F
ilm music narratology has so far revolved around the idea of the diegesis: the world‘behind the screen’ of a fiction film (and not dissimilarly a documentary), or rather, the world constructed by viewers on the basis of cues provided by the film. Etienne Souriau borrowed the term in 1950 from his daughter Anne (Souriau 1990: 581), who had borrowed it from the Greek ‘diegesis’ (meaning narration) – a term for the telling of a story became a term for the world the story is set in. But Souriau did not understand it as a narratological term, part of a theory of storytelling; he used it as a filmological term, part of a map of film studies (see Kessler 1997 & 2007; Fuxjäger 2007; Taylor 2007; Neumeyer 2009).
On this map, Souriau understood it as one of eight levels of l’univers filmique: the afilmique (the reality outside of cinema); the profilmique (the reality informing a film); the filmographique (film as an artefact); the filmophanique (the film projection); the créatorial (the making of a film); the écranique (what happens on the screen during projection); and the spectatoriel (what happens in viewers’ minds) (Souriau 1951; see also Kessler 2007: 9–10; and Neumeyer 2009). In this system, diégètique was ‘all that concerns the film insofar it represents something.
Diegetic is everything we take into account as being represented by the film, and as part of the reality presupposed by the signification of the film’ (Souriau 1951: 237; my translation).
(The relationship of Souriau’s definition to a narratological one is discussed in ch. II.iv.a.) In this wider context, Souriau was not interested in the distinction between diegesis and narration. His system does not have a term for the nondiegetic as something not represented by the film, but doing the representing; the distinction is beyond its frame of reference.
Nondiegetic music, in this system, would be part of the filmophanique, but only one element among others, and not conceptually linked to the diegesis.
But the career of the diegesis has happened in narratology: in film narratology, but also in narratology in general. From Genette it found its way into film musicology, mainly through Claudia Gorbman, who used Genette’s terms ‘diegetic’ and ‘extradiegetic’ (the latter she calls ‘nondiegetic’) to replace older terms such as ‘source music’, ‘incidental music’, ‘score’,
‘underscoring’, ‘background music’, etc. (see Gorbman 1987: 11–30).8
8 Yet another distinction was that between ‘visual vocal’, ‘visual instrumental’ and ‘background vocal’
and ‘background instrumental’ music, which was used in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s in the context of fees for musicians (defined as those who played or sang in the ‘background’, i.e. off-screen) and actors, defined by their on-screen presence (see Neumeyer 2000: 18–19).
But therein lay the rub. Film music already had its own terms, and even if they were not much of a system and did not really link up with anything else, they belonged to a (fairly) venerable praxis, and new ones did not necessarily seem an improvement. For film composers, ‘source music’ and ‘score’ are still more common than ‘diegetic’ or ‘nondiegetic’
music, and frustrated with the crudeness of the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction, some film scholars have argued for retaining the older terms.9
But it is too late. The terminology film musicology has inherited from Souriau, Genette and Gorbman has become the small change of talking about music in narrative film. Yet it is not just acceptance of the inevitable that recommends that we grapple with these concepts. This book has been written by a musicologist, and musicology has always been shaped by conflicting impulses, generated by its odd position in the ivory palace of the arts and humanities: not in the central tower, where linguists, classicists, philosophers, historians and sundry others are engaged in lively conversation, but in a garden hut on the fringes of the grounds, behind high hedges of notation and music theory and their arcane signs and symbols. Everyone likes music, but almost everyone finds it hard to talk about it to musicologists, and vice versa. One impulse has been the adoption of ideas invented elsewhere to claim the relevance of music to wider intellectual concerns: music as an embodiment of the harmony of a world defined by numbers; music as rhetoric, or as mimesis; or the New Musicologies of recent decades and their attempts to learn the lessons of New Historicism, gender, racial or (post)colonial studies or the performative turn of the arts. This can turn into a breathless race to catch up, and a bit of distance may sometimes be a good thing. The other impulse has been defiant self-enclosure in the paradise garden of music’s own body of theory, which give academics enough to play with for a while, but lets the hedges grow ever higher, and behind them musicology may eventually be forgotten altogether.
It is not difficult to detect traces of this problem in, for example, Anahid Kassabian’s preference for the language of film music praxis rather than the theorizing of film scholars and narratologists, who have no great track record in writing about film music (see Kassabian 2001: 42–49). But there are two problems with this impulse:
• No one really doubts that music is an integral part of its film, but it is not always easy to translate that idea into scholarly practice. If film musicology wants film scholars to listen, it has to participate in film scholarship understood as an umbrella discipline encompassing many specialisms in need of a common language.
• If that sounds like too much academic opportunism, the argument can also be turned around. If the narratology lesson were already over after the adoption of the diegetic/
9 Anahid Kassabian, for example, who prefers ‘source music’, ‘scoring’ and ‘source scoring’, borrowed from Earle Hagen’s Scoring for Films (cf. Kassabian 2001: 42–49, referring to Hagen 1971: 190-206), not least because ‘source scoring’ provides a fuzzy zone that helps to avoid the dichotomy suggested by the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction (see also footnotes 38 and 41 for critiques of her position.)
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nondiegetic distinction, it would not be worth the fee. The problem with that distinction is not that it is simplistic, but (a) that it has sometimes been used simplistically, and (b) that it is but one element in a bigger toolbox, one which film musicology may be advised to make useful for its purposes (in pursuit of which project it may become more useful to film scholarship).
This chapter is an attempt to do that, in different ways:
• One is the attempt to expand the range of narratological concepts applied to film music.
Hierarchically nested levels of narration are a standard of narratological models, and so far film musicology has failed to look at most of them in a systematic manner. Music in extrafictional contexts – e.g. in company logos, or its contribution to title sequences – have rarely been discussed. The same applies to the other end of the scale: while the role of music in establishing subjectivity in film is acknowledged, and is discussed in studies of individual films, it has not been systematically explored beyond Gorbman’s concept of ‘metadiegetic music’ (Gorbman 1987: 22–23).
• Another one is the attempt to think about common concepts as more than boxes to file film-musical moments away in: to explore what goes on inside the boxes, e.g. what different options basic terms such as ‘diegetic’ and ‘nondiegetic’ cover.
• A third is a more sustained look at the fuzzy spaces between the categories, the zones of ambiguity in (re)constructing the place of music in the narrative structure, music’s apparent ‘movements’ from one ‘space’ into another. This includes the exploration of concepts that have occasionally been mentioned, but rarely used in film musicology, such as ‘displaced diegetic music’, ‘supradiegetic music’ or the ‘implied author’.
This includes ambiguities produced by the application of such concepts: all those film-musical equations that cannot be solved without a conceptual remainder.
This chapter explores concepts and tests them against examples, while Chapters III, IV and V are an acknowledgement of the need to do something with the concepts. Theory has to earn its keep by showing that it allows us to see and hear more in what we study. So far, film music narratology has been focused on discussing its conceptual instruments. In the process, much of interest has been found out about music’s contribution to individual films, but rather as a side effect of the methodological discussion. While that discussion is not over (in some respects it has hardly begun), we should not put off the application of the instruments for too long, even for methodological purposes, because only in their application can their usefulness be tested.
*
Hierarchies of levels of narration are a core feature of narratological systems (see, for example, Genette 1980: 227–37; Chatman 1978: 146–95; Abbott 2008: 67–82; Bal 2009: 48–74; Kuhn 2011: 81–118). This chapter uses as its framework Edward Branigan’s hierarchy, which
distinguishes between eight levels of narrative agency or sources of narrative information and corresponding levels of reception/addressees (Branigan 1992: 87) (Figure 1).
However, my reasons for referring to Branigan’s model are pragmatic rather than indicative of theoretical affiliation. Some of its features are problematic:
• A problem not of the model itself, but of its theoretical foundation is Branigan’s subscription to a perceiver-centred model of narrative and his critique of communication models. (This is discussed in ch. II.iv.d with regard to the ‘implied author’, a level represented in the model by the ‘extrafictional narrator’.)
• A second problem lies in the relationship between left- and right-hand columns. Most (film) narratology has been more interested in the sources of narrative agency, and Branigan is no exception; the addressees have been rather neglected. Some are more obvious than others:
the ‘historical audience’ sitting in the cinema, or diegetic characters listening to a tale told within the storyworld. The roles of extrafictional and nondiegetic narratees depends on one’s understanding of the conceptual role of narration and the implied author in film, but their analytical usefulness is limited, and in any case closely linked to the left-hand categories (see Kuhn 2011: 110–12), while the lower half of the categories needs to be considered in in the context of the place of focalization in the model (see below).
• The same applies to the middle column. While text, fiction and storyworld are clear, the places of event, action and speech are not; and while perception and thought make
Figure 1: Edward Branigan’s hierarchy of levels of narration.
Extrafictional narrator
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sense as different aspects of internal focalization (see ch. II.v), the place of focalization in the model itself is problematic.
• For Genette, who coined the term, focalization is categorically different from narration (see Genette 1980: 25–32). Narration organizes the narratees’ access to story information, while fozalization describes the access the narration itself has to information (see Genette 1980: 29–32). From a Genettean perspective, below the diegetic narrator is the metadiegetic level – the level of embedded narratives – while focalization specifies the restriction of access to information (see p. 121 for a model integrating both aspects).
The advantage of Branigan’s model as a chapter framework is its comprehensiveness. He is pragmatic enough to include concepts that fit the theoretical foundations of his own position only uncomfortably, and also concepts other narratologists would position differently. The differentiation between two levels of internal focalization is also helpful for the particular requirements of film (more in ch. II.v). The structure that results from my skeptical adaptation of Branigan is this:
• Ch. II.ii looks at the textualization of ‘historical’ authorship in title sequences, and at musical mediation between extrafictionality, fiction and diegesis in such sequences.
End credits also address the extrafictional aspect of film, but the chapter focuses on the title sequence as the ‘prototypical paratext of film’ (Böhnke 2007a: 32).
• Ch. II.iii deals with overt extrafictional narration, primarily in audience addresses. The implied author, the other aspect of this level, is discussed in ch. II.iv.d, because it is most relevant for certain uses of diegetic music.
• Ch. II.iv integrates the discussion of the nondiegetic and diegetic levels, because their relationship has been such a major concern of film musicology.
• Ch. II.v interrogates the usefulness of the concept of focalization for film music narratology.
ii. The ‘historical author’: extrafictionality and the title sequence
Narratology grew out of literary studies, and for most literature the ‘historical author’ is a relatively straightforward concept: most literature – a novel, say, or a play – is written by one person, probably sitting at a desk. It is not quite as simple, of course: there is an editing process, and the public persona of an author (created not least by the works) may differ from the person (whatever that may be). Things are obviously different in films, which are collaborative and have no single author in a meaningful sense – a lack felt so acutely in comparison with other arts that it gave rise to auteurism to fill the gap of an identifiable individual creator, by assigning that role to (usually) the director of a film.
But while different in the practicalities of text generation, narratologically a film is not dissimilar to a novel: there is an empirical level on which a film is made, by however many
people in whichever way; most films suggest a story(world) with its own set of rules and fictional facts, which may invite us to mentally construct an agency responsible for inventing them (i.e. an implied author; more in ch. II.iv.d); and there is narration, the presentation of the story with the means of the medium. Even the representation of authorship is not dissimilar:
books contain pages providing the names of author and publisher, a publication date, etc., and most films are bookended by credits presenting the people and organizations involved in their making. The fiction begins with an acknowledgement of its fictionality, and, strangely enough, that acknowledgement seems not to detract from viewers’ subsequent story immersion, but to be almost a condition for it: the credits delimit a space within which the fiction may legitimately take place (what Roger Odin has called the ‘title-sequence effect’ [2000: 75–80]).
Most art delimits its space and separates itself from what is not art, at different levels:
art usually takes place in specific spaces (galleries, museums, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, etc.). Inside or outside those spaces, works have their own boundaries: paintings have frames, sculptures stand on plinths, plays (and films) open and close with curtains.
Cinema as a commercial institution also surrounds its core texts with other framing devices: muzak before the curtain opens, ads, trailers. On one level, such boundaries are part of the physical reality of an artwork: even an unframed painting has an edge that separates it from its surroundings; a book has to have a first and a last page; a play has to show us the first set (or an empty stage), the first entry of an actor and a first line of dialogue (if there is any); a film has a first and last frame. But an actual frame around a painting or a stage curtain does more: it points out the boundary, and says ‘Here is art (and there isn’t)’; it focuses attention on the work, but also contains it in a ‘safe’ space to which particular rules of mental disposition, behaviour, etc., apply – here be dragons, but they are only make-believe.
But the framing of books and films does yet more. In crediting author, publisher, film-makers, it attests to their made-ness, to the fact that they have been put together by real people (as does a signature on a painting). In one sense, books and films do that in a similar way. The fictional text is at the centre, while parts attesting to its production are arranged around it: a book has a dust jacket, front and rear covers, endpapers, flyleaves, front matter (frontispiece, title page, copyright page, table of contents, acknowledgements, etc.), and possibly back matter (notes, appendices, etc.). A film may have an exhibition classification and a title at the start, perhaps a title card at ‘The End’, and company, cast and crew credits at the beginning, or end, or both. The difference is that readers of a book can decide what of the information surrounding the core text they want to take notice of and when.
In temporal arts such as theatre, music or film, audiences are bound by the progression of the work (though the display apparatus may change conditions: films shown on TV often have their end credits cut off; on a DVD player we can skip, fast forward, rewind, etc.).
Yet film differs from plays or music, which rarely acknowledge their made-ness in their performance itself.
This combination of features means two things for films: they have to overcome the challenge of leading their audience from the acknowledgement of their extrafictional aspect
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into a storyworld in limited time; but they also have the chance to do this in a very precise way, because their temporal progression is fixed, and the audience is bound to this progression –
‘the relationship of cinema to the spectator is authoritarian’, at least in this respect, as Saul Bass once said (Bass 1993: 412; my translation).
That temporal structure is crucial for film title sequences. In film scholarship, they have been discussed as ‘paratexts’, a term introduced by Genette, albeit for books. Genette differentiates paratexts into ‘peritexts’ and ‘epitexts’ (1997: 1–15). The former are physically linked to the main text – title, author and publisher information, dedication, epigraph, annotations, etc. – while the latter reference the text, but are located elsewhere – author interviews, reviews, advertising, etc. The distinction can easily be extrapolated to film, with company logos, film title, credits, etc., falling under the former and trailers, makings-of, reviews, etc. under the latter heading.
More problematic is the distinction between text and peritext. What is realized in books as a spatial distinction can be more complex in the multichannel medium of film. While title sequences can be self-enclosed, more often they layer peritextual elements (e.g. lettering of title and credits) and textual elements (theme music, images, sounds or dialogue introducing the diegesis), in Hollywood films especially since the 1950s. There is still a separation: we do not assume the letters of a title superimposed on an establishing shot to float somewhere in diegetic space (though some films play with locating title or credit typography in the diegesis; see Allison 2006). The spatial separation on different pages of a book is realized here as the conceptual separation of levels of narration. But, more importantly, such layering tends to be part of a process that leads into the fiction, and it is this process and the often unanswerable question where the peritext ends and the text begins that makes ‘paratext’ a label applicable to film only cautiously.10
The transitional nature of title sequences is not just an induction into a narrative, but also into a frame of mind: ‘a film’s beginning must lure the audience, i.e. it must prompt the necessary attention and suspense, it must plant important information, but also set the tone and atmosphere that prepares for the film to come’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 42).11 In that sense, a title sequence can be understood as an illocutionary act, an ‘invitation, persuasion, permission, or even command [...] to engage in imagining’ (Biancorosso 2001: § 5), to be attuned to the fiction and the way it requires its audience to work mentally if the fiction is to
10 André Gardies, on the other hand, stresses the difference between the title/credit sequence and its acknowledgement of ‘the film as a product’ and the actual film text: ‘the title sequence is fully part of the film, but not of the text’ (Gardies 2006: 21; my translation).
11 Deborah Allison describes theme songs in Hollywood westerns whose lyrics pre-empt the stories, modelled on the traditions of ballads or ‘story songs’ (see Allison 2001: 160–87). Beyond induction, title sequences ‘serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in the context of careers, movie title, entertainment, commercials, fashion, and art’
(Stanitzek 2009: 46).
work.12 Giorgio Biancorosso has described the ritualistic aspect of this, and the role of music for the ritual (Biancorosso 2001: § 3–7).
For many decades, the market dominance and oligopolistic structure of Hollywood have
For many decades, the market dominance and oligopolistic structure of Hollywood have