Reader’s Reviews > Composing for the Films > Status Update

Generally, all artistic means that were originally conceived for their stimulating effect rather than for their structural significance grow threadbare and obsolete with extraordinary rapidity.

One of the worst practices is the incessant use of a limited number of worn-out musical pieces that are associated with the given screen situations by reason of their actual or traditional titles. […] The use of trademarks is a nuisance, though it must be acknowledged that childlike faith in the eternal symbolic force of certain classical marches occasionally has a redeeming aspect.

Music cut to fit the stereotype ‘nature’ is reduced to the character of a cheap mood-producing gadget, and the associative patterns are so familiar that there is really no illustration of anything, but only the elicitation of the automatic response: ‘Aha, nature!’

The insertion of music should be planned along with the writing of the script, and the question whether the spectator should be aware of the music is a matter to be decided in each case according to the dramatic requirements of the script.

More than anything else the demand for melody at any cost and on every occasion has throttled the development of motion-picture music. The alternative is certainly not to resort to the unmelodic, but to liberate melody from conventional fetters.

Visual action in the motion picture has of course a prosaic irregularity and asymmetry. It claims to be photographed life; and as such every motion picture is a documentary. As a result, there is a gap between what is happening on the screen and the symetrically articulated conventional melody.

Here [in motion pictures] the function of the leitmotif has been reduced to the level of a musical lackey, who announces his master with an important air even though the eminent personage is clearly recognizable to everyone. The effective technique of the past thus becomes a mere duplication, ineffective and uneconomical.

They [leitmotifs] function as trademarks, so to speak, by which persons, emotions, and symbols can instantly be identified. They have always been the most elementary means of elucidation, the thread by which the musically inexperienced find their way about.

The motion picture cannit be understood in isolation, as a specific form of art; it is understandable only as the most characteristic medium of contemporary cultural industry, which uses the techniques of mechanical reproduction. The popular messages conveyed by this industry must not be conceived as an art originally created by the masses. Such an art no longer exists or does not yet exist.