Quiet, Please

I miss silence in the movies. Not silent movies — the films so called were anything but, since they relied on live music from a piano pit or an orchestra to convey mood, momentum and sound effects. What I miss in films is silence, not only as a neutral medium, or even for its powers of contrast, but for the things from which music is debarred. There are things that only silence can express.

Music in films can be as carefully chosen from sequence to sequence as wines to match the courses of a banquet — or it can be sloshed about as casually as syrup or custard over institutional pudding. Film music can be stained glass or wallpaper. The classic directors in the past who are most associated with appreciating the power of music also had a complementary understanding of silence. Music best retains its power by being rationed.

When music is everywhere in a film, audiences feel less rather than more. A case in point would be a mildly successful, mildly fizzling blockbuster from 2000, The Perfect Storm (directed by Wolfgang Das Boot Petersen), a story of fishermen’s ordeals in extreme conditions at sea. It’s sometimes hard to hear the roaring of the winds over the lachrymose raging of the orchestra. The composer is James Horner, whose most famous score was also for a marine disaster — but at least Titanic, in James Cameron’s vision, was a romance (a romance with 1,503 real deaths used as the backdrop for a single fictional one, but a romance all the same). The Perfect Storm is based on a true story and aspires to tragedy, but Horner’s score in its lushness and sweep is jarringly wrong. Petersen doesn't even have the excuse that the music is there to hide the weakness of the special effects — the special effects are the most impressive parts of the film. So why have music there at all? The presence of music on a soundtrack always tells us we're at a distance from the natural world (which is why music accompanying wildlife documentaries feels so tacky and suspect). Every dollar spent on the music neutralizes a thousand spent on the visual effects, the digitized mountains of water which would be awe-inspiring if they were only let alone.

The omnipresence of music in films is part of a general cultural pattern of obliterating silence, in lifts, airports, shopping centres, lobbies and restaurants. For film-makers there is the additional temptation to fill a soundtrack with pop classics and sell the film that way — but that hardly applies to a piece of product like The Perfect Storm. Hollywood always assumes that the young are the prime market for almost every film, which becomes true when films rival music television in the relentlessness of hit placement. Despite regular waves of prediction, film as an art form has survived the onslaught of television and even MTV. Demographically it would be sensible (more sensible every year) to chase a senior market, for whom saturation with music becomes a deterrent. Older people may have a degree of hearing loss that is hardly noticeable in daily life but makes it hard to extract film dialogue from its inanely seething background.

When music is a constant feature of a film, the director forfeits the possibility that a moment of music will provide a pivot around which the whole film swings in a new direction. For his 1956 film A Man Escaped, for instance, Robert Bresson keeps music reined in, concentrating instead on patterns of significant sound inside the prison where the hero is confined—tappings on the walls, a spoon being scraped into sharpness on a stone floor, the gamelan-jangle of keys against metal railings. Roughly every ten minutes Bresson gives us the same sombre burst of a Mozart Mass, always when the hero is mixing with others in the confines of the prison. There is some talk about God among the inmates, but still the music in its organized sorrow is pitched far higher, spiritually, than the action can justify. Those few sombrely blazing bars of orchestra and chorus are more than enough to furnish the soundtrack, since when they aren’t being played they are likely to be replayed in the audience’s memory. Then when his hero escapes, Bresson lets loose with Mozart in the major. The blaze of organized joy at this point shifts the plane of the story from physical release to transfiguration. Bresson has made us wait ninety minutes to experience one of the simplest effects in classical music, the move from minor to major, as if we had never heard it before, and the music at this point tells us that we are witnessing not good fortune but grace.

The word ‘dialectic’ was quite properly pensioned off years ago, after decades of overuse, but perhaps it could be brought out of retirement to convey the way silence and music can act on each other as elements of the aural design of a film. Bresson is inescapably a director of ‘art films’, but much more limited craftsmen in film can achieve modestly overwhelming results. Michael Anderson, for instance, who directed The Dam Busters in 1954, is no one’s idea of an auteur, but his use of music is highly sophisticated. Eric Coates’s ‘Dam Busters March’ is a classic of film music but it isn’t played to death, and the incidental score is carefully modulated. Passages of tension usually rely on natural sound and dialogue, with music being reserved for moments of release. Then at the end of the film the camera shows, in silence, the rooms of men who didn’t come back from the raid on the Ruhr. As an account of a dazzling wartime exploit, the apotheosis of boffinry, The Dam Busters isn’t above a certain amount of tub-thumping, but the director also knows that there are moments when it's the silent tub that makes the most noise.

Silence in this short sequence performs the function that the Mozart Mass does for Bresson — it takes the film into new territory. The camera doesn't stand in for a person, Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave) say, or Guy Gibson (Richard Todd), though that too would be a legitimate sequence — the victors should acknowledge the cost of their triumph to others. What is being registered here is absence. The approach is impersonal, almost documentary, though there’s little enough to document in the bare quarters of these servicemen: just a travelling clock ticking on, outliving the man whose wrist-turns wound its spring. Music is absent also. Music is the sign that something has become part of culture, whereas this little sequence documents bare absence before it can be tamed into grief. Music takes the edge off, and here we need to feel the edge. The Dam Busters Silence deserves to be as well known as the Dam Busters March.

There are several current directors who could have imagined the visual side of the sequence, Steven Spielberg among them, but none of them would have dared to abstain from the stock musical cues for feeling.

Spielberg took over from Stanley Kubrick a typically slow-brewing project, only partly prepared when he died — AI. If Kubrick had made it, the music score would certainly have been less saccharine. Kubrick enjoyed using pre-existing pieces of music (at least once cancelling a commissioned score during editing), and used them in longer extracts than has ever been the fashion. Whether it’s Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in The Shining or Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick used substantial stretches. It’s as if he set himself the challenge of absorbing the energy of the music into his visuals without cheating by chopping it up.

During the editing of 2001, Kubrick received an advance pressing of a record by the Berlin Philharmonic from his friend Herbert von Karajan. It included music by both Johann (‘Blue Danube’) and Richard (Also Sprach Zarathustra) Strauss. He started playing it in the editing suite with no thought — to start with — of its bizarre appropriateness. If this story is true, then it seems that music was an area where the great control freak could allow himself to be seduced into spontaneity. After excluding chance so single-mindedly from his project Kubrick could let it back in at the last moment, and even enjoy playing with it.

2001 is remarkable for Kubrick’s use of the present that Karajan sent. Johann Strauss’s magnificently insipid waltz loses all its sentiment when it's made to accompany a sequence of docking with a space station. Richard Strauss’s grand gestures seem quite modest, really, when configured as a fanfare to eternity. But the film is also remarkable for its fidelity to silence. For once in the movies, engines roaring in a vacuum make no sound. Infinity isn’t given an echo just because we’re more comfortable with that illusion. Music and silence, bland actors and overwhelming sets — everything contributes to Kubrick’s vision of a cosmos full of grandeur and devoid of personality, full of emptiness and waiting.

A dozen years later, the advertising campaign for Alien warned that ‘In space no one can hear you scream’. But every engine-note and explosion in the film was helpfully relayed to the audience’s ears through a conducting medium that didn't exist.

Sometimes music can enter a film even later than it did in the case of 2001. Sometimes a commissioned score fails to find favour, and must be replaced at the last minute or even later. Music shares this never-too-late property with another element of film language, the voice-over, but voice-overs are inherently suspect. They’ve been used so often as sticking-plaster for a bleeding narrative that their very presence makes critics narrow their eyes. It’s the cheapest way to cover up defects that can’t be remedied, orange pancake make-up in spoken form.

Music doesn’t give the game away like that. No one watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain on its first release in 1966 could have known from internal evidence that the original score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, before John Addison was called in. Hitchcock had a profound understanding of the possibilities of sound design in films, and could boast at least two technical firsts — first British sound film for Blackmail (1929), where the soundtrack is as inventively expressionistic as the visuals, and first electronic score, with The Birds (1963). His partnership with Herrmann is one of the great pairings in cinema history, up there with Greenaway and Nyman, Lynch and Badalamenti. The high point of their collaboration was certainly Vertigo, but Herrmann had a credit (as ‘sound consultant’) even on The Birds, where there isn’t anything that could really be described as music.

There was no obvious reason why Torn Curtain should have led to rupture, though Hitchcock did have a complex attitude to artistic sharing, and a certain amount of history in terms of driving his most talented collaborators away (such as the brilliant screenwriter on North by Northwest, Ernest Lehman). It’s true that Herrmann’s music for the new film (which you can hear on the DVD) was dark and ominous, and Hitchcock was under pressure from Universal to come up with something more varied and entertaining. But the question of the relative power of music and silence is in there somewhere too.

The most famous scene in Torn Curtain — really the only sequence which is even grudgingly admired — is where the hero kills the agent who has been detailed to keep an eye on him in a farmhouse. The killing is slow, ugly, and desperately hard work. Other Iron Curtain agents are only a few yards away, so there can be no question of using a gun — it’s all down to saucepans, kitchen knives, spades and finally the (gas) oven. Bernard Herrmann wrote music for the scene. If there is one ‘cue’ he is famous for, it’s the screeching violins that accompany the showerbath murder in Psycho. He had come up with an extreme score before, so why not now? Hitchcock didn’t use it, not because it failed as music, but because it was music. The scene as released plays in silence (the characters, after all, are desperate not to be heard at their grisly work). Hitchcock understood that music, even when it seems inflammatory of the emotions, is actually a lubricant. Certainly the scene is much harder to watch without the orchestral score. Hitchcock and Herrmann never worked together again.

That’s the myth, even if it doesn’t quite add up. After all, if Hitchcock was so adamant that the farmhouse killing should be shown without music, why did he get Herrmann's replacement John Addison to score it all over again, before he finally decided? But it's a necessary myth, now that music has so largely vanquished silence.

Still, there are tiny signs of a silent backlash, and not just in art movies like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, where music and silence, speech and ambient noise were woven with astonishing subtlety into an aural design. For me, much of the tension of watching Peter Weir’s splendid Master and Commander came from waiting, as a master film-maker set his story in motion, with dialogue, sound, set design and special effects all making their mark, for the moment when he remembered to underestimate his audience, and dropped in some of the sea music that has been a celluloid plague at least since Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote the score for The Sea Hawk in 1940. It didn’t happen. When music was eventually used it was familiar (Vaughan Williams) or more or less in period (the fiddle and cello duets between Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany). But the first forty minutes played without music. These days we have to be grateful when at least one mainstream director trusts the visual and dramatic language of film to stay afloat, without an orchestra below decks constantly pumping out bilge. Silence and music have coexisted in films in a thousand different ways in the past, and music is the loser when silence dies.