Debisijev kasni stil

8/8/2019 Debisijev kasni stil

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/debisijev-kasni-stil 1/25

Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices

of the Early Silent Cinema

Rebecca Leydon

introduction

Mosaic-like designs characterize musical form in Debussy’slate style, exemplied in the twelve piano etudes, written in 1915,and the contemporaneous chamber music. Like their orchestralprecursor Jeux, these works exhibit fragmented arrangements of heterogeneous motivic materials and free juxtaposition of tonaland nontonal pitch resources. Such moments are peculiar to andpervasive within the composer’s late style. But above all, it is thefascinating methods of “enchainment” in these works—their enig-matic transitions, their disjunctive reiterations and duplications—

that has puzzled and intrigued listeners and performers. This paperproposes a model for the continuity and succession of ideas inDebussy’s late style by situating his late works within the contextof the technologies used in the early silent cinema—specically,the repertory of cinematic editing techniques that are contempora-neous with this music.

In positing a cinematic model for Debussy’s music, I am imag-ining something like Anthony Newcomb’s narratological conceptof “modes of continuation.”1 Modeling his approach to musical

form on the narratology of the Russian Formalist Vladmir Propp,Newcomb views narrative as an ordered series of “functions” andcharacterizes the structural analysis of narrative as a process by

which a paradigmatic plot—a typical series of events in a pre-scribed order—is deduced from a repertoire of texts. Newcombstresses that this paradigmatic plot

. . . is not the same thing as a quasi-architectural formal schema, such asABA, with its patterns of repetition and complementarities. The paradig-matic plot may be a unidirectional unfolding of events, without overt rep-etition. Nor is it the same as a series of musical sections dened by spe-cic thematic content. The surface content of each individual instance of the series may differ widely. The paradigmatic plot is a series of func-tions, not necessarily dened by patterns of sectional recurrences or bythe specic characters fullling the functions. 2

Newcomb’s approach, then, does not rely solely upon theschematic conventions peculiar to musical forms. Instead, New-comb asks, What are the codes according to which we isolate dis-crete musical events, and what are the codes we invoke to locatethese events within a paradigmatic series? The patterns that char-acterize musical continuity and succession (as opposed to specicmotivic content) are perceived according to patterns that are storedin memory, patterns that are generalizable enough to govern event

successions in more than one medium:Inasmuch as music may be (and is by many listeners) heard as a mimeticand referential metaphor, the mimesis involved is of modes of continuation,

2Newcomb 1987, 165.1Newcomb 1987.



218 Music Theory Spectrum

of change and potential. And modes of continuation lie at the very heart of narrativity, whether verbal or musical.3

Because so much of Debussy’s music essentially preserves the

recognizable shapes of familiar tonal objects (triads and seventhchords, for example), our attention is drawn more directly to theircurious linkages. While the pitch-collectional basis of Debussy’smusic (its pervasive octatonicism and hexatonicism, for example,as elucidated by Allen Forte and Richard Parks4) is responsible formany unusual new sonorities, Debussy’s originality so often liesin the new orderings and contexts for familiar sonorities. In the re-mainder of this paper I shall demonstrate how, upon the develop-ment of a new popular narrative medium around 1900—the silent

cinema—new paradigmatic modes of continuation emerge, onesthat modify the classical narrative syntax of traditional story-telling media. Just as Newcomb imagines a kind of a cross-domain mapping among music and the nineteenth-century novel, Iclaim that the repertoire of cinematic editing devices can serve asa key interpretant for a set of homologous musical structures. Inpositing cinematic devices as cognates for musical ones, my goalis to foster discussion about musical signication, which may inturn provide a basis for more effective pedagogy and performance

of this music. Finally, cinematic models offer an attractive alterna-tive to rigidly hierarchical accounts of Debussy’s musical syntax.

Although very few of the lms from the early 1900s have sur-vived, extant lm reviews and contemporary criticism evoke avivid sense of the early cinema, how it was received and what itsmost salient devices were. For modern cinema audiences, thesedevices have been largely internalized as part of a “lm-reading”competence, but early lm reviews by Emile Vuillermoz, LouisDelluc, Louis Aragon, and others, as well as remarks made by

Debussy himself, reveal the extent to which early cinema im-pressed its spectators. I begin with a discussion of early lm criti-cism that refers to cinematic techniques and lm-editing practices

made possible by and peculiar to the motion-picture camera,which techniques and practices give expression to a new kind of visual logic. They include the “fade,” in which the screen gradu-ally turns black; the “dissolve,” in which one image gradually dis-appears while another emerges; the “cut-in,” an instantaneous cutto a close shot; the juxtaposition of different camera angles; andthe varieties of special effects involving stop-motion tricks, ad-

justment of lm speed and direction, double-exposure of the lm,and matted images. The accounts of early lm reviewers makeclear that such devices represented a radical departure from thetemporal and spatial orientations to which traditional theater-goerswere accustomed. In the second part of the paper, I consider anumber of musical situations as cognates for cinematic ones, andI illustrate how the particular narrative situations that give rise tothese devices in lms can suggest specic formal functions for themusical passages in which analogous devices occur in Debussy’slate works. In the nal section of the paper, I discuss how De-bussy’s cultivation of a “cinematic” style may be understood in re-lation to French nationalism in the years surrounding the rst

world war.

the early cinema

It is a matter of some debate exactly who should be consideredthe original inventor of cinema, since a number of moving-picturetechnologies were developed independently at around the sametime in Europe and America. Certainly ideas about motion pictureswere circulating in France from an early date. In the 1880s, for ex-

ample, the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge had orga-nized lectures in the Parisian salons to show his “motion studies,”sequences of photographs taken in quick succession and then pro-

jected onto a screen using a device called a “Zoopraxiscope.” Arelated form of entertainment, popular in the Montmartre cabarets

3Newcomb 1987, 167.4Forte 1991 (developing work begun in Forte 1988), and Parks 1989.

Parks’s comprehensive theory of Debussy’s pitch language expands and encom-passes Forte’s octatonic angle, and explores the role of hexatonicism, diatoni-cism, pentatonicism, and other referential collections in the music.



Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 219

of the 1890s, was the ombres chinoises; Richard Langam Smithhas written of the “shadow plays” performed by Henri Riviere inthe Chat Noir to piano accompaniment by Eric Satie, Charles de

Sivry, and other musicians in regular attendance at the popularclub. Smith speculates that Debussy himself attended these proto-cinematic spectacles, and may well have provided musical accom-paniments on occasion. Indeed, Smith argues that these music-hallspectacles likely played a signicant role in the genesis of De-bussy’s Iberia and other works.5

Louis Lumière is usually credited with the invention of cin-ema. With his brother Auguste in their Lyons factory, Lumièremanufactured photography equipment and in the 1890s designedthe rst “cinematographe,” a machine that combined the functionsof a moving-picture camera and a projector. On December 28,1895—the date usually considered the birth of cinema—Lumièrescreened a number of short lms before a paying audience.6 Oneof these lms, entitled La Sortie des usines Lumière, is typicalof these rst works by Lumière: a single shot of the outside of thefactory shows the doors swinging open and workers emergingfrom inside. Lumière went on to make hundreds of these shortsingle-shot lms. Perhaps the most famous of these is L’Arrivee

d’un train a la Ciotat, which shows a steam train moving towards

the camera at an oblique angle; it is anecdotally reported that themembers of the audience frantically took cover under their chairs,so unprepared were they for the realism of this cinematic image.

The rst cinema audiences were fascinated by the simple de-piction of motion itself, as they experienced a sort of defamiliar-

ization of ordinary objects and events, like the movement of thetrain or the factory workers. Anything that moved could supplythe subject for a lm. Soon, however, the moving-picture tech-

nology was put to the more specialized use of bringing unusualscenes and images of remote places into the local theatre. Manyof the rst popular cinema productions were of scenic points of interest, like Niagara Falls, the American West, views from thebridge of a ship on the high seas or through the window of a mov-ing train. These kinds of “nature lms” were enormously popularat the 1900 Paris Exposition. A technically spectacular example isRaoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama, in which ten projectors werearranged in the middle of a spherical auditorium, offering theviewers the experience of the Sahara desert as seen from a bal-loon.7

The lm theorist Noël Burch has remarked on the unique senseof motion and space that is represented in these rst cinematicevents; the experience for the spectator is quite different from any-thing associated either with the traditional theatre or with an ordi-nary lived experience of space. Burch points out that the work of early lm-makers antedates what he calls the “Institutional Modeof Representation” [IMR] in cinema.8 The IMR is the repertoireof lmic devices that would eventually become a fully developed

visual language of cinema, a language to which all present-dayspectators have been thoroughly exposed through movies andtelevision. It is a language that is in no way “natural,” Burch em-phasizes, but is rather a product of a particular history. While a

5Smith 1973.6Although Lumière is usually credited with developing the combined cam-

era and projector, two Americans, Thomas Armat and C. Frances Jenkens, had

independently come up with a similar invention, the “Phantoscope,” somemonths earlier. They had used this device to project moving pictures for an au-dience at an exhibition in Atlanta in 1895, but they did not meet with any com-mercial success at that time. By this date, Thomas Edison had already patentedhis “kinetoscope,” a contraption that allowed a single spectator to view tiny pro-

jected moving images.

7Also shown at the Exposition was the Lumière Brothers’ Maréorama,

which simulated the view from the bridge of a ship on the high seas. Similarlms were popular across the Atlantic: in 1904 the American lm-makerGeorge C. Hale presented his Tours and Scenes of the World, which simulated

the view one would have from the window of a train. Other notable examplesof these early “interest lms” are those of James Freer, a Canadian farmerfrom Brandon, who captured scenes of the wilds of Manitoba. Freer’s lmswere shown throughout Europe during the late 1890s in a tour organized by theCanadian Pacic Railway Company.

8Burch 1990.




modern lm-maker can rely on spectators’ ability to understand,for instance, that a juxtaposition of two views of a single objectshot from two different angles represents the same object, the rst

lm-makers had no such common visual code: an instantaneousshift in perspective was not something with which spectators hadhad any prior experience. Similarly, a modern lm-maker canrely on certain visual conventions to convey temporal ideas, like“later” or “meanwhile,” but these codes were unavailable to therst people working within the medium. To grasp the impact of early lm, the modern spectator must try to imagine the silent cin-ema as seen through the eyes of an audience unstudied in the vari-ous conventions that modern cinema audiences have internalizedas a lm-reading competence.

The unique experience of space that Burch describes is a resultof a variety of cinema-specic devices made possible by the exi-bility of the camera’s eye. A camera may record moving objectsfrom a xed position; it may pan across a static scene from a xedpoint; it may also shift instantaneously to a new view or angle;and the camera may be mounted on a conveyance which itself moves through space. In this last case, the “tracking shot,” the cin-ematic spectator experiences a curious kind of motionless voyage.It is as though the camera has a bodily agency, serving as a site of

subjectivity which the viewer is invited to occupy. On the otherhand, the camera’s eye may also represent something seen by aparticular subject within the diegetic world of the lm. Or thecamera may function like an unmarked omnipresent narrator in anovel, seeing everything from all points of view. The silent cin-ema, lacking overt narration, creates a unique situation in whichthe spectator’s position with respect to the imaginary space of thelm is ambiguous. Vivian Sobchack has explored the uctuatingsubjective position of the cinematic spectator, the different possi-

bilities for what she calls the “site of sight” or the “viewing view”:. . . we know from our own lived experience what our bodily orientation,attention, and visual investment in the world ‘look like’ as they informand play across our objectively visible bodily presence to others. We cansee the visible and objective body of another who is looking at the world

or ourselves, and understand that objective body is also a body-subjectwhose sight is as intentional and meaningful as our own. What is sounique about the cinema’s ‘viewing view’, however, is that it presents andrepresents the activity of vision not merely as it is objectively seen by us,

but also as it is introceptively lived by another. Thus the cinema’s ‘view-ing view’ is a model of vision as it is lived as ‘my own’ by a body-subject,and its uniqueness is that this ‘viewing view’ is objectively visible for usin the same form as it is subjectively visual for itself. . . . The structureand activity of the cinema’s ‘viewing view’ are isomorphic with our ownbodily experience of vision as we dynamically live it as ‘mine.’9

What was so unusual about the early silent cinema, then, wasthe mobility and exibility of the camera’s eye and the radically

new representations of space made possible by the multiplicity of shots and perspectives.10 While some of these cinematic devicescan be understood as extensions of the lighting and staging tech-niques already available in live theatre or opera, other devices rep-resent a radical departure from traditional stage presentation. Therst spectators’ inexperience with these devices is brought into re-lief when we consider the utter transparency of the same devicesfor modern viewers. For instance, a 1906 lm called La Danse du

Diable, produced by the Pathé-Frères lm company, presents anelaborately costumed character who appears to be rolling aroundon the oor. The scene is lmed with the camera oriented in a

9Sobchack 1991.10Early lm-makers frequently treated the cinematic frame itself as a exi-

ble form by employing irises and masks (adjustable apertures of differentshapes and sizes), which provided alternatives to the normal rectangular formof the cinematic frame. Examples can be found throughout D. W. Grifth’s Intolerance of 1916. Multiple-frame imagery was also sometimes employed, inwhich the screen was divided into separate segments containing different im-ages. This technique reached its zenith with the lms of Abel Gance in the

1920s, but it already occurred in Phillips Smalley’s Suspense of 1913. It is alsoimportant to remember that the aspect ratio of the frame in the early cinema—the ratio of the frame’s width to its height—was not standardized. Unlike thelater “talkies,” no space was required along the side of the lm strip for theband of sound. Consequently, silent cinema’s screen was generally wider thanthe one we are accustomed to seeing today.




downward vertical tilt. It is difcult for modern spectators to graspthe point of this peculiar lm unless we realize that we are notsupposed to recognize the downward tilt of the camera. Rather we

are meant to perceive the actor performing his acrobatics withinthe traditional proscenium frame and thus witness a “magical,”gravity-defying dance. Noël Burch remarks:

The effectiveness of this trick at the time undoubtedly lay in the fact thatthe clues to downward verticality were absolutely unrecognizable—it wasan unthinkable angle never seen in a system whose basic reference pointwas a at screen unfailingly perpendicular to the gaze of a spectatorseated in a theatre. 11

These rather simplistic examples aside, the technical sophisti-cation of many early lms was often quite remarkable, as lm-makers rapidly began to take advantage of a host of new tech-niques and special effects, many of them developed by the cinemapioneer George Méliès. Between 1895 and 1914, Méliès madeover a thousand fantasy lms that exploit all types of cinematicdevices. As the director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, Paris’sforemost magic theatre, Méliès treated the cinema essentially as asort of magic show, and his work explores an array of cinematicillusions. For example, it was Méliès who rst used the uniquely

cinematic technique of the dissolve, in which one image is seen togradually fade away at the same time as a second image graduallyemerges. Adjustment of the lm speed and direction, double expo-suresand superimpositions, stop-motion tricks, glass shots (in whichthe camera shoots through glass on which a scene has beenpainted) and model animation were all used extensively by Méliès.12

Many examples of these camera tricks are found throughout his

well-known lm La voyage dans la lune of 1902, based on JulesVerne’s novel of the same name. A notable instance is when theexplorers rst arrive at their destination (in a rocket shot from a

cannon): as the characters lie down to sleep on the moon’s sur-face, Méliès has the actors occupy the bottom part of the framewhile the upper portion remains completely black. Into this blackarea, Méliès inserts a second image—a process called “matting,”in which an additional image is produced either through re-exposure of a selected portion of the lm or by actually tting asecond piece of lm into the space. At this point in the lm, a seriesof magical dissolves now begins, with images of stars, celestialbodies, and actors dressed as various mythological personae fad-ing in and out of view in the space above the sleeping explorers.

Other French lm-makers began to make use of multiple cam-era set-ups, lming the actors from various angles and continu-ously changing the perspective in the editing. They also began toincorporate the “cut-in” (or “close-up”), an instantaneous shiftfrom a distant framing to a closer view of the same space.13

Naturally such devices have been internalized as part of a modernlm-reading competence, but early lm reviews reveal the extentto which cinema’s rst viewers were impressed by the shiftingperspectives of the camera. Contemporary accounts indicate that

the shifting spatial orientation was so strongly marked in relation

11Burch 1990, 228. Another lm of this type is The Ingenious Soubrette,

produced by Pathé Frères in 1902, which shows a woman apparently walkingstraight up the side of a wall in order to hang a picture.

12Variable lm speed appears very early in cinema history, as represented bytime-lapse experiments such as Muybridge’s motion studies. The “normal”speed of early silent lm is in the range of 16–20 frames per second, consider-ably slower than that of modern lm. Because this rate is below the fusion

threshold of about 24 frames per second, these early lms had a pronouncedicker when projected—hence the term “icker” or “ick” used to refer tomovies. Today, in order to eliminate the icker, silent lms are sometimes pro-

jected at sound-lm speed which accounts for the fast motion that is erro-neously associated with cinema of this period.

13While it is sometimes reported that early French lmmakers used the longshot almost exclusively,Burch has shown that this is not the case.

Contrary to a highly tenacious myth, the medium close-up and even thetrue close-up are found in the very earliest stages of the cinema, inEurope and in the USA. They rapidly became an established presence inthe rst decade, so that it can be stated, with no wish to cultivate para-dox, that the development of institutional editing among the Americans,the Danes, and so on, was to reduce the proportion of medium close-upsand close-ups in the cinema. (Burch 1990, 24.)




to normative proscenium staging that it could signicantly impairthe audience’s ability to comprehend a narrative. For example, aslate as 1912, a lm critic known as Yhcam complained of the dis-

rupting effect produced by the close-up:In order that their [the actors] facial expressions could be seen clearly bythe spectators (in all corners of the hall), the director has had to project theactors in close-shots as often as possible. This method, which gives goodresults, has quickly degenerated into an excessive practice. . . . Naturally,little by little, this misuse has been pursued conscientiously by the direc-tors of other companies. Now we have reached what could be called the

age of the legless cripple. For three quarters of the time, the actors in ascene are projected in close shot, cut off at the knees; from an artisticpoint of view the effect produced is highly disagreeable and shocking . . .

the impression [is] of characters of unnatural grandeur. And when the ag-grandizement diminishes and they return to normal, the same characterseems too small; the eye takes a certain time to get used to this. . . . Thedirector should always begin by projecting the subject with a clear refer-ence point, for example a dog with a man. If later he wants to increase thesize of one or the other, in order to better capture details, he should an-nounce to the audience that the subject is being projected in an enlarge-ment of two, three, or four times.14

While these instantaneous changes in the camera’s view were

sometimes experienced as disruptive, other critics were delightedby the same effect. One was Emile Vuillermoz, the student and bi-ographer of Gabriel Fauré, who was well-known as a critic of bothmusic and lm. In his review of a 1915 lm, The Battle Cry of

Peace, he writes:

Here I touch on one of the most marvelous technical possibilities of thecinema art. This ability to juxtapose, within several seconds, on the sameluminous screen, images which generally are isolated in time or space,

this power (hitherto reserved to the human imagination) to leap from oneend of the universe to another, to draw together antipoles, to interweavethoughts far removed from one another, to compose, as one fancies, aceaselessly changing mosaic out of millions of scattered facets of the tan-

gible world . . . all this could permit a poet to realize his most ambitiousdreams—if poets would become interested in the cinema and the cinemawould interest itself in poets! . . . More fortunate than painting and sculp-ture, the cinema, like music, possesses all the riches, all the inections,and all the nuances of beauty in movement: cinema produces counterpointand harmony . . . but still awaits its Debussy.15

This account is striking since it links Debussy’s name with cin-ematic techniques; it also emphasizes the conspicuousness of lmediting for this viewer (who barely even mentions the lm’s “con-tent” in the complete review). Whether viewers found these cine-matic devices attractive or disruptive, it is certain that such tech-niques represented a radical departure from the temporal andspatial orientations to which traditional theater-goers were accus-tomed.

Above all, the rst proponents of the cinema valued it most forits verisimilitude, its ability to depict “things as they really are,”particularly things in the natural world. And many critics werequick to see the poetic possibilities in cinema, a potential for a

kind of psychological verisimilitude. Writers like Vuillermoz wereinterested in the way that devices such as the dissolve could evokedreams, hallucinations, or imitate real human perception. It wasclaimed that cinema could achieve this representation in a mannermore compelling than could traditional painting or poetry. Thisopinion enjoyed the support of contemporary psychoanalysis: In1914, the German psychoanalyst Otto Rank wrote that

Representation in the movies, which is suggestive of dream technique inmore than one respect, expresses in clear and sensual picture-language

certain conditions and connections that the Poet cannot always expresswith words.16

14Yhcam 1912. Quoted in Abel 1988, 72–3. Well after the technique had be-come widespread, complaints about the close-up continued to be voiced: thelm-maker and writer Henri Diamant-Berger felt it was much overused, and thecelebrated writer Colette objected to “the technique that separates two speakersof a dialogue, that projects them in turn in huge close-ups, just when it is impor-tant to compare their faces together.”

15Vuillermoz 1916. Quoted in Abel 1988, 131.16Rank 1971, 7. Originally published as Der Doppelgänger (Leipzig: 1914).




But while cinema’s verisimilitude was praised by writers likeVuillermoz, the realism of the camera could sometimes contradicttraditional codes of representation. Film legend has it that whenMuybridge’s rst stop-motion analyses of race horses revealedthat the positioning of the horse’s legs did not correspond to thestandard way of depicting this motion in painting, some peoplehad difculty believing that the photographs were real.17 This sortof contradiction would have delighted Debussy and other artists of the day who felt that real, “natural” representation had been hin-dered by academic formulae. The desire to bring the full supple-ness of the natural world into the theatre, reected so clearly inevents like the Cineorama of 1900, is equally evident in Debussy’sdesire to cultivate in music “an art of the open air, an art compara-ble to the elements—the wind, the sea, and the sky!”—a kind of randomness, “subject to laws of beauty inscribed in the move-ments of nature herself.”18 Debussy argues that music is betterequipped than the other arts to depict the suppleness of nature, byvirtue of its temporal dimension:

Despite their claims to be representationalists, the painters and sculptorscan only present us with the beauty of the universe in their own free,somewhat fragmentary, interpretation. They can capture only one of its as-pects at a time, preserve only one moment. It is the musicians alone whohave the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of night and day,of earth and sky. Only they can recreate nature’s atmosphere and giverhythm to her heaving breast. 19

What many artists found attractive in the cinema was preciselyits spatial and temporal exibility, something which gave it thepower to counteract the stiffness of rigid academic representa-tional codes. It is not surprising, therefore, that Debussy consid-ered the cinema as a promising model for music. In a 1913 SIM

bulletin Debussy writes:

There remains but one way of reviving the taste for symphonic musicamong our contemporaries: to apply to pure music the techniques of cine-matography. It is the lm—the Ariadne’s thread—that will show us theway out of this disquieting labyrinth. 20

musical counterparts to cinematic devices

In his late works, Debussy employed a variety of unusual pro-cessive strategies, and a model for his “modes of continuation”—those characteristic means of following one musical event withanother—can be found in the cinematic devices I have been de-scribing: the dissolve, the juxtaposition of different camera angles,the direct cut, the close-up, as well as adjustments of lm speedand direction, superimpositions and matted images, and double-exposure of the lm. Given how conspicuous these techniqueswere for the rst cinema audiences, could the formal disruptionsrepresented by these lmic devices have suggested solutions forthe problem of continuity and succession with which Debussy wasfaced in his modied tonal idiom? Cinematic devices, in otherwords, may have served as a source of new formal options thatbecame available with the advent of a new narrative medium.Certain punctuation shots, for examples, like the dissolve and the

direct cut, have musical counterparts in Debussy’s techniques of transition and enchainment. Moreover, the particular narrative sit-uations that give rise to these devices in lms suggest the possibil-ity of signifying relationships with the musical passages in whichcognate devices occur.

The dissolve is one of the most salient devices specic to thecinematic medium. It allows the lm-maker to link any two shotswith a perfectly smooth transition. A comparable musical tech-nique would link two musical events in a similarly seamless man-

ner. A technique closely analogous to the dissolve is illustrated bythe passage in Example 1. In the third measure, the ute sustainsthe note E, effecting a diminuendo, while the viola emerges on the17Burch 1990, 11.

18Smith 1977, 245 and 84.19Smith 1977, 295. 20SIM bulletin, November 1, 1913. Quoted in Smith 1977, 298.




same pitch. When performed skillfully this passage creates the im-pression of a smooth dissolve from the timbre of the ute to thatof the viola.21

This timbral effect is not common in Debussy’s music, but thecinematic dissolve does suggest a way that we might think about a

more general feature of Debussy’s language, what Richard Parkscalls the “kinesthetic shift.”22 Parks identies the pitch resourcesof Debussy’s music according to their membership in representa-tive super-sets or “referential collections”: the pentatonic, dia-tonic, hexatonic, octatonic, and dodecaphonic collections (plus anadditional collection that Parks calls the “8-17/18/19 complex”).He then demonstrates the linking action of subsets that are sharedbetween two referential collections. These are pivots for “modula-tions” between different referential collections, or for “mutations”

(in a Guidonian sense) between different transpositions of the

same genus. A half-diminished seventh chord, for instance, whichbelongs to both the diatonic and octatonic genera, may be used toeffect a shift from one collection to the other. In this way Parkselucidates a background of uctuating referential collectionsthroughout a piece, connected via these kinesthetic pivots.

These linking events function similarly to the cinematic dis-solve, where one image disappears as another emerges. For a brief moment, the cinematic spectator sees two images at the sametime; likewise, the “pivot” sonority that links two referential col-lections momentarily implies two musical spaces for the listener.Example 2 shows some instances of this type of transition in theetude “Pour les agréments”: X marks a transition from one dia-tonic referential collection to another, and Y marks a transitionfrom a diatonic collection to a whole-tone environment.

Certainly this device is not without precedents in Debussy’searlier “pre-cinematic” style—indeed, similar dissolve-like mo-ments may be identied in much earlier tonal music. But this tech-nique acquires a new mimetic signicance once the cinema be-comes available as an interpretant. Even in the early example of

21The popular 1969 recording of this work by Rogér Bourdin, ColetteLequin, and Anne Challan achieves this effect perfectly.

22Parks 1989.

Example 1. Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, “Pastorale,”mm. 1–4: A Dissolve-like transition

&

&

&

?

b b

b

b

89

89

89

89

Flute

Viola

Harp

p mélancoliquement

p

ä ä Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï .Ï·

Ïb Ï Ï

Ïb Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï .Ï .Ï

.ú .Ï

Ï Ïb Ïb .Ï ä

5

Ï Ï Ïn Ïn Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï·

· ?

.úb - .Ï-

p doux et pénétrant

,

jÏb

5

Ï Ï Ïn Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï jÏb

5

Ï Ï Ïn Ï Ï Ï .ÏÎ . Î . .Ï-

Ïb o Ï o Ïn o Ïb o Ï o Ïn o .Ï

ä Ïb - ä Ï- Î ä

·Ï JÏ .Ï .Ï

·

·






of material shown in Example 3, another passage from “Pour lesagréments.” The segments marked W, X, Y, and Z are linked byrecurring motives, but these connections are overridden by themarked discontinuities in register, dynamics, and referential col-lection. These kinds of rapid changes between sharply contrastingimages are precisely what Vuillermoz found so appealing andYhcam so frustrating about early cinema. We might think of thispassage as representing a series of direct cuts among a variety of different views of some object whose unity is preserved in themotivic aspects of the example: the recurring 3-9[027] trichords,whole-tone segments, the transpositions and expansions of the4-4[0125] motive, and so on, set against the backdrop of the dia-tonic, hexatonic, chromatic, and pentatonic collections.

Many of the abrupt transitions in the second movement of theCello Sonata, some of which are marked with asterisks in Ex-ample 4, recall the cinematic effects of direct cutting and close-up.The example traces the path of the tritone motive that rst appearsat the end of m. 3: the tritone dyad creeps upward by half-step—G–D , A –D, A–E . The next expected dyad, B –E, arrives in m.5 but is inverted around its E axis: the cello’s B –E appears as thetop two notes of a rolled chord, and this gesture initiates the intro-duction of the higher range, more volatile rhythmic values, and

hair-pin dynamics. Like the inversion of the tritone in m. 5, thesubsequent alternations between pizzicato and arco, the abruptharmonic contrasts, and the sudden shifts in register in mm. 7–9are reminiscent of a c inematic “shot/reverse-shot” technique, a de-vice in which the camera shoots from two angles 180 degreesapart in order to capture the facial expressions of two actors facingone another in a scene. Indeed, in the case of the cello sonata, thisnotion of an interaction among different “characters” seems espe-cially relevant: conceived as a portrait of Pierrot (Pierrot faché

avec la lune was Debussy’s working title)—a character prone todrastic mood swings, and, at least in his early 20th-century mani-festations, one exhibiting a kind of multiple-personality disorder—the Serenade draws upon a highly appropriate set of cinemati-cally inspired devices in order to characterize Pierrot’s uninte-

grated personae.23 Debussy’s intention here, I believe, is to depictPierrot in fragments—perhaps as a kind of Chaplinesque clown—via a series of rapid direct cuts and continuous changes in per-spective.

In his late works, Debussy often eschewed smoothness of for-mal continuity. Transition through graduated transformation is acharacteristic associated more with his earlier, so-called Impres-sionistic style, and his later reliance on sudden musical contrastsmight be understood as a rejection of those Impressionisticideals.24 It is interesting to note that cinema underwent a similarchange in editing style during its early history: the earliest lms of Georges Méliès in France and those of Edwin Porter in Americaregularly use dissolves to connect shots instead of having direct

cuts.25 After around 1903, however, direct cutting became standardpractice, although some lm-makers and critics continued to ndthis practice visually jarring.26 For example, as late as 1914 theBritish lm-maker Cecil Hepworth regularly inserted short piecesof blank lm in between cuts in order to temper what he saw as adisruptive break.27 Nevertheless, the wide acceptance of the directcut as a viable and comprehensible means of linking differentshots pregures the kinds of abrupt formal divisions we nd inDebussy’s music. The dissolve, on the other hand, begins to be

used for the more specialized purpose of conveying a time lapseor to demarcate an event from the diegetic past. Debussy’s moresparing use of impressionistic shifts in his late works could be un-derstood as recognition of this more specialized function of thedissolve in lm and its more specic connotations.

23See Watkins 1994, 277 ff.24Lawrence Berman takes this view in his comparison of Jeux and Prélude à

l’après-midi d’un faune. See Berman 1980, 225.25

Salt 1990, 32. Another way in which the early lmmakers connected shotswas to insert an appropriate intertitle, a bit of dialogue or text explaining thescene.

26Naturally, a direct cut is less costly and time-consuming to produce than adissolve, and this is likely an important reason for the change in editing style.

27Bottomore 1990, 105.












30Salt 1990, 32. 31Berman 1980, 225.

scenes of chain-gangs, signifying a utopian future beyond the mis-erable present. Again, these examples use superimposition to setoff a ctional, illusory, or “wishful” realm within the lm.

This cinematic device suggests a way of thinking about certainmusical devices co-emergent with the cinema, such as situationsin which contrasting musical environments are presented simulta-neously, most notably in polytonality. In Debussy’s late worksseveral examples of “superimposing” materials connote contrast-ing musical spaces. One is shown in Example 7, a passage fromthe Etude “Pour les sonorités opposées.” Here, even the notationDebussy uses recalls the look of a cinematic “dream balloon” setoff to one side of the frame. This passage can be viewed as repre-senting two “opposed” tonal spaces that correspond to two diegetic

spaces in a lm, one “real” (the notes which accord with the no-tated key signature) and one “imagined” (the chords written insmall notes on the upper staff). Such an analytical perspective hasramications for how one might think about the resolution of “tonal problems” and “goals” later in the piece. For instance,Example 8 shows a passage from the end of this piece in which aseries of chords sounds in the same register as the earlier F-majorchord. If these chords recall the “dream-world” represented by theearlier chords, they may point toward an unattainable tonal goal

that remains unrealized at the end of the piece. This might explainwhy the D -major chord in m. 73 seems somehow unresolved—perhaps even implying an impossible resolution.

The curious disembodied chords at the end of “Pour lessonorités opposées” recall another early cinematic device. EdwinPorter’s popular 1903 lm, The Great Train Robbery, employs adevice known as the “emblematic shot,” which was copied inmany subsequent lms.30 The lm is about the exploits of a bandof violent robbers, and it concludes with a shoot-out in which the

crooks make off with the spoils. Following the conclusion of thenarrative, the terminal image in the lm shows a medium close-upshot of a cowboy who points and shoots a gun straight into the

camera. This “coda” image does not represent any particular ac-tion in the lm—the story has already ended; it does suggest ageneral mood of balefulness. Considering certain musical eventsas analogs for emblematic shots offers the analyst a useful alterna-tive to a notion of “coherence” that compels us to account for thestructural function of each event in a piece of music. A model thatincorporates the structural “functionlessness” of the emblematicshot allows some musical events to have a role beyond that in astrictly hierarchical or goal-directed design. This is especially cru-cial for post-tonal works in which the relations between musicalevents within the work may be metaphorical and associative ratherthan causal or hierarchical.

Perhaps the most signicant way in which the silent cinema

could serve as a compositional model and as a key interpretant forlisteners was this: lm editing suggested a reconguration of con-ventional narrative syntax in which events needed not always toact as “cardinal functions,” moving the plot inexorably forward.Indeed, a narrative might be structured more as a collection of indices, with a global form emerging from the purely rhythmicaspects of a succession of images. Likewise, musical forms mightcohere not on the basis of an over-arching Ursatz or other central-izing and coordinating feature, but rather as a montage of ideas.

Debussy’s preoccupation with these cinematic modes is clearlymost pronounced in his late works. Understanding of formal syn-tax in a late work like Jeux, for example, might be considerablyenriched if musical counterparts to cinematic devices are consid-ered in analysis. Lawrence Berman has written persuasively about

Jeux, claiming that this work can be understood as a reworking of both the poetic and musical premises of the earlier Prélude à

l’après-midi d’un faune.31 Berman views Jeux as a second, moresuccessful rendering of the Mallarmè poem upon which Faune is

based. The two works share common narrative elements in theirscenarios: the theme of pursuit, and the ménage à trois. The rolesof the faun and the two nymphs depicted musically in the Prelude






the opening movement of the Children’s Corner Suite, “DoctorGradus ad Parnassum,” published in 1908. Clearly, both of these

works are intended to be humorous, and both vividly evoke theimage of a distracted piano student practicing tedious technicalexercises. Each work concludes with an accelerando and nal

presto






piece, as Debussy sustains a cinematic portrayal of the ongoingtension between tedious technical labor and the play of the imagi-nation. Debussy’s superimpositions encourage us to consider theve-nger white-note exercises and the A within the black-note

world as starting points for two parallel, ongoing processes thatwe can continue to trace throughout the piece.

As the piece proceeds, Debussy turns to techniques of “directcutting” between the two musical worlds juxtaposed in the open-ing measures. Example 11 shows a passage from the middle of theEtude in which occurs a sudden change of register, pitch collec-tion, texture, and dynamics. In the segment marked X, the lefthand isolates motive M from within the previous gesture, markedas Y. The way in which X is framed here by Y recalls a cinematic

“cut-in”—a close-up view, usually of a character’s face, interpo-lated between two shots taken from a greater distance. Example11 presents a musical device whose cinematic counterpart in-volves a sudden focus on a detail within the cinematic space. Inthe Etude, the equivalent of a cinematic background is suddenlyremoved at X, and the motive M occupies the resultant musicalvacuum. This detail is subsequently taken up as the generativemotive of the passage beginning at m. 48. In silent lms, theclose-up frequently reveals a character’s subjective reaction to a

situation; the audience is given an opportunity to read the charac-ter’s face, and to identify with that character’s subjective positionin the narrative. Debussy’s closing in on motive M and the subse-quent development of that idea express a similar sense of markedinteriority, recalling the intimacy of the cinematic closeup.

The lmic situation of switch-back editing can inform our un-derstanding of a passage shown in Example 12, where the alter-nating segments A, B, and C recall the alternation of images in alm. As would be the case in a “rescue” or “chase” lm, this pas-

sage occurs towards the end of the work. The duration of each of the separate “images” uctuates in interesting ways in this pas-sage; the “editing rhythm” accelerates as the music progresses,much the way it would in a D. W. Grifth lm. Beginning in m.91, the size of the grouping units reduces to one beat, with beats 1and 3 representing one tonal space (six ats) and beats 2 and 4

representing another (white notes). At the same time there is amore literal acceleration— poco a poco accelerando e cresc.—andthe passage culminates in a reprise of the etude’s original tonality,C major, in m. 97. The analogy with cinematic cross-cutting sug-

gests an analytical approach in which we could identify severaldifferent processes going on at the same time, all converging to-wards the same goal. For example, we catch intermittent glimpsesof an ongoing process in the events (labeled B in the example) atmm. 72, 79, 83, and 85. This process may be further extended, viathe T5 relation that obtains between mm. 79 (an A harmony)and 83 (D ), to the downbeats of m. 91 and following (G ). At thesame time, a second simultaneous process is represented by theintervening measures. It is, in part, the association between cine-

matic cross-cutting and the last-minute rescue that imbues theEtude’s conclusion with its sense of urgency.

cinema and debussy’s nationalism

The emblematic shot, the dream balloon, the dissolve, directcutting, and switchback editing are a repertoire of compositionaltechniques that early lm-makers developed for connecting differ-ent kinds of shots. These devices could be employed to convey

temporality and spatiality in unique ways. Consequently, the cin-ema, with its ability to juxtapose disparate images in this fashion,was frequently seen as an exemplary medium for artists at the turnof the century, particularly those active in France, who were at-tempting new types of temporal and spatial representation. Theenthusiastic Emile Vuillermoz, who urged poets to take an interestin the cinema, claimed that lm could express a uniquely modernconception of space and time, comparable with and even surpass-ing the latest trends in painting and in poetry:

The cinema’s miraculous gift of ubiquity, its power of immediate evoca-tion, its wealth of interchangeable images are all needed to execute thistour de force. Thousands of tiny frames in a moving lmstrip act like thecells of the human brain: the same overwhelming rapidity of perception,the same multiplicity of many-faceted mirrors which effortlessly juxtaposethe farthest horizons, suppress distances, abolish the bondage of time and










musical value to poetic images, and they deliberately cultivated a

confusion among the perceptions of the various senses.33

It is clear from the attention that prominent music critics like

Vuillermoz were giving cinema that it represented somethingmuch more than a fad or novelty, and that lm was acquiring con-siderable cultural importance in France. Certainly, the cinema en-

joyed a high public prole, not only as a fascinating new popularentertainment, but also as particularly French technology, onewhich occupied a signicant position within the national econ-omy. In the rst decade of the twentieth century, several large lmcompanies with control over all levels of production, distribution,and exhibition began to replace the early artisan-based outts like

those of Lumière and Méliès. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, accepted statistics of the time claimed thatninety percent of the lms seen around the world were producedin France. Between 1905 and 1914, the two largest French lmcompanies, Pathé-Frères and Établissements Gaumont, produced

33One artist who actively sought to combine Symbolist ideals with cinemawas Léopold Survage, a Russian-born painter who came to Paris in 1908. In1913 and 1914, Survage exhibited his work with the Cubists at the Salon desIndépendents. His 1914 article “Le Rythme coloré” outlines a project for a lmbased on animated abstract images. “The fundamental element in my dynamicart is colored visual form, which plays a part analogous to that of sound inmusic.” Like many of his contemporaries, Survage conceives of image, sound,and motion as inextricably linked with one another and with the psychologicalstates of the artist. He goes on to say that these non-representational movingimages, by virtue of the fact that they are moving, would somehow evoke thechanging emotional state of the artist. For Survage, Vuillermoz, and others,music and cinema are distinguished by being temporal phenomena, and, assuch, both cinema and music are thought to be “life-like,” expressing a kind of mutability comparable to the workings of real human perception and intra-psychic experience. Survage 1914 is quoted in Abel 1988, 90.

Example 12. [continued ]

?

?

92

5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb

5

Ïn Ïn Ïn Ïn Ïn5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïn5

Ï Ïn Ï Ïn Ïn &5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb

5


Ïb Ïb Ï Ïb Ïb

5

Ïn Ïn Ï Ïn Ïn

&

molto cresc.5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb

5


Ïb Ïb Ï Ïb Ïb 5

Ïn ÏnÏ Ïn Ïn

&

&

95

5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb 5

Ïn Ïn ÏnÏn Ïn

5


Ïn Ïn Ï Ïn Ïn

f5

Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb Ïb 5

Ïn Ïn ÏnÏn Ïn

5


Ïn Ïn Ï Ïn Ïn

Ä

Mouvt

Ï> jÏ. jÏ

ÏèÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

JÏ.

?

Ï>

Ï>

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

jÏÏèjÏJÏ

240 M i Th S




lms and lm-making equipment on a vast scale, and even con-ducted experiments with color processing and sound synchroniza-tion.34

Cinema thus came to serve as a locus for nationalistic pride,

providing manifest evidence of French ingenuity and creativity.Because the cinema was perceived as something particularlyFrench, as a medium in which the French had a superior expertise,it was often invoked by artists and critics with nationalistic lean-ings. Modelling one’s art or poetry on the devices of the cinemarepresented a way in which artists could be modern and, at thesame time, uniquely and essentially French. To these artists, there-fore, it was a matter of national disgrace when, with the declara-tion of war in August of 1914, the lucrative French lm industry

immediately collapsed. As lm historian Richard Abel reports:All branches of the industry immediately closed down. The general mobi-lization emptied the studios of directors, actors, and technicians. Eventhe French lm star, Max Linder, although rejected by the army, left forthe front to deliver military dispatches before going off to make lms inthe United States. The deserted spaces of the studios were requisitionedfor military stores and horse barns, and Pathé’s lm-stock factory at Vin-cennes was transformed into a war plant. The cinemas, along with allother shows, closed their doors in the national interest.35

As the war dragged on, cinemas were eventually reopened, but,because the whole structure of French lm production was nolonger in place, it was imported American lms that largely lledthe theatres. The French industry never recovered its losses, and

by 1919, at most only about 15% of the lms seen in Paris wereFrench-made. It was claimed in the journal Mon-Ciné in 1919 that“the French cinema is stripped of its glories, it will perish, and wewill have to resign ourselves to being a country that no longermakes good lms.”36

The prestige and the nationalistic associations of the early cin-ema would have made it all the more attractive to Debussy as amodel for musical forms. Debussy’s own crusade for a nationallydistinct musical tradition, with himself playing the role of the ex-

emplary musicien français, becomes most pronounced in his latercareer. His desire to express what he felt to be a uniquely Frenchkind of lyricism is perhaps best achieved in these late works,which also, I believe, most clearly capture the spirit of cinema.Perhaps Debussy’s deployment of lmic devices, his cultivation of the modes of cinematic editing and its special temporal and spatialassociations, was motivated by a sense of the cinema as a particu-larly French art. And this awareness of cinema’s “Frenchness”was probably most acutely felt with the demise of the French lm

industry in 1914. At a time when Debussy’s work becomes mostself-consciously French, the cinematic aspects of his style becomemost pronounced.

But before the attempt to claim lm as a French art, cinema of-fered to all turn-of-the-century artists the means to make a radicalbreak from previous modes of representing time and space. Thetechniques of the cinema, as I have suggested, are the lmic ana-log to the formal discontinuities embraced by these artists, not theleast of whom was Debussy. Thus, recognizing a relationship

between lmic and compositional techniques can create a new un-derstanding of his music, particularly in the analysis of his con-spicuous techniques of formal enchainment, which can be contex-

34These companies employed thousands of people in their studios and distri-bution centers throughout Europe and North America. At its height, Pathé-Frères employed around 5,000 people in France, while Gaumont, its largestcompetitor, had over 2,000 employees around the world. Chains of cinemassprang up; Gaumont’s chain included the grand Gaumont-Palace in Paris withseating for 3,400 spectators. At the same time, many smaller companies wereable to specialize within particular areas of the industry, like the production of newsreels. A small but prestigious company, Film d’Art, produced lms featur-ing Comédie Française actors and directors in original scenarios written byComédie Française dramatists. A subsidiary company of Pathé-Frères calledthe “Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens des lettres” (S.C.A.G.L.)

produced adaptations of literary classics for the screen. In contrast to theirAmerican contemporaries, who mainly targeted a vaudeville audience, the rstFrench lm-makers produced lms for a wide variety of audience types acrossthe social spectrum.

35Abel 1984, 9. 36Quoted in Abel 1984, 6.

Deb ss ’s Late St le and the De ices of the Earl Silent Cinema 241




tualized within the “modes of continuation” peculiar to a co-emergent narrative medium such as lm. The silent cinema’smontage of shots and perspectives, its reconguration of narrativetime, and its multiplicity of “viewing views” give Debussy’s formal

procedures a particularly modern cast. May we, long-accustomedto the techniques of lm, appreciate these procedures anew.

LIST OF WORKS CITED

Abel, Richard. 1984. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929. Prince-

ton University Press.

———. 1988. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology,

volume 1: 1907–1929. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Berman, Lawrence. 1980. “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune and Jeux:

Debussy’s Summer Rites.” 19th Century Music 3: 225–38.

Bottomore, Stephen. 1990. “Shots in the Dark.” In Early Cinema: Space,

Frame, Narrative. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker.

London: British Film Institute Publishing.

Burch, Noel. 1990. Life to those Shadows. Translated by Ben Brewster.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Forte, Allen. 1988. “Pitch-class Set Genera and the Origin of the Modern

Harmonic Species.” Journal of Music Theory 32: 187–279.

———. 1991. “Debussy and the Octatonic.” Music Analysis 10: 125–69.

Newcomb, Anthony. 1987. “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-CenturyNarrative Strategies.” 19th Century Music 11: 164 –74.

Parks, Richard. 1989. The Music of Claude Debussy. New Haven: Yale

University Press.

Rank, Otto. 1971. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated and

edited by Harry Tucker, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press.

Salt, Barry. 1990. “Film Form 1900–1906.” In Early Cinema: Space,

Frame, Narrative. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker.

London: British Film Institute Publishing.

Smith, Richard Langam. 1973. “Debussy and the Art of Cinema.” Music

and Letters 54: 61–70.

———. 1977. Debussy on Music. New York: A. A. Knopf.

Sobchack, Vivian. 1991. “The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cine-

matic Vision.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12/3: 25.Survage, Léopold. 1914. “Le Rythme coloré.” Les Soirées de Paris 26–7

(July–August): 426–7.

Vuillermoz, Emile. 1916. “Devant l’écran.” Le Temps, 29 November: 3.

———. 1917. “Before the Screen: Les Frères corses.” Le Temps, 7

February: 3.

Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and

Collage from Stravinksy to the Postmodernists. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Yhcam. 1912. “Le Cinématographe.” Ciné-Journal, 4 May: 16–17.

ABSTRACTThe article situates Debussy’s late works within the context of the tech-nologies of the early silent cinema. Cinematic techniques developed byFrench lm-makers during Debussy’s lifetime can provide the basis for amodel of continuity and succession in this music and suggest some newways of approaching form in his late style. Cinema was of considerableconsequence in France during Debussy’s mature career, and the technicaldevices of the cinema constituted a markedly new way of representingtime and space. Very few of the lms from the late 1890s and early 1900shave survived, but the extant lm reviews and contemporary criticism pro-vide a vivid sense of the early cinema, its reception, and its characteristicdevices. Particular cinematic editing techniques are noted as models forDebussy’s own characteristic repertoire of musical devices. Finally, someof the connections are made between cinema and Debussy’s nationalismin the years surrounding the rst world war.

Documents

Debisijev kasni stil