David Bordwell

The Musical Analogy

A film is in some respects like a musical composition. This analogy,

so obviously inadequate and partial, has been demolished several
times and on many grounds.‘ Traditional music has at its disposal a
restricted range of materials (e.g., tones in a scale), whereas cinema
ranges over an infinity of visual phenomena. Allied to this is the fact
that traditional music also has a fixed notational scheme. As two
writers pointed out in 1926, Beethoven could compose while deaf,
but how could a blind man make a film?2 It might be shown that the
musical analogy simply expresses the snobbery of an era when cinéas-
tes were anxious to justify the medium as worthy of intellectual notice
and that to call a film “visual music” justifies its existence under a
new aesthetic. Thus the logic of the analogy can seem to spring from
partisan and distant struggles.
Nevertheless, neither the faults nor the tactical uses of the anal-
ogy explain its longevity. Why have theorists and filmmakers been
drawn to it for over fifty years? One reason is apparent. Since at least
1914, when Leopold Survage proposed making a film 6f Rythmes
dolorés, some filmmakers have sought to purify cinema along the
lines of abstract art. Schoenberg wanted the film of his opera Die
Glfickliche Hand to be as sensuously absolute as music: It must never
suggest symbols, or meanings, or thoughts, but simply the play of
colors and forms. Just as music never drags a meaning around with
it . . . so this should simply be like sounds for the eye.3 Since then,
the tradition of abstract filmmaking has repeatedly sought
'Jean Mitry, Esthétique e! psychologie du cinéma, vol. [1 (Paris, 1965), pp. 444-445.
See 350 Henri Bescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L’Idée e1 l'écran: Opinions sur le cinéma,
vol. [-111 (Paris. 1925-1927).
2Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet. “Sensations ou sentiments?" Cinéma-
Ciné pour tous, no. 66 (31 July 1926), p. 13.
3Quoted in Standish Dyer Lawder, Structuralism and Movement in Experintental
Film and Modern Art. 1896-1925 (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1967), p. 39.

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a music for the eye, as the very titles testify: Diagonal Symphony,
Rhythmus 21, Jazz Dance, Allegretto, Toccata and Fugue, Théme e:
variations. Here the musical analogy functions to stress the films’
nonrepresentational qualities, those aspects which led Frank Lloyd
Wright to call abstract cinema “icing for an unbaked cake.”4 It is
more surprising that the musical analogy has long been used as a way
to understand a cinema committed to representation and narrative.
The history of this analogy shows that, however imperfect it may
be, it has functioned to brake a tendency to think of cinema as an art
of the real. Music has become a model of how formal unity can check,
control, and override representation. This depends, in turn, upon
conceiving music as the art of pure pattern and process. It is not only
that music is nonreferential, as the purist avant-garde assumes. Music
is useful as a model because of its architectonic features. A musical
piece exhibits form at many levels, from rhythmic figures and motivic
or melodic construction through larger forms (rondo, sonata) to the
overarching structure of an entire symphony or opera. What has
made the analogy attractive are the ways in which a musical piece can
be analyzed as a system of systems: text and music, melody and
harmony, leading voice and accompaniment. On this analogy, a film
becomes a large-scale form made of smaller systems. We can then
envisage some of these systems (narrative, for example) as being
more representational than others. Given this complex of formal
systems, we can examine the relations obtaining among them. Does
the rhythm of the editing accord with the narrative development?
Does the structure of narrative events mesh with shifts in color? The
musical analogy, in short, constitutes a crucial move in many theories
of film form, since it asserts that a film’s overall structure controls and
places its more localized denotative systems. Here film salvages
representation but contains it within a rigorous context.
The musical analogy, I hope to show, has helped theorists think of
a film as an interplay of formal systems. But the analogy has raised
many issues. First, there is the matter of what we are to identify as a
film’s various systems. Music has, we shall see, provided many cues
“Quoted in John Whitney, “Moving Pictures and Electronic Music," Die Reihe no. 7
(1965), p. 70.

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David Bordwell

in this regard. Secondly, a musical piece exists in space and time; so

does a film. Yet the uses of the musical analogy have tended to stress
one attribute over another, yielding distinctly temporal or spatial
conceptions of film form. Finally, in seeking to define the interaction
of formal systems, film theorists have confronted the issue of accom-
paniment. Is one system dominant, dictating the substance and shape
of others? Or are the text’s systems equal in importance? Can we
conceive of a conflict among formal systems? In cinema, the issue
often emerges as whether “intrinsically cinematic” materials and
structures are to be subordinated to alien systems. This is the basis of
Wright’s wisecrack: abstract cinema accompanies nothing; cinema
usually ices some (narrative, theatrical) cake. In the two principal
traditions drawing upon the musical analogy, we shall see clearly
opposed attitudes toward the nature, the spatio—temporal features,
and the degree of independence of the formal systems that constitute
a film.

One tradition of film theory takes the musical analogy in a Wag-

nerian way. Sketching the art work of the future, Wagner foresaw a
grand synthesis of drama and music. Each was to be intricately
wrought and densely patterned in its own right; the mythic tale must
be intensely concentrated and the orchestra must draw upon its
“many-voiced” resources.5 Nevertheless, the center of the spectacle
remains the drama. It is the music’s task to fuse with the drama, to
penetrate its smallest crevice and amplify what cannot be said or
shown.

The orchestra’s equalizing moments of expression are never to be determined by

the caprice of the musician. as a random tricking out of sound, but only by the
poet's aim. Should these “moments” utter anything not connected with the situation
of the dramatis personae, anything superfluous thereto, then the unity of expression
is itself disturbed by this departure from the content.6

5Richard Wagner, Wagner on Music and Drama, selected and arranged by Albert
Goldman and Evert Sprinchom (New York. 1964), p. 221.
°lbid., pp. 228—229.

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In practice as well, Wagner’s overall musical structure remained

determined principally by dramatic action.7 Music complements, com-
pletes, and fulfills the drama in a continuous temporal process. In
film theory, Wagner’s assumptions were continued in the writings of
the French Impressionists and in the later works of Sergei Eisenstein.
It should not be surprising that the filmmakers and writers of
French Impressionism—Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein,
Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier—conceive of cinema along Wagner-
ian lines. As a theory of cinema, Impressionism links to Romantic
and Symbolist conceptions of the expressivity of art. Since, like
Mallarmé, the Impressionist theorist values evocation, allusion, and
suggestion in the art work, music becomes the privileged analogue.
Louis Delluc called film “that prodigious art which lives, like music,
off mathematical precision and mystery.”8 Gance’s pronouncement
became a slogan: “Cinema is the music of light.”9 What can the
analogy tell us about the structure of the film? Although the Impres-
sionists seldom cite Wagner explicitly, their aesthetic owes a great
deal to his conception of how two highly-wrought systems can fuse
into a single expressive whole.
For most Impressionists, the film retains narrative as one of those
systems, for, as Epstein observes: “Ordinarily, feeling can burst out
only from a situation, a story.”'0 But cinema is held to have its own
expressive possibilities, encapsulated for the Impressionists in the
term photoge’nie. Although various writings use the term differently,
photoge'nie can be seen as the power of cinema to transform physical
reality through mechanical and technical processes. Once transformed,
reality can reveal its essence. Lighting, camera placement and move-
ment, filters, and editing become the filmmaker’s tools for capturing
photoge’nie. That photogénie can create an interest distinct from the

’Wagner's musical structure, writes Robert Gutman, “was patched together out of
units whose occasional traditional plans were for the most part called into use, molded,
and modified by the requirements of drama. Motif, the musical flesh of these units.
was (ideally), for Wagner, a direct function of his unfolding poem." See Robert W.
Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and Hit Music (New York, 1973), p.
386.
a‘Louis Delluc, Cinéma et cie (Paris, 1919). p. 68.
9Abel Gance, La Beaute' d travers 1e cine’ma (Paris, 1926).
10Jean Epstein, “Réalisation des details," Cinéa no. 45 (17 March 1922), p. 12.

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David Bordwell

film’s narrative line is repeated tirelessly in Impressionist writing.

Dulac speaks of the visual idea as at odds with the recitation of story
actions; for René Clair and Elie Faure, a story is but a pretext for the
images. 1' Once the strength of photogénie is recognized, it can play
precisely the role of orchestral accompaniment in Wagnerian Opera
by extending and intensifying feelings latent in the drama. Dulac
dates the arrival of the Impressionist era from the moment that
filmmakers saw how editing and close-ups expanded the psychological
atmosphere: “Suggestion prolonged the action, thereby creating a
domain of emotion which was vaster because no longer confined
within particular actions.”‘2 Cinema swells beyond the narrative,
motivated by it but ultimately transcending it.
What is less Wagnerian in the Impressionist canon, however, is
the emphasis on rhythm. Rhythm becomes the all-purpose structural
concept, never defined precisely. A look at the films, however,
reveals that rhythmic play is usually motivated by narrative demands.
In L’lnhumaine (1923), very fast panning shots to posters are cut
together rapidly to build up anticipation for a concert. La roue (1922),
one of the founding films of the Impressionist style, contains several
bravura passages of accelerated rhythmic montage, always conveying
a character’s increased agitation. Machines, fairground rides, dances,
dizziness, drunkenness, mental turrnoil—any of these narrative factors
can justify markedly rhythmic construction. And although very few
Impressionist writings explore how cinema might borrow motivic
form from music, a film like Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher
reveals how small motivic forms were embedded as set-pieces within
elaborate rhythmic constructions. '3

"Germain Dulac, “Les esthétiques, lee entraves: la cinégraphie intégrale," L‘an

cinématographique [1 (Paris, 1927), p. 39; Rene Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today,
tr. Stanley Applebaum (New York, 1972), pp. 44—45; Elie Faure, Function du cinéma
(Paris. 1963), pp. 29—36.
l"Dulac, p. 42.
l30ne sequence is analysed in detail in my French Impressionist Cinema: Film
Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Iowa, 1974). pp. 204-206. Paul Ramain was one of the few writers of the period to use
motivic forms as models for cinema. See “De la construction thématique des films,"
Cinéa—Ciné pour (Ous no. 44 (2 Sept. 1925), pp. 9—-11, and “Metropolis,” Cinéa-Cine’
pour mus no. 91 (15 Aug. 1927), pp. 21 -22 and Cinéa-Ciné pour tous no. 93 (15 Sept.
1927), pp. 21—24.

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 Yale French Studies

Two facets of Impressionist rhythm remain within the Wagnerian

ambit, however. Since narrative constitutes the reference point for
rhythmic construction, photoge’nie retains an accompanying role.
Secondly, the insistence on rhythm stresses temporality. Although
the Impressionist considers cinematic time as rather simply pattemed—
that is, as pulse and accent—the theory highlights the tendency of the
Wagnerian tradition to make cinema an art of temporal process.
The Wagnerian trend re-emerges explicitly in the post-1930 writ-
ings and films of Sergei Eisenstein. “What most attracted me in
Wagner,” he explained while staging Die Walku're in 1940, “were his
opinions on synthetic spectacle . . . Men, music, light, landscape,
color, and motion brought into one integral whole by a single piercing
emotion, by a single theme and idea—this is the aim of modern
cinematography.”"‘ Just as Wagner bent music, gesture, language,
scenography, lighting, even architecture to one expresive end, so
does Eisenstein seek to fuse the various “lines” of cinema into an
audiovisual totality. The most famous example of Eisenstein’s impulse
remains his essay on Alexander Nevsky’s battle on the ice, which
seeks to show how music can synchronize precisely with even static
images. '5 In Non-Indzfi‘erem Nature, he explains that he composed one
scene in [van the Terrible I as a dense weave of visual and sonic
motifs. As Ivan slumps at his wife’s bier, his de3pair is given, again
and again, on every channel: Cherkasov’s performance, candlelight,
the choir’s singing, the architecture (“the cathedral as a whole ‘sings’
the basic score”), the majestically sagging drapery.l6 Once estab-
lished, each “line” can modulate into the theme of affirmation through
galvanic shifts in posture, the crash of candelabra, and the entry of a
swarm of torches. The goal is a cinema which accompanies the drama
more profoundly and intensely than ever before.
I"Sergei Eisenstein. “The Embodiment of a Myth." Film Essays and a Lecture,
ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1970). p. 85. Eisenstein’s debt to Wagner has been explored
in detail in Mary Peatman, Sergei Eisenstein's “Ivan the Terrible" as a Cinematic
Realization of the Concept of the “Gesamtszstwerk” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Indiana University, 1975) and Kristin Thompson, Form and Material in ”Ivan the
Terrible” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977).
I-"Sergei Eisenstein, “Form and Content: Practice," The Film Sense, ed. and tr.
Jav Leyda (New York. 1957), pp. 156—216.
I“Sergei Eisenstein, La non-indifféreme nature 2. tr. Luda and Jean Schnitzer
(Paris: Union générale d’éditions. 1978), pp. 212~215.

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David Bordwell

Like the Impressionist thinkers, the late Eisenstein uses the musical
analogy to stress temporality. His conception of time, however, goes
beyond the rather simple notions of rhythm underpinning the earlier
theory. Straightforward rhythmic cutting is not organic enough: sound
cinema, with its extra channels of expression, requires the total fusion
supplied by vertical montage. This conception of fusion includes not
only correspondence of emphasis between sound and image but also
coordinated alternation (e.g., weak accents against strong ones),
creating a saturated flow.‘7 Similarly, what counts is not the static
equivalence between a certain motif and a fixed theme; rather,
Eisenstein claims that these motifs must constantly modulate, rising
and fading. “You will get exactly nowhere with terms borrowed from
easel painting. You must use musical terminology because here every-
thing is tied to movement . . . . The base of the problem is that in
musical movement, there is a certain temporal orientation.”18 Else-
where I have tried to show that Eisenstein seeks to ground this time-
bound aesthetic process in a theory of concept formation, his cele-
brated doctrine of “inner speech.”'° As the most precise theorist of
cinematic dynamism— that process which steadily pulls the viewer to
ecstasy, out-of-stasis—Eisenstein exemplifies how the Wagnerian
strain of the musical analogy usefully stresses the experience of the
viewer in time.

II.

During a 1947 class on color and sound in Ivan the Terrible, a

student asked Eisenstein what would happen if the music and the
visuals were in conflict.20 Eisenstein dodged the question, but twenty
years earlier he had welcomed that very possibility. In his theoretical
work of the 19203, he laid the groundwork for conceiving cinematic
form as “dialectical” rather than “organic” and consequently opened

”lbid., pp. 265-275.

”Sergei Eisenstein, “Extrait d’un cours sur la musique et la oouleur dans Ivan le
Terrible, " Au-deld des e'toiles, tr. Jacques Aumont et 01. (Paris. 1974), pp. 303, 299.
I"David Bordwell, “Eisenstein‘s Epistemological Shift," Screen XV, 4 (Winter
1974/75), pp. 32-46.
20Eisenstein, “Extrait . . . ,” p. 297.

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the way to exploiting the musical analogy in a non-Wagnerian fashion.

Although he later turned from this alternative, it was posed again,
very forcefully, in the late 19605 by Noél Burch.
Eisenstein’s conception of a dialectical film form entails that the
various cinematic materials and structures gain a new independence,
and he finds in musical counterpoint a model of that independence.
Eisenstein’s conception of counterpoint is very roomy (it includes
“collision, conflict,
’7 (6
tension.
’3 6‘
non-synchronization,” “superim-
” 6‘

position”), but what he seeks is evident. Cinematic structure will be

perceived as distinct from and equal to narrative structure. “The plot
is no more than a device without which one isn’t yet capable of telling
something to the spectator.”2| The parity of cinematic form and
dramatic form is most sharply seen when the two don’t coincide; thus
Eisenstein notes that 01d and New rests upon “a conflict between
story and its traditional form. Emotive structures applied to non-
emotive material.”22 Montage creates perceptual, emotional, and
conceptual conflicts that propel the film at every level. From frame to
frame, within the shot, from shot to shot, from series to series and
episode to episode: conflict (“counterpoint”) of antithetical forces
becomes for Eisenstein the basis of a dynamic film form.
Most elaborately, Eisenstein’s various methods of montage exploit
the musical analogy in detail. Montage may be metric, rhythmic,
tonal, or overtonal. Each type, he claims, rests upon collision and
conflict: rhythmic montage is seen to negate metric beats, tonal
montage creates “dissonance,” the overtone must sharply oppose the
dominant tone.23 Even the relations of image and sound become
distinct, equal, and working in “contrapuntal conflict.”24
Here Eisenstein glimpses the possibility of thinking of the musical
metaphor in a non-hierarchical way. The ordinary film, he implies, is
constructed on metric, rhythmic, and “melodic” principles. That is,
the salient narrative material determines the length of the shot and

“Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” Film Form, tr. and
ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1957), p. 61.
”Eisenstein, “Methods of Montage,” Film Form, p. 77.
23Eisenstein, “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” Film Form, p. 68; “Methods of
Montage," p. 78.
2‘Eiisenstein, “Methods of Montage," p. 71.

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David Bordwell

the link from shot to shot. Overtonal montage, however, makes the
less salient material in the shots equal to the dominant material. This
move significantly shifts the terms of the musical analogy. In the
Wagnerian model, the film corresponds to the operatic piece (with
drama parallel to narrative and music to cinema). The early Eisen-
stein theory, on the other hand, conceives a film as analogous to a
piece of pure music, free of text. By making the narrative line
analogous to rhythm and melody, Eisenstein’s model need not favor
narrative action so much as Wagner’s does. Turning to Debussy and
Scriabin for examples, Eisenstein suggests that the vertical—har-
monic—dimension of music can enjoy equality with the horizontal
one. The secondary vibrations of a tone can create powerful effects of
their own in “their impacts against each other, their impacts with the
basic tone, and so on.”25 Eisenstein here points to how Impressionist
music uses chromaticism to undermine the listener's expectations
about upcoming musical events; when tonality is weakened, the work
shimmers irresolute over several keys and cadences become difficult
to predict. By analogy, the film can be so constructed that montage
on the dominant is constantly challenged by montage on overtones;
the visual overtones need not simply accompany the narrative melody.
Eisenstein only glimpses dialectical form here, however, because
he finds it hard to conceive of actual instances when the overtone
clashes with the dominant. In Old and New he can point only to
“ ‘synthetic’ combinations of tonal and overtonal montage” and
“constructions that are wholly a-dominant” but not anti—dominant.“5
The transitional historical role of Scriabin and Debussy resembles the
provisional quality of Eisenstein’s early application of the musical
analogy. The very concept of overtone commits the material to a
secondary function, one parasitic upon the dominant. A true conflict
between narrative structure and cinematic structure requires them to
be equal, and an analogy from tonal music, even in its Impressionist
phase, cannot supply that. The recasting of the musical analogy
became possible only when film theory had grasped that twentieth-
century composers were rethinking the relation of tonality to musical
ZSEisenstein. “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” p. 68.
2“’Ibt‘d.

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form. It was not until 1967 that Noél Burch proposed a theory of
cinematic form based upon concepts of atonality and serialism.
Since formal procedures of serial and post-serial composition
become the basis of Burch’s argument, his theory rests upon an
implicit comparison of tonal music and a certain mode of film form.
In classical and romantic music, formal unity derives from tonality.
The piece presents a horizontal unfolding, with tonality’s promise of
cadence giving intelligible shape to melodic and motivic forms. The
vertical dimension of harmony is subordinated to the forward temporal
movement. What in cinema can correspond to tonal composition?
For Burch, “illusionism.” Although he does not elaborate the con-
cept, an illusionist style seems to require that a film create a hierarchy
of systems in which represented action always dominates. Like tonality,
the imaginary world beyond the screen absorbs our entire attention,
thanks to the “zero-degree point of cinematic style.”27
In contrast, Burch appeals to the challenge which serial and post-
serial composition posed to tonality in music. Charles Rosen succinctly
describes the breakthroughs made by Schoenberg in this regard:

A centralized system, tonality. in which everything was ordered by its relation to a

fundamental perfect triad. had been replaced by a decentralized system in which
cadence or resolution was achieved partly by tone color, rhythm, texture, and
phrasing, and partly by the new importance given to chromatic saturation. There
was no longer a clear stylistic hierarchy, with everything subordinate to the so-
called “rules" of voioe-leading (the oontrapuntal resolution of harmonic dissonance).
Other elements in music now demanded an equal status with pitch.28

Although Schoenberg’s subsequent practice seems to have retained

the hierarchy of melody and accompaniment, Webem and later
composers went on to use the tone-row to determine the organization
of tone‘colors, attack, and intensity. According to Pierre Boulez,
Webem’s works show the series as “engendering permutations and
manifested through a distribution of intervals independent of hori-
zontal or vertical functions.”29 One effect of this “musical dialecties”
27N0iél Burch, Theory of Film Practice, tr. Helen R. Lane (New York. 1973), p.
xix.
28Charles Rosen. Arnold Schoenberg (New York. 1975), p. 63.
29Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, tr. Herbert Weinstock (New York,
1968). p. 302. Serialist hopes for the germinal power of the series are questioned in
Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago, 1967), pp. 235—316.

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David Bordwell

(Jean Barraqué’s phrase) is to break the sense of the work’s temp-

oral flow.30 If horizontal and vertical axes derive from the same
tone-row, the piece becomes a quasi-spatial event, what Andre Hodeir
calls “a pattern of geometrical figures in sound.”3'
It is the totalized rigor of organization in serial music that opens
up what film form might be. For Burch, the idea of the equality of
all compositional materials can be readily extended to cinema. He
insists that the film image reduces all visual stimuli to the same
level. “All the elements in the film image are perceived as equal in
importance.”2 Thus narrative components (the hero, a prop) are a
priori no more significant than any other area of the screen. Sound
is flattened out as well: recording and playback reduce all sound
components to the same perceptual level.33 This theoretical move
seeks to dethrone narrative structure as decisively as serial composi-
tion displaced tonality. Now film technique can become of central
interest in its own right. Using the serialist term “parameters,”
Burch suggests considering a film an organized interaction of all
pertinent dimensions, a “cellular” structure.

Serial composers appear to us to have a very similar conception of the relationships

between the basic choice of a tone row or tone rows (which provides a musical
work with its “subject," what classical musicians caled the “theme" of a work,
although tone rows function quite differently) and the form of the finished work.
Serial composers believe that the entire development of a musical work must be
derived from the basic cell or at least be located relative to it. even if the actual
cellular unit is never recognizable as such.34

Now the film’s represented content becomes only one parameter

among several.
At this point, however, Burch’s theory is confronted by a prob-
lem analogous to one facing serialism. What particular principles
will organize the entire art work? If no hierarchy determines the

30Quoted in Andre Hodeir, Since Debussy, tr. Noél Burch (New York, 1961), p.
75. Hodeir’s work has considerably influenced Burch’s. Burch has translated not only
Since Debussy but also Hodeir’s The Worlds of Jazz (New York. 1972).
3|Hodeir, Since Debussy, p. 76.
32Burch, Theory, p. 34.
33Ibid., pp. 91—92.
J‘lbid., p. 143. Burch later appeals to serialist theory in Noél Burch and Jorge
Dana, “Propositions," Afterimage no. 5 (Spring 1974), pp. 41—42.

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 Yale French Studies

function of each parameter, what makes the work distinguishable

from disorder? Without the teleology of tonal resolution, how does
the musical piece progress? If illusionist narrative is no longer salient.
how can the film be grasped? The serialists have come up with
several solutions to the problem. Schoenberg and Webem relied
upon neoclassical forms, such as the sonata and the variation. More
radically, Boulez has insisted that each piece find its unique inherent
logic.3S In cinema, Burch has identified one strategy for total organ-
ization: open form.
Burch conceives each parameter as an opposition: hard focus
versus soft, spatial continuity versus discontinuity, direct sound ver-
sus studio recording, and so on. If we grant all these parameters
equality, we can combine them in strictly varied ways. One scene can
use soft focus, discontinuity editing, and direct sound; another scene
can retain direct sound but use hard focus and continuity editing; a
third scene can retain sharp focus but use continuity editing and
studio sound. The result is a rigorous combinatoire that resembles
the variation form in its “repetition, alternation, elimination, pro-
gressive proliferation.”36
By itself, this conception of open form does not specify any tem-
poral sequencing of parts. A film could be just as open if it surveyed
the parameters in any order. Yet Burch’s exemplary open films—
M, Play Time, Une Simple Histoire, Cronaca di un amore—hardly
consist of indifferently arranged modules. Burch goes on to demand
that the open film he systematic as well as exhaustive, though its
system will necessarily be ad hoc. For example, M is seen as

structured around a rigorous organization of the film’s formal articulations, start-

ing with sequences in which each shot is temporally and spatially autonomous,
with time ellipses and changes in location playing the obviously predominant role,
then gradually and systematically evolving toward the increasing use of the contin-
uity cut, finally culminating in the famous trial sequence in which temporal and
spatial continuity are strictly preserved for some ten minutes.”

Presumably, then, the problem is that confronting the composer of

3"‘Boulez, Notes. p. 303.

3"’Burch, Theory, p. 30.
371biat, p. 14.

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David Bordwell

theme and variations: one must sequence the variations in some

logical way. The point for Burch is that narrative structure should
play no greater role in the sequencing than does any other para-
meter.
What justifies calling such a rigourously disciplined form “open”?
Burch’s theory links to reflections on the open art work that were
current in France in the late 19605, such as Boulez’s Penser la musique
aujourd’hui (1963) and Releve’s d’apprenti (1966) and Eco’s L’oeuvre
ouverte (translated 1965). In several essays, Boulez calls for a musical
piece that will be both rigorous and responsive to “free will”; his
essay, “Aléa,” is an important source for Burch’s chapter on chance
structures.38 Eco cites several senses in which the term “open” may
be applied to a text, and Burch’s conception of film form responds
most clearly to Beds second meaning: a work may be so dense that it
is “Open to a continuous generation of internal relations which the
consumer must uncover and select in the act of perceiving the totality
of incoming stimuli.”39 (Eco’s example is Finnegans Wake.) For
Burch, the equality of parameters and the complexity of their inter-
action generate a dense system of relations. Play Time becomes the
first truly open film because “it is the first in the history of cinema that
not only must be seen several times, but also must be viewed from
different distances from the screen.”“° The film is so overloaded that
the viewer can grasp only some of the internal relations at any one
moment. Each viewing becomes, in Eco’s words, “the actualization
of a strongly individualized formativity, whose premises are firmly
rooted in the original data provided by the author.”‘" This means, of
course, that each film must continually find its own unique form; no
recipe will do.
Like other versions of the musical analogy, Burch’s theory advan-
ces the possiblity that a film’s form may be conceived not as one
primary pattern but as the complex relations created by several
patterns. Burch’s theory is, though, more comprehensive than those

38Boulez, Nates, pp. 35-51.

3"Umberto Eco, “Poetics of the Open Work," Twentieth Century Studies no. 12
(Dec. 1974), p. 24.
”Burch, Theory, p. 47.
"Eco, p. 23.

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of his predecessors. The late Eisenstein is biased toward congruence

and fusion; Burch includes fusion as simply one alternative. Cronaca
di un amore exemplifies “the possibility of an essential structural
unity in the form of a continual and alternating series of divergences
and convergences between sound and image, a dialectical rhythm that
sometimes joins and sometimes separates what used to be called form
and content.”42 Accompaniment becomes simply one moment in the
total structure of the film.
In one sense, Burch’s analogy is dialectical in permitting us to see
serial devices as negating historical norms. Just as atonality becomes
significant only against the background of tonality, systematic editing
mismatches must be grasped by reference to continuity cutting, asynch-
ronous sound must be read as rejecting synchronization. But within
the film’s total form, Burch has no better luck than Eisenstein in
demonstrating a dialectic which gives full sway to the negative mo-
ment. M may riffle through a system of permutations ranging from
discontinuity to continuity, but this progress can be seen as expressing
the ongoing narrative line, with the finale’s actor-centered hysteria
most effectively shot in lengthy takes. The frame entries and exits in
the bridge scene in Cronaca create “a hallucinatory rhythm under-
scoring the nature of the quarrel between the lovers.“3 It is not only
that such claims swing back toward a notion of accompaniment. The
problem is that the final stress on unity can encourage serialism’s
already spatial conception of form to freeze into an abstract homo-
geneity. Sophisticated as the serialist theory is, its open forms may
rest upon a conception of stasis that the Wagnerian theory, for all its
reductiveness, manages to avoid.

111.

It may be, though, that the difficulty of thinking of cinema as both

dynamic and dialectical grows out of the musical analogy itself. After
all, how can we theorize music as heterogeneous when music has
typically embodied the transcendence of the autonomous art work?
“Burch, Theory, p. 79; italics mine.
‘3lbt'd., p. 28; italics mine.

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Everything that makes the analogy attractive—music’s presentation

of pure architectonics, its tendency to check representation—may
finally rest upon its embodying the suprasocial autonomy of art itself.
All art aspires to the condition of music, T.W. Adomo suggests,
because the very uselessness of music typifies culture’s tendency to
fetishize commodities: “In a society that has been functionalized
virtually through and through, totally ruled by the exchange principle,
lack of function comes to be a secondary funtion.”‘“ The ideology of
music, to put it schematically, has been to embody the absence of
ideology. And it must be said, I think, that even the film theories
most committed to textual disruption have appealed to the musical
analogy in order to push film toward formal autonomy.
Is it then a question of scrapping the analogy as hopelessly regres-
sive? Certain recent films, in particular Huillet-Straub’s Cronik der
Anna Magdalena Bach, suggest that things are not so simple, that the
musical analogy remains necessary even if troublesome—necessary
insofar as troublesome. First, the film’s construction is modeled upon
certain musical procedures. Straub calls the film’s fragmentary nar-
rative scenes “points” in Stockhausen’s sense of elements “existing
for themselves and in complete freedom and formulated individually
and in considerable isolation from each other.”“5 But the musical
analogy becomes fruitful here exactly because it is partial. What
occupies the rest of Cronik is the representation of music itself, in
manuscript scores, in printed editions, and especially in performances.
Music is represented in a double aspect—as commodity and as aes-
thetic pleasure. Unlike the traditional “bio-pic” treating a musician’s
life, Cronik never shows us Bach composing; what we see is the
process which transforms a score into an acoustic event. In the film’s
context, the performance becomes a commodity with exchange value
(Bach works as kapellmeister, teacher, virtuoso). Hence the film’s
lengthy performance sequences stress the specifics of production:

“T. W. Adomo, Philosophy of Modern Music. tr. Anne C. Mitchell and Wesley
V. Blomstcr (New York, 1973), p. 41. See also Bertolt Brecht, “Théorie de la
musique,” Sur 1e cinema (Paris, 1970), p. 96.
“Quoted in Karl l-I. Womer, Stockhausen: Life and Work (Berkeley. 1976), 81;
see also Jean-Man'e Straub. “Sur ’Chronique d’Anna Magdalena Bach!“ Cahiers du
cinema no. 193 (Sept. 1967), p. 56.

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segments of pieces are played in tow and the audiences are never
shown. Yet while the voice-over commentary, the narrative scenes,
and our knowledge of Bach’s life define the performance as histor-
ically specific labor, these sequences also present music-making as
intrinsically engrossing activity—as chamber music is described by
Adomo as “pure doing . . . labor as play.“6 What we hear is music in
its intrinsic aspect, pure pattern in an abstract autonomy; what we are
forced to see are physical gestures devoid of sentiment, determinate
procedures, concrete work which qualifies this autonomy. Cronik der
Anna Magdalena Bach uses the musical analogy to examine the very
problem of music—its historical functions, its modes of production,
and its “relative autonomy” with respect to those functions and
modes. What permits this examination is, precisely, cinema as a
mixed representational mode, its unyielding impurity. The analogy
turns inside out: instead of music operating as an overarching formal
model holding representation in check, representation—reconsidered
as a social process—places music and, indeed, formal autonomy
within a wider context. If we want to know how cinema may work
upon the social and the suprasocial, the musical analogy must persist,
for it crystallizes the drive of film form toward multiple systems. But
these systems must be situated within the process of cinema’s hetero-
geneity.

“T. W. Adamo, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, tr. E. B. Ashton (New

York, 1976), p. 87.

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