Film Music and the Director’s Aesthetics: Concerning the Methodology of Film Text Analysis

Abstract

The article raises the question of the necessity of applying special and individualized approaches in analyzing the music of author’s cinematography. The traditionally basic trend of research of cinema music centers around functionally semantic analysis of cinematic works. However, in the movies of author-directors, music is frequently included in the polysemantic artistic space of a cinematic text in the broad sense of this concept as the assemblage of the text (the storyline narrative), the context, the subtext, the intertext, and the metatext of the cinema product. As a rule, analysis of the music of the author’s film is inseparable from the visual images and peculiarities of the other elements of the phonogram (speech, noises, sound effects, silence). In this context, the following concepts require demarcation: “film music,” “music of the film” and “the audiovisual solution of film.” The suggested approach, based on the principles of film director’s aesthetics, is expounded on the example of analysis of Robert Bresson’s film Une femme douce (A Gentle Woman). The movie is of special interest due to the fact that in it Bresson’s general ideas regarding the use of sound, including music, in film, are manifested to the fullest degree, including declarative utterances from the screen. In the case of Bresson, the principles of phenomenological aesthetics manifested in the director’s works, especially those from his mature periods, are of foundational significance. However, the general approaches towards analysis of music in author’s cinematography suggested in the present article may be extrapolated and applied in the research of the works of film directors who created cinema works on the basis of other and most diverse aesthetic principles.

Keywords: film music, audiovisual solution of a film, screen image, cinematic aesthetics, Robert Bresson, Feodor Dostoyevsky, screen adaptations of the novelette Une femme douce (A Gentle Woman)