Zoom-in Online

The web’s movie circles just keep pumping out the blog-a-thons. For newbies to the phenomenon a topic is announced in advance (here’s a frequently updated calendar of topics) and for one day or more, depending on the parameters, any site or blog is free to chime in on said theme. A collection of links is pooled at the host site. It’s like a book film club with strangers, which runs the gamut between deep and deeply silly (depending on topic and various contributions thereto). I just hosted one. And now there’s two more going on right now over the weekend. The filmmusic and the ambitious failure blog-a-thons. I’d be a failure (and not an ambitious one) if I tried the latter this morning without preparation, but I have been mulling over the filmmusic topic.

I believe the musical is the greatest of film genres. It regularly demands of the filmmaker a simultaneous focus on everything that’s most intoxicating about the cinema: movement (camera and subject), visuals, performance and sound. They must be working in perfect tandem. All types of film use each of these ingredients but the musical performs the most delicate and dangerous alchemy with them. Even the magical musicals teeter precariously on the edge of folly.

Perversely, despite my love of the musical, I’m choosing as my topic the absence of music. Some people feel that films without scores are dead. I personally greet them like a challenge. They're not as easy to watch, true, but they're intriguing experiments.

"It is almost impossible to make movies without music. Movies need the cement of music. I've never seen a movie better without it. Music is as important as the photography."
- Bernard Herrman

I’m not speaking of silent films which are nearly always screened with music. I’m speaking of the movies which make a deliberate choice to forego it… like Hitchcock’s The Birds. One only needs to be reminded that it was his follow up to Psycho, which relies heavily on its über famous score, to be reminded of Hitchcock’s restless experimentation. Hitchcock also went easy on the music in Rope (a personal favorite). 12 Angry Men is another famous film that skips the score -- presumably to focus on the debate which consumes the actors. And the late 90s Dogme movement from Danish filmmakers, which produced the acclaimed The Celebration and the controversial Lars Von Trier effort The Idiots among other films, demanded no musical scoring.

For those readers willing to test the tuneless waters, my music-averse movie pet is Executive Suite (1954). It’s an underseen dramatic gem from Robert Wise who is himself famous for musicals like The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Suite features a rich cast including Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch and June Allyson. Even without a score this business drama plays taut and tense. It takes place in a panicked compact time frame as Wise guides his actors through a sea of shark infested corporate waters and tricky interpersonal relationships. The past histories between the characters --employees, managers, ladder climbers, spouses -- are sometimes fleshed out and sometimes deliciously opaque. This is total conjecture but I bet Robert Altman loved it.

If you know of any other films without scores list them in the comments. Do you like the challenge of films without scores or do you resent the withholding?