The Moveable Archive
I first spotted this effervescent film-music meld on Nat Russell’s blog last week and have seen it corralled a few other places since. For good reason: the track, by Bethany Cosentino, taking a break from Pocahaunted’s more violent maundering, floats a girl group chorus on miles of smeared fuzz. It’s a great hook, served up inchoate — reaching for bliss with wistfulness, it makes a nice match for the images from Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film, Un Homme et Une Femme (the whole concoction comes courtesy of a YouTube impresario using the moniker khole71 — much more of his work is available here).
A simple question emerges: how different is this, in effect, from Tarantino quoting Hawks’s Red Line 7000 with a souped up Chuck Berry score? What about Wes Anderson putting the needle on “Hey Jude” while conjuring his own private Ambersons, those magnificent Tenenbaums? If we think of groups like Vampire Weekend as channeling Anderson’s appreciation of the Kinks rather than the brothers Davies themselves, it seems that this nesting game is one of diminishing returns. What about recent albums by M83 and Odawas, both of them conceived as facsimiles of 80s movie music (the guys in Odawas cite the searching synths of Vangelis as a primary influence)? Brian Eno theorized music for imaginary films; Donnie Darko listens to Echo & the Bunnymen.
Music and moving image have always had a more heterogeneous, slipper relationship with one another than is commonly acknowledged. The silent film era was far from silent; some of the most musical American films produced in the 50s and 60s were (e.g. Brakhage). In Scorpio Rising and Where Did Our Love Go?, Kenneth Anger and Warren Sonbert molded pop music’s plastic meaning to images which, while certainly not conventional, were neither completely ironic (David Lynch tipped the scales still further in Blue Velvet). Anger and Sonbert evidently saw possibility in the way that this music spoke freedom without specificity. Scorsese, it is often pointed out, borrowed from their films, but he deserves his place as the American metier of extended musical quotations for Mean Streets alone. Critic Howard Hampton is very clear on this:
“From its beginning, Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets is the most seductive union of movies and rock imaginable: a prowling, claustrophobic fever dream where the images and music are locked in an interpenetrating embrace, each intensifying, elaborating, and undermining the meanings of the other.”
Flipping the record over, I’ve always balked when critics describe pop music as “cinematic.” They mean widescreen: a packed production palette that exceeds the ears’ grasp as surely as the widescreen image does the eyes. Like all overused shorthand, it’s reductive to both sides of the metaphor and hopelessly vague. To point to just one of many counter-proofs, Bruce Sringsteen’s most cinematic album is also his starkest (Nebraska). There is something to be said for the way the overripe atmosphere of something like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea resembles the claustrophic anxiety of Nick Ray and Anthony Mann’s capsized Cinemascope, but really the analogy probably shouldn’t be taken much further than West Side Story winning Best Picture the same year Phil Spector started laying the groundwork at Philles Records.
So this little clip stands at the crossroads, though it’s tough to say which. Up through the couple’s 360-degree embrace (shades of Vertigo, Bernard Herrmann’s film, with storyboards by Alfred Hitchcock), it works better than any of these mash-ups have any business doing. There’s a nice calibration of scale and speed here, with Cosentino’s scuffed up pop rising into Lelouch’s shrunken, YouTube’d romance — both riff on familiar hooks, and remind us why we liked them in the first place.
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