¶ … aesthetic terms from the days in which the musical accompaniment of a film consisted primarily of a pianist or organist sitting in the theater and taking cues on what to play by watching the silenced action on the screen. And yet, in other and probably more important ways, we have come no real distance at all, for music now (as it did since the very first movie) helps to determine the overall emotional impact of a film. This paper examines the film scores from two recent productions, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Iron Monkey."
Overall, the musical score for a film helps knit together all of the different technical elements of a film as well as all of the different thematic elements:
Picture and track, to a certain degree, have a composition of their own but when combined they form a new entity. Thus the track becomes not only a harmonious complement but an integral inseparable part of the picture as well. Picture and track are so closely fused together that each one functions through the other. There is no separation of I see in the image and I hear on the track. Instead, there is the I feel, I experience, through the grand total of picture and track combined. (Flinn p. 46)
Jack of All Trades and Master As Well
The musical score for a movie performs at least a half-score of dozen distinct roles. Each of those will be assessed here for both of the movie scores, the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" score by composer Tan Dun and the score by James L. Venable Newman for "Iron Monkey."
The first function of the score is simply to connect the individual elements of the music (the motifs, themes, harmonies and colors to the non-musical elements of the film - to the characters, the events and places, the physical objects that make up the worlds of the characters and to the overall motifs and themes in the film. The score also serves to connect the viewer to the characters and to the visceral feeling of the viewing the film itself. Music draws both the audience and the characters into the moment of the action.
The "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" score is especially adept at this last function. The musical score helps to create an overall feel for the movie: The music calls to mind a specific era and a specific place with great effectiveness. One of the strengths of both the movie in general and of the score in particular is that it is able to be so evocative of a place that is not real.
It is, after all, relatively easy for a filmmaker with all of the tools of the modern cinema, to recreate and call to mind a particular moment in history - verisimilitude is difficult, but it can be achieved with care. However, it is a much more difficult task to create a feeling of unity and cohesion when the world that is being shot is the land of the imagination.
The music is not as visually beautiful as the movie - at least not to Western listeners - but it provides a sensory basis for the film, in the same way that the rocks on a shore are necessary to produce the beauty of water-spray and prismatic light:
If the score by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun does not immediately strike one as being particularly distinctive, it may simply be that it perfectly evokes exactly the sound one imagines for an epic scale historical Chinese romantic adventure. To Western ears this might be the archetypal Chinese film score, with all the characteristic devices of films such as The Last Emperor (ironically composed by the Japanese Ryuichi Sakamoto and American David Byrne) present and correct. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is elegant, majestic, spare, haunting, epic and somehow timeless, summoning vast landscapes and a world centuries gone by with what seems like consummate ease (http://www.musicweb.uk.net/film/2000/Nov00/crouching_tiger.html).
The "Iron Monkey" score, on the other hand, is less effective at connecting the audience to a particular time and place but generally more effective at connecting us to the main character of the film. This is not a criticism of either film, for "Iron Monkey" is less about a particular individual and more about an era while the reverse is true of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"(which is about the couple at the center of the story but also about their effacement as well). In each case the score reflects this focus.
In both films, the music acts as a sort of narrative, helping the viewer adjust to the ways in which...
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