechanical organ and in the latter by live musicians, the fact that the same music is used in such a proximity seems to indicate that these two loves, despite their apparent different reception intended for the audience—one to pursue, one to avoid; one true, one false; one good, one evil—are in fact two versions of the same story. The mechanicalness of the love between Fritz and Christine is such that it has to be maintained by feeding the love machine a coin (a token of love) every three minutes.

In the film there is no mentioning of Fritz not in love with the baroness any more. Instead it tells us that he cannot stand the cold gaze of the husband and his brother (a colleague of his). In other words, the illusion of love fades because of an inconvenience. On the other hand, the illusion of love between Fritz and Christine flourishes for a while given the absence of obstacle. Nevertheless it still needs to be nourished by making reference to “eternity”, a most effective and costless commodity between lovers. Fritz in vain tries to locate an object where his illusion can be objectified, fetishized in Christine’s humble apartment. But her father couldn’t help him there.

If one suspect that this sarcasm toward love is a misreading, in another film, also adapted from Schnitzler, the attitude is made clear. Indeed, as Alan Williams quotes La Rochefoucauld, our virtues are disguised vices—love is but a disguised perversion.

A small detail in Liebelie: the military binocular is not an opera glass, which is a usually feminine prop. What we have in the film is instead a tool of investigation, an emblem of authority, a power to look. The two shop girls, for this reason, cannot hold it; the binocular is doomed to fall—and onto nothing but a military man’s cap. Is this a futile attempt of appropriation, of attacking the enemy by their own weapon? This may be ambiguous. But what is striking to me is that the presence of this monstrous binocular can be appropriated, absorbed by a seemingly realistic/romantic context.

Music in 2046

 

hitherto the best performance of Zhang ZiYi

 

The contemporary approach to film music is very different from the classical score model. The most radical of the differences is that music is no longer used to achieve a structural unity. A contemporary OST is extremely diversified in terms of musical genres and the film shows no intention to unite them together. There is no longer a dominant musical idiom like the symphonic form where the confident host of romanticism is able to accommodate a certain amount of exotic instrumentations. Nevertheless what is marvelous is that somehow the audience does not feel the least disturbance accepting such a fragmented potpourri.

Take 2046 as an example. Basically music in this film is used in only two ways.

The first possibility is what I call the music nostalgia. This includes Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song, because the narrative needs some mood support, and NKC was popular in the 1960s. Such a double dimension is exactly the way NKC is used in Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes. Invariably this brings in a sense of nostalgia because it refers not to a time of the year that recycles itself, but is irretrievably lost in time. The Connie Francis version of Siboney is under the same category. FYI, Connie Francis must be something then, because Edward Yang’s GuLingJie also mentions it.

Dear Martin’s Sway, however, is just illustrative, although it could have the same epoch marking function. This is a staple of contemporary pop score. The gist is that you need to pay attention to the lyric.

This kind of music can also be intertextual. When Perfidia comes up, one instantly recognizes it as coming from Days of being Wild.

The other category is I what I call music psychologia. This includes George Delerue piece, CastaDiva and Secret Garden. What this category differs from the first is that here the music is not diegetically justifiable in any way—it does not belong to that time. It is arbitrarily selected by the director, who believes it conveys an emotional charge that is appropriate to the scene. This is getting close to theme tune. In fact, CastaDiva is the theme tune of Faye Wang and Secret Garden is used to denote 2046, the place of eternal immobility. But while the knowledge of what CastaDiva is can help to appreciate its functioning here, the other two pieces can simply be listened to as it is—a really easy listening. In fact, the knowledge of their origin will spoil their effect in the scene.

I also put in this category film music from Fassbinder and Kielowski, although this normally calls for the label of intertextuality. As in above, such knowledge is not required—I doubt anyone can recognize it at all—and the text they refer to make little sense here.

There remains the original music composed by Shigeru Umebayashi. My subjective experience is that whether these are original or not matters little—it sounds just like Secret Garden or the Delerue piece, with a touch of grandiosity through percussion.

The use of sound in Kiss Me Deadly

 

I was wrong in assuming, after Pascal Bonitzer, that the voice of Dr. Soberin is a disembodied voice. It is in fact anchored to a body; to be more specific, to a pair of shoes, and to a lesser extent, to a pair of tweed pants. The term “shoe fetishism” almost cries out loud in those scenes where the face of this prophetic figure is withheld from us. But this withholding is only justified in the killing of Nick, whereas in other instances is rather unmotivated. The revealing shoes and pants also appear in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, where our protagonist detective is able to identify the murderer, Yusa, only by his muddy pants and shoes; his face, on the other hand, is perfectly insignificant. Similarly, the face of Dr. Soberin is entirely unsuited to exemplify an oracle.

Blue suede or black moccasin?

So I was angry with Bonitzer for his making a big fuss out of a small deal—which proves his superior writing skill. What makes me first notice the peculiar quality of sound in this film is a scene where our protagonist-investigator is talking to Lily/Gabrielle in her apartment whose windows open to the street. During the course of the conversation we hear constantly the street noise which constitutes a minor interference to the dialogue. When she stands up and moves closer to the window—we see it is open because the curtain flies—the background sound, especially that of the street car, becomes even stronger and competes for our aural attention. This is not something we used to find in Hollywood—something made famous by Godard’s pinball machine. When he leaves and she is alone again it is literally deafening—and definitely too long for a street car (sounds more like a freight train is going beneath her window). Like tide wave, it reclaims its victim in her most helpless cubicle.

Put the gun where it belongs!

What is also striking about this sequence is the fact that the dialogue sounds have a peculiar echo in it. It is far from a recording one gets from sound-proofed studio where the clarity of voices is not tempered, christen. But I am not suggesting that it is a synchronized recording, a documentary style. Besides, who would expect to see cinema-verite in a noir film? Aren’t they antitheses to each other? But here the voices are indeed raw; one can almost smell the room and feel the heat of it.

Kiss Me Deadly makes extensive diegetic use of recording devices. Unlike Double Indemnity, which reminds us of the pre-magnetic tape age—I recently saw the dictaphone again in Revolutionary Road. Here the wonderful technical achievement of tape recorder in celebrated. Several times, Mike listens to his telephone message. We see this rather giant machine that is wall-mounted (makes it an inseparable part of his apartment), in front of which our protagonist communicates with those disembodied voices. In fact, Mike relies so much on this recorder that he never answers his calls before he discovers what might be the caller’s intention. The film goes all the length to distinguish sound according to their sources, a sonic realism that is hard to come by in a B class noir. For example, the recording on the tape, the welcome message is different from what we hear when somebody is speaking from the recorder’s speakerphone. And this in turn in put in sharp contrast with the sound when Mike picks up the phone.

Mike’s a gadget guy

The mixture of recorded and live voice also finds its way into the scene where Mike visits Trivago, the amateur tenor, where he is, as well as we are instructed to “follow your ear”. This episode is entirely pointless, i.e., without narrative significance. We realize later that Trivago does not really know anything. Rather, the whole episode is a pretext to tell us a few facts about Raymondo: he is an engineer scientist, he is very sad because the way the world is; and he is a man of contradictions. Now how can such a sad scientist befriend a cuckold opera lover is totally beyond me. But ultimately what makes this scene interesting is its colorful details: Caruso’s Pagliacci and Flotow’s Martha; and that the guy’s first name is Carmen.

The film uses a variety of musical pieces, from pop to classical. We know that in the early 1930s, immediately following the conversion of sound, Hollywood experienced a brief period of taboo on the use of nondiegetic music. The ways in which a musical presence is to be justified sometimes amount to the level of ridiculousness. Therefore I am rather surprised to see that in this film made in the mid-50s, Aldrich still tries to justify the music as diegetic whenever possible.

The credit sequence (Star War style twenty years before) is accompanied by Nat King Cole’s I’d rather have the blues. It is understood as coming from the radio, therefore it has an ambient effect, which tells you this is not extradiegetic. But in the same time we hear an unrealistically amplified panting of Christina. One possible interpretation, then, is this is a subjective POA of Christina.

Many internal scenes use a classical piece. When Mike first enters Christina/Lily’s apartment, the first thing he does is to turn on the radio (yet another celebration of sound-producing equipment). We have to wait a while before we actually hear the piece—is it just the way these things work? Nevertheless when it does begin—the allegro moderato of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony—it does not start from the middle of somewhere, as it should be if it is indeed coming from the radio. We hear a rather complete version of it. This is more like he is using Pandora!

When Mike enters his own apartment again the first thing to do is to turn on the radio (is this a RKO production?). The music permeates the room and does not diminish when the telephone rings. But when the welcome message is played the music lowers down. When the recording actually begins, Mike walks closer to the recorder and we are shown a close-up of him occupying the whole frame. We as audience are also listening attentively. As a result the music is further lowered down. Now this is standard practice.

The next scene is in the sexy assistant’s apartment (her name being Velda Wakeman)—and she is doing a pole dance! Here the music is again diegetic—in order to make it perfectly clear there is a close-up of the phonograph, which Mike momentarily lifts the stylus—the music stops and resumes. Btw, is a Waltz really a good music choice to do ballet workout with?

whats the pole doing there?

But this film has more funky music choice for us. In William Mist’s gallery, when the poor is asleep, Mike almost compulsively turns the radio on. What do we hear this time? Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude”!

It is not like there is no unjustified nondiegetic music, but when it does happen, it has a curious flavor that goes beyond the Hollywood norm. For instance, a jazz piece bridges the transition between the porter’s informing Mike (we have the music starting from the moment he whispers into Mike’s ear) of Lily’s whereabouts and Mike’s visit to her. But this music is soon inundated in the ambient noise that I described earlier. One gets the illusion (if one does not notice it earlier) that some tenant in that crappy building is actually playing this music! More conventional underscoring can be found in Evello house, when Charlie the goon is ordered to get Mike. Here the music is intense and highly illustrative. The sequence is actually very stylistic in the mood of Orson Welles. I suspect Aldrich is paying his homage here, not simply because of Paul Stewart. A similar tense underscore is found in the beach fight where Mike is captured. Notice the long shot of the sea, though.

Does it remind you of Antonioni

Inside the beach house we have a radio broadcasting a boxing where all actions are framed. These goons, just like Mike, can never do without a radio. Earlier in the Evello house, we have an even more complicated sonic layering of telephone, radio and live conversation. It starts with a woman’s naked back while she is moving away from the camera. What accompanies this on the soundtrack is a bugle! Then a voice announces a horse race; the camera pulls back to reveal the source of voice—a radio on the table! We realize that Charlie is talking on the phone. At this moment, Friday/Tuesday comes to the table and talks to Sugar. These speeches naturally overlap a lot, which reminds us again of the Wellesian deep sonic space (look for Altman’s excellent article on this).

Evello, Charlie, Sugar, and the days of the week

TBC

The rise of machines

One thing that is shared by French Impressionism, Italian Futurists and Russian Montagists is this notion of metal brain, this fascination of the machine world. Although the above three only exist for a short period of time, this notion is probably not entirely lost. One unexpected descendant is Jacques Tati.

In Tati’s world, the machine is heard with an unprecedented clarity and distinctive emphasis. In Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, who is making the most noise? Not Mr. Hulot himself, nor anybody else, but his car. One finds numerous examples in Play Time, where the sounds of inanimate objects dominate. In Trafic, the point is made even clearer—it is about autos, not humans. In Tati human utterance is always subjected to quiet derision, to desperate distortion. One thinks of the opening of Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, where the broadcast is mechanically deformed to eliminate all legibility; one also thinks of Mr. Hulot the protagonist, whose speech never goes beyond simple and absolutely necessary clarifications. Most of the time, Hulot avoids verbalizing and opts for gesticulating—perhaps this is exactly why one easily finds him so lovable. And this is true, in a perverse way, for the public relation girl in Trafic, who speaks ridiculous French—she is very much a sympathetic figure in the movie, where a potential romance is alluded to, because she, as Hulot, cannot speak the language.

A constructivism concept, the faktura, calls our attention to the materiality of objects, the surface. I believe that it is a concept that has been echoed a lot in the last century. Robbe-Grillet, as we know, fetishizes one aspect of this surface—the geometry of and between objects. Tati, for his part, focuses on sound. It is not so much about how these sounds function for us as human beings. On the contrary—and this is also true for Robbe-Grillet—it is about how these sounds ignore our humanistic existence.

Pillow shot and others

 

The Only Son (1936), according to Noel Burch, is a “supreme achievement”. The reason he gives—as far as I can gather—is that this is not only a film that has pillow shots, but also a “pillow structure”.

The longest pillow shot Burch has described in length in his To the Distant Observer, p 179. A few details first. The scroll on the wall is not some “good-luck” roll; it is an apotropaic image to prevent the baby from crying during the night. Also, the frames on page 177 are all on the wrong side—one frame has actually text on it.

The shot lasts fifty seconds and it is very long, radical. The lighting change is most noticeable towards the end. My fellow viewer makes the strange remark that it is unjustified. What strikes me is rather the one with the closed door of the classroom—the son has left his students and gone borrowing money from his colleagues.

Due to several reasons, I think the use of sound in this first talkie of Ozu is quite good. Here is what he says,

Ingrained ways of making silents cannot be changed overnight, so glitches were inevitable. Even though I was well aware that talkies were a totally different ballgame, I couldn't help slipping back into style of silents. I was worried that after being four or five years behind others, I would never be able to catch up. However, now I realize how useful my persistence in making silents was to my future development.

Ozu’s use of signs is intriguing. He never even tried to be subtle. Okay, Joan Crawford is photogenic. But what is Lover Divine doing there?

Does the opera need to be unsettled?

 

I wish every time my hungry eyes glide over the unattractive quick meal they could bump into a passage like this,

Once upon a time, the principle responsibility of the director of an operatic production was to make sure that the singers didn’t bump into one another or the scenery on stage. Then, came the idea of the “concept” director where a novel idea—whether inspired or not, whether logical or not—ruled the day. It became increasingly commonplace for stage directors to add operas to their resumes, even if said director was not particularly musical and even if the staging had nothing whatsoever to do with the music. Oh well, at least the drama of the piece would be served, or so it was reasoned. Very, very rarely, you end up with operatic direction that somehow misses the point of both the music and the drama, no small feat, given the odds of some aspect of one or the other working out even with a clueless director. Such is the case with Lyric Opera’s new production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio”. (Dennis Polkow, Chicago Weekly)

It spices up my meal considerably—although I cannot say I agree with this critic, I find myself almost perversely enjoying the sarcasm, which is of course the revenge taken for an obligatory writing after a bad experience. Critics are hard to please these days. They base their judgment on highly subjective reasons, and overtly so. That makes it hard to understand why we need their opinion—isn’t it that when we look for advice we prefer some rational thoughts instead of mere complains? After reflecting on this important issue for over a minute I suddenly realize that is not the case. In fact we read these reviews not as a guide as how to approach the work, but as—what would I feel if I were there, and stayed where I were?

Therefore not surprisingly the critic’s opinion coalesces with that of an average audience. Here is what I find under Amazon’s customer review of Le Nozze di Figaro,

What a missed opportunity! Great performers, great orchestra, in a perverse, misguided direction! An extra character has been introduced who goes around grimacing, juggling, tossing oranges and apples around the set during the action, or caressing or making teasing actions at the characters distracting from the action. And talk about sparse; Susanna sings her opening aria about her hat without wearing or holding one! Most of action takes place on a bare set with no furniture. This is a travesty and a disappointment….

Again, if the bareness of the stage constitutes a failure, then we must concede that the art of opera demands a visual spectacle. But even the most kitsch production (MET) of the most visually abundant works (Wagner) can fail to satisfy a contemporary audience’s eyes, spoiled by seeing dinosaurs in IMAX theaters.

I have always felt that if an average psychoanalytic interpretation of film could be like what Zizek’s does, it would make cultural studies less a subject of aversion to me and to a few others; and if Zizek does not always begin his brilliant statements with “as my spiritual father once said”, he would be indeed as great as Oscar Wilde.

Letter revisited

There was a beautiful theory, or rather a myth, that one remembers everything one experiences, down to the smallest detail. Everything is stored somewhere in the brain; it is just a question of whether or not we are able to retrieve them. Normally we can’t, since it is deeply buried in our consciousness. But in special moments, thanks to unexpected clues—such as the taste of Madeleine biscuit mingled with tea on your upper lip—a whole passage of our past live emerges. I was obsessed with this idea for a long time, partly because it supports Proust. But the fallacy of this theory is that the more we know how memory works, the more we realize that one only remembers that which has significance. In other words, memory is selective and constructive from the very beginning. And even before that, human senses (visual, aural, in particular) all work in a selective and constructive manner.

Fail to remember, therefore, signifies a failure to assign significance. Why is that I don’t remember much from my childhood? Simply because it lacks significance, even for myself. This in turn means I was indifferent to them. But my childhood is not the issue here. Recently I got to read several articles on Letter from an Unknown Woman that are not covered by last year’s Ophuls course. In Letter, there is this myth that Lisa remembers everything. Lisa does remember more of the story we are being told, and shown. This is because it is exactly she who, from the outset, has grasped its thematic coherency. Therefore, Hunt makes the following observation,

The sort of recounting she must give—in which a series of events is described in such a way as to exhibit them as being related to one another in ways (by cause and effect, for instance) that can be perceived as meaningful—is precisely what a narrative is. To create narrative art is, in a way, exactly what Lisa does. Her letter is such a creation.

In other words, it is not so much that Lisa remembers more than Stefan, but rather, we opt for her memory instead of Stefan’s, the latter Hunt describes as “his way of life splits experience into an unordered array of self-contained moments”. In a sense, what we witness as the film progresses is that Lisa imposes her story/memory upon Stefan, and he finally accepts it as his own. Insomuch as we as spectator do the same, it can be said that we are aligned to Stefan—we have to take her story as the official story, simply because it makes sense, and we are always looking forward to making sense of our life, as Stefan does. If this is true, then there is an important distinction to be made here. It is generally agreed upon that the point of identification of this film is Lisa. But as I would argue here, we do not identify with Lisa; we admire her. Her action is too heroic/crazy that we cannot follow but only admire from a distance; it offers an ideal (pure Eros) that we are willing to be absorbed into and never can. Conversely, we align to Stefan’s position in every possible way. Our life lacks coherence; we are ignorant of The story until being told and read. This is why it has to be her voice, whose persuasive power leads our imagination.

Hunt also makes the observation that Lisa knows Stefan without knowing herself, whereas Stefan knows himself but not Lisa. Lisa’s knowing of Stefan, however, is only partial. She sees in him as much as she is willing to see, that is, an ideal image. Robin wood makes the point clear by saying

Romantic love is never love for a person but for an ideal, and this ideal can only originate within the psyche of the lover. The ideal (related to Freud's 'ideal ego') is projected on to the chosen love object, and the lover then believes that the love object is the ideal. On whatever level of psychoanalytical awareness the filmmakers consciously worked, Letter is very clear and precise about this: Lisa falls in love with Stefan before she even knows what he looks like. (It is of course fortunate for the continuation and development of the fantasy that he looks like Louis Jourdan, but physical attraction is not its origin.) Her desire is to construct him as her ideal self, the 'self' that is denied expression by the conditions of her society.

In the film this idea is supported by the ways in which the main theme, Liszt’s un sospiro, is used. First it is established by having him playing it twice. The first time he made a mistake and left. Note that she hears the music before she actually gets to know who he is. The second time, already, the music is presented acoustimatically. From then on the music is transferred from a sign of “him” to a sign of “love” and it is often rendered in his absence. The third time one hears it in the rug-beating day. When Lisa sneaks into the room we are offered an orchestra setting, with the tune rendered only on strings. The music stops as the sheets fall. The fourth time one hears the music in Lisa’s last night before she goes to Linz. This time we have, for a few phrases, the full orchestra on the tune, before she knocks at the door. And then, when she wanders in the empty rooms, we have a piano version of it with much echo. The acoustic quality signifies that it is a music “remembered”. For a long stretch of time we do not hear it again. Not even when she finally meets him as an adult woman and successfully dates him: the whole time they spend on the street, in the café, restaurant, carriage, amusement park, the train and finally the dancing hall, we do not hear it. But this doesn’t mean we do not have music all this “romantic” time—we have mostly folk music and cheap Waltzes. He plays it when the woman military band leaves and this waltz even carries on inside the apartment, up to the moment when they kiss and ‘consummate” this love. Or do they? I believe that Ophuls is making a rather sarcastic comment here. The next time we do hear it is, obviously, in Lisa’s last visit of the apartment. In a summarizing way, not only do we have the orchestra version of this music before she enters the building (it starts when she exits the cafe) and after she leaves in disillusion (she bumps into John on the staircase), we also have it inside the apartment, first a touch of harp and celesta, and when he appears, on string.

It might be that this signifies that Lisa has a faint hope of rekindling their love. But honestly I believe the composer should be better off leaving here an absence. This way one can argue that this Liszt piece is not associated with Brand, but rather, her ideal image of him. It is his physical presence (an old womanizer in his habitual course of ordering the “usual things”) that presents this image to emerge. She has to leave the room immediately, although she confesses that she has much to tell him. She has to leave because if she stays she risks losing this image that she has been cultivating with her life for so many years—it is to lose one’s meaning of life.

One last time we hear the music from Lisa’s perspective: her face is blocked from our view, writing her last words.

I love you now as I’ve always loved you. My life can be measured by the moments I’ve had with you and our child.

Now we are back to the present tense. Stefan has been converted. He now remembers the images. To climate this conversion, John offers him the name. At this moment, the music emerges again, from the dead. Only now it turns into his music. And it has even acquired a heroic touch when he decides to carry on with the duel.

In fact, for this particular film one could say the subjective mode of Lisa, characterized by the use of extradiegetic music, symbolizes the very notion of the romantic love, or as Hunt put it, pure Eros. It is for this reason that it is brought up so many times (one gets the impression that music permeates the whole film) because it is her story. On the other hand, the occasions where the music is silenced, replaced by diegetic sounds invariably suggest a disillusion, or at least the danger of it. In the sequence where Lisa returns before she parts for Linz, the whole time her rambling of the empty rooms and corridors are suffused with music; the moment she realizes that Brandt has come back with a woman the music suddenly stops, leaving us the usual things: good morning Mr. Brandt, footsteps, Stephan’s whispering, the woman’s giggling, etc. The sequence in which Lisa and Stefan finally have physical love, we also do not hear this music. This I take to mean that the physical love is in a sense an antithesis of the kind of love Lisa maintains. She is consummated by it and for a moment becomes aimless—although one cannot say this is definitely what she wants.