Abstract:
When examining the role of music in film, film musicologists generally focus on the way music articulates narrative: how the sign system of music interacts with and contributes to the sign system of the image and the flow of both fabula and suzhet. Some film composers, however, have sought to dramatise not the macro-level of narrative, but rather the micro-level of film performance, musicalising the inner psychology of a film’s characters rather than describing the situations in which the characters find themselves. Drawing on the work of film scholars such as James Naremore (one of the first to theorise acting from a specifically filmic perspective) and Vivian Sobchack (whose recent theorisation of the phenomenology and embodiment of the screen actor offers a musicalisable model), this paper seeks to highlight this alternative model of film music through a number of contrasting examples from the career of American actor Montgomery Clift, and to question how film acting can be musically embodied. Unlike earlier classically-trained actors, who usually found their characters with makeup, costume, and movement (working from the outside in), Clift and other “method” actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando worked from the inside out, starting with character psychology. Many of Clift’s performances are mirrored by scores that also work from the outside in, accepting the challenge to musicalise the new model of mid-century American masculinity that Clift presented. The scores for films such as A Place in the Sun (Franz Waxman, 1951), From Here to Eternity (George Duning and Morris Stoloff, 1953), and Wild River (Kenyon Hopkins, 1960) all reflect Clift as the sensitive centre of turbulent, emotional films. These scores when matched with Clift’s performances demonstrate the richness and variety of Hollywood film scoring beyond the standard “classical” model of mood music and leitmotivs, and offer a new perspective on musical characterisation.