by Linda Ganus

 

 So long, mom,

I’m off to drop the bomb,

So don’t wait up for me.

But while you swelter

Down there in your shelter,

You can see me

On your tv.[1]

 In the 1960s and 70s, American movie and TV audiences watched as disturbing political events played out on their home entertainment TV screens, including Presidential impeachment proceedings, assassinations, and coverage of the war in Vietnam. Disillusioned, angry and confused, many young artists, musicians, and filmmakers began to raise the volume and intensity of their protests. Technological advances in camera equipment during the 1950s and 60s had made it easier for filmmakers to be more mobile, with camera operators interviewing real people on the street and capturing synchronized sound directly in almost any situation. In his seminal book Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, film historian Erik Barnouw describes this burgeoning style of cinéma vérité documentary filmmaking as “having certain democratizing effect –or a disruptive one, depending on the point of view.”[2]

One critical way documentarians chose to frame their protests against official policy in the United States was through creative ironic commentary. In other entertainment and news media during this time, Madison Avenue “Mad Men” were in their prime, creating the new David Ogilvy-inspired advertising model full of slyly-referential humor and music. Parodies and caricatures of politicians and their foibles abounded, ranging from the sublime (David Levine in the New York Review of Books) to the ridiculous (Mort Drucker and Al Jaffee in Mad magazine), who delighted in skewering Vietnam and Watergate-era politicos including Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and their cronies. Although most commercial Hollywood directors still warily avoided fictional films explicitly critical of official policy in Vietnam for several years after its end, many documentary filmmakers were not as reticent, and looked for ways to catch the eyes – and ears – of increasingly sophisticated and media-savvy viewers. Many filmmakers chose to present their political opinions in their non-fiction films by using music and sound not just as background but as ironic, darkly humorous signifiers to create a commentary by their contrasting combination with the moving images. These striking ironic stylizations, critical constructions in mid-twentieth century documentary soundtracks, were occasionally part of formal strategies that in turn informed the construction of some popular dramatic films of the era and their soundtracks.

EARLY TRADITIONAL FUNCTIONS OF THE SOUNDTRACK IN DOCUMENTARY FILMS

 Non-fiction films advocating particular political points of view via multi-sensory, immersive approaches were not new to mid-twentieth century documentarians or their audiences. Barnouw cites the development of the British filmmaker John Grierson’s Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (EMB) of the early 1930s, detailing how Grierson and his team worked to incorporate the new element of sound into their moving documentary images.[3] In the United States, during the same decade, Pare Laurentz collaborated with composer Virgil Thomson to create The Plow That Broke the Plains, using through-composed music inspired by folk tunes and avoiding “mickey-mousing” (having the music slavishly imitate and highlight each detail of the action onscreen). The film’s narration was dramatically read by baritone Thomas Chalmers in a poetic, Whitman-esque manner to illuminate hardships suffered by farmers during the Dust Bowl droughts.[5]

However, unlike these 1930s films with earnest soundtracks meant to celebrate and champion the average working citizen, many filmmakers who came of age during the cynical, media-saturated Cold War frequently chose to express their fatalistic views about war, power, and human nature in a dark and mordantly joking way. In the face of mutually assured destruction, the directors seemed to be saying, what else is there to do but whistle into the existential void? In the long literary tradition of sharply critical humorous writing (the master of which was Mark Twain, who used irony and sarcastic humor as a critical response to U.S. Gilded Age politicians’ abuse of power and lust for empire), Vietnam War-era documentarians began using music and sound in their films as signifiers for making ironic cultural references and jokes that the (supposedly) hip baby boomer listener/viewer would appreciate. By deliberately pairing music, lyrics and/or sound originally intended to provoke certain types of emotional responses with contrasting but somehow related imagery that evoked contrasting affective memories and reactions, filmmakers knowingly provoked moments of shocking, sardonic juxtapositions that imbued their works with grimly humorous touches: atomic age Dadaism.

What made documentarians turn to this ironic approach to scoring serious subjects such as the Vietnam War? In order to highlight several ways that post-Cold War filmmakers used the sound as an device for ironic commentary, it might be helpful to first describe characteristics and functions of the traditional non-fiction film soundtrack at this point in history, as historical artifacts. In the 1960s/1970s, there was a rise in an observational, non-“movie-score-music” soundtrack aesthetic because any sound not captured by the camera “witness” was deemed manipulative in a documentary. Instead of non-diegetic (music or sound added for atmosphere in post-production), documentaries tended to use soundtracks with primarily diegetic sound (sound that only existed as part of the action being filmed), such as asylum patients filmed performing in a musical in the opening scenes of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies:

https://vimeo.com/41901644

This preference for naturalistic, ambient sound and music served several purposes, the most important being that sound naturally captured while filming (or that seemed to be, but skillfully added or recreated in post-production) reinforced the quality of “authenticity” thought necessary for the non-fiction film to be taken seriously. Even within these parameters, the sounds accompanying on-screen images served several purposes to make a documentary more compelling: to establish a grounded sense of place and character; to structurally tie disparate types of shots (talking heads, recreations, action) together; to reinforce a sense of spontaneity by recreating imperfect sounds of overlapping conversations and noises heard in “real” life; and perhaps most importantly, to help embody (through stimulating the viewer/listeners bodily sensations) an audience member’s intellectual and emotional response to the message of the film.[6]

As Barnouw states, this “witness-like” quality of the documentary soundtrack does not necessarily imply “truth,” but rather a quality of testimony.[7] One film maker, Scott Hicks, interviewed for Pepita Ferrari’s film Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary argues that film making, even a non-fiction/documentary film, is a subjective, constructed art and any claim to absolute truth is spurious. Another great contemporary documentarian also interviewed for the film, Errol Morris, states that in a documentary, “the truth is not up for grabs.”  By this, Morris means that a film maker may have opinions about the ramifications of an event, but he or she is not at liberty to change the factual occurrences of that event in their film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE7ZtJXG0kU

However, since Cold War-era documentarians were eschewing a non-diagetic music soundtrack to amplify action onscreen so as not to give any impression of trying to conceal any “construction” of the non-fictional narrative, sound and music were freed up to be used as intentional components in untraditional ways, including music that seemingly contradicted the on-screen images in an ironic manner.

The literary device irony is a multi-faceted concept involving opposition or an inherent contradiction that the audience perceives, even though the characters may not. Ancient Greek dramas such as Oedipus Rex contain elements of dramatic irony: the audience knows for the duration of the play that the cursed person who has murdered Oedipus’ father and who will marry his mother is himself, and the tension and paradox that this knowledge produces is essential to the dramatic urgency of the play. Oedipus’ tragic journey could also be described as an example of situational irony, in which events play out in a certain way precisely because of actions taken to prevent them, another paradoxical contradiction.

In his article “Dance Macabre” for the online edition of Film Comment, critic Sean Doyle comments that “the film soundtrack, like the movement of the camera, often is experienced like the (invisible) work of God; when there is a contrast or contradiction between onscreen action and the score, the film’s God may seem unjust or even cruel.”[9] It is this disturbing, attention-grabbing tension between two oppositional affective devices that many Cold-war era filmmakers chose to provoke by using well-known music that contradicted and subverted the emotional message of the images. Like the knowing ads of Madison Avenue and the 1970s caricaturists lampooning politicians,

lbj vietnam scar

(David Levine, in The New York Review of Books)

filmmakers were directly acknowledging their audiences’ increasing cultural erudition by using the contradictions of an ironic soundtrack that commented on the onscreen action. They were letting the audience in on their ironic joking.

SOUND AND MUSIC USED FOR CRITICAL/IRONIC PURPOSES IN POSTWAR DOCUMENTARY

There were several ways that documentary directors and their production teams used music and sound as ironic post-war signifiers in their films. One method was to situate well-known music previously used for patriotic effect alongside footage that demonstrated or revealed morally dubious explanations or actions, as was done with excoriating effect in Peter Davis’ 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds.

The film was extremely controversial. In the age of Woodstock and protest songs, the ambient sounds of Hearts and Minds captured the average post-war citizen’s feeling of overloaded confusion, betrayal and innocence lost, through mediums that had become increasingly self-referential in an ironic and satirical way.

Along with tremendously moving war footage and clips of famous and ordinary people whose lives were touched by the Vietnam War, the soundtrack of Hearts and Minds featured excerpts of politicians’ disingenuous speeches, bitter comments from ex-combatants; testimony from devastated Vietnamese villagers were translated and overdubbed; hearing actual words carried more emotional weight than reading subtitles, and propagandistic musical snippets of super-patriotic Hollywood movies were played over footage of U.S. soldiers napalming villages, all edited in a relentless audiovisual collage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcnd1GDzEPg

An earlier 1968 anti-Vietnam war documentary, In the Year of the Pig by filmmaker Emilio de Antonio has been occasionally mentioned as an early pioneer in the use of ironic music in the soundtrack as a critical strategy. However, though compelling and effective in conveying his anti-war message, de Antonio’s supposedly ironic use of music in the film is not particularly persuasive. De Antonio relies mostly on voice-overs from many, many interviews and uses ambient, diagetic sound sparingly, such as helicopter noise at the beginning. There are two short sequences underscored by music: a heroic orchestral fanfare from the final few measures of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 accompanying a brief excerpt of an American newsreel announcing that “communist guerillas join American forces” and a sequence at the end of the film in which the Civil War anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays over scenes of maimed American soldiers limping onto a beachhead. I would argue that neither of these musical sequences would qualify as “ironic:” the Mahler excerpt, for example, sounds triumphant, but is not in itself a movie trope/signifier of anti-Semitic and/or racial oppression, in the way that some of Wagner’s music has become, for example. Besides the fact that Mahler was Jewish, his music is not really widely familiar enough to mainstream audiences to be understood as part any kind of cliché of semantic oppositional commentary on the screen action. This can also be said of de Antonio’s use of the “Battle Hymn” sequence: the Civil War anthem celebrating brave soldiers does not create a surprising or contradictory affective dissonance when paired with a sequence of wounded soldiers (as opposed to Davis’ movie music tune “Over There,” a song about patriotic Americans admirably going “over there” to Europe in order to assist Allies in winning the war during World War II, being played over a scene of soldiers “over there” in Vietnam calmly spraying burning napalm on Viet Cong huts–not so admirable, and not winning–in Hearts and Minds). In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds are both films that indict the United States for its actions surrounding the war in Vietnam; however, only the latter effectively uses the soundtrack as an ironic device to do so. De Antonio was extremely critical and dismissive of Davis’ movie, perhaps in part because the Hollywood academy eventually awarded Hearts and Minds an Oscar for Best Documentary, but not The Year of the Pig.

FICTION FILMS: DOCUMENTARY MUSIC AND SOUND TROPES USED AS DEVICES OF POSTWAR CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The use of the film score to evoke nihilistic humor was already being used by a few popular dramatic early Cold War filmmakers, notably Stanley Kubrick in his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, a Cold War black comedy fictional film. The conclusion of the film features the sappy, sentimental WWII Vera Lynn song “We’ll Meet Again” played over images of nuclear holocaust engineered by the bumbling-yet-evil, Kissingeresque Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFkryh6hC-k

As Sean Doyle comments in “Dance Macabre,” instead of Vera Lynn optimistically waiting for her lover to come home from the war, the film’s audiences anxiously knew that a nuclear holocaust would be a war from which no one would come home.[10]

The ironic, referential use of contrasting music/imagery in Dr. Strangelove was itself paralleling (if not directly referencing) another dramatic fictional Cold War film from the same year, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe. The final scenes also used sound to evoke a nuclear holocaust, but instead of benign music with horrific images, the opposite juxtaposition is used: quick cuts of familiar, friendly street scenes in New York (about to be bombed) with a voice over of an imminent countdown to the bombing. (I still remember experiencing a sleepless night as a twelve-year old after watching and hearing the final freeze-frame and silence of a rebroadcast of the film, which stopped immediately before the imagined nuclear blast.)

http://www.tubechop.com/watch/8147281

One major studio filmmaker, in particular, was already making his own waves during this era by creating a distinctive style of filmmaking that featured naturalistic, overlapping documentary style of dialogue as a hallmark of his dramatic films. In reviews and press releases, Robert Altman, a major Hollywood studio director, has been often described as a “maverick” and an original “auteur,” known as much for his distinctive blend of naturalistic camera zooms and pans as his multi-layered, overlapping tracks of dialogue. The term “Altman-esque” is cinematic shorthand for this seemingly improvisatory, naturalistic style of shooting. Altman’s style of filmmaking was unique for a major Hollywood studio film director at the time, although de rigeur for many “serious” documentary films. Altman, however, actually started his career as a director of many documentary films, and often used his faux-documentary style to sardonically comment on various Hollywood genre clichés and tropes as well as to lend his films an interesting tension from this blend of fictional narrative heard through a “naturalistic” documentary-style sound filter. The following link is to a compilation of several famous overlapping dialogue moments from notable Altman films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFiXAgwuaJI&index=20&list=PLBSVd97ZTc1IuKxYdowp-SEJQYXYLWPq_

Like the portentous narrator in The Plow That Broke the Plains, or countless RKO, Movietone and British Pathé newsreels, the documentary filmmaking trope of using an omniscient narrator/voiceover to serve a “Straight Man/Balladeer” function has also been used to darkly humorous effect in several fiction films. Early dramatic film directors that used this trope include Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane; Welles used the actual crew from RKO to prepare his fictional satiric newsreel summary of the life of Charles Foster Kane. More recent dramatic film directors who use the “omniscient narrator” trope to tongue-in-cheek effect include Rob Reiner, who acted as both director and narrator in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap. Wes Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek, yet touching Moonrise Kingdom (2012) featured the earnestly deadpan actor Bob Balaban, breaking the fourth wall and narrating the film, wryly and implicitly commenting on the shifting morals and standards of small-town America in the 1960s.

THE UNINTENTIONALLY IRONIC SOUNDTRACK MOVIE TRAILER MUSIC AS HISTORIC ARTIFACT: HOOP DREAMS

Over time, documentary soundtrack tropes occasionally become dated and the sounds themself can become an ironic signifier of cultural attitudes. An example of this is film trailer music, background teaser music used to promote film at the time, often made before the film’s soundtrack was completed and used to market a documentary. Inappropriate trailer music can later become unintentional historic commentary, as seen in a comparison of the original 1994 trailer and updated 2004 trailer for Steve James’ documentary Hoop Dreams.

Upon comparing the original 1994 trailer and accompanying music/voice over with the current “Criterion Collection” version, today’s listeners/viewers can easily perceive entrenched white bias that was pervasive in the Hollywood Academy, or at least in the major studios’ marketing departments, at the time. The original efforts to promote the documentary Hoop Dreams misrepresented the soundtrack and music in the original 1994 trailer for the film. For the trailer, the editors used a more traditional “uplifting” classical fanfare sound often associated with sports triumphs over adversity (think John Williams’ music for the 1984 Summer Olympics) instead of the real Hoop Dreams soundtrack featuring hip-hop music, which may have been feared to be not mainstream/commercially appealing enough at the time. The current updated trailer for the film has been changed to more accurately reflect the music/soundtrack used in the film.

original 1994 trailer for Hoop Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph2Y-epihlk

revised current trailer for Hoop Dreams – Criterion Collection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scFTAyjs2cc

EPILOGUE: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF IRONY IN DOCUMENTARY SOUNDTRACKS

The device of making indirect ironic, pointed commentary through music and sound in documentary films tends to wax and wane in historic cycles. During much of the 1980s and the Reagan administration, films sharply critical of the government and foreign policy became tacitly frowned upon; in their place came more strictly educational documentaries, such as Carl Sagan’s wildly popular PBS series Cosmos. After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the nation seemed to go on to suffer complete amnesia for several years about the lessons of the problematic Vietnam War intervention; however, after the traumatic U.S. entry into both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, satirists with a journalistic thrust (starting with the fearless Stephen Colbert at a 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner), began again to publicly criticize and question U.S. policy in artistic venues. Contemporary documentary filmmakers including Michael Moore, Eugene Jarecki and Robert Weide, use music and sound in their documentary films to point out absurd or hypocritical attitudes of Americans abusing power.

In Jarecki’s searing 2012 documentary The House I Live In, the soundtrack is an ingeniously-constructed amalgam of music, dialogue, ambient noise, and narration. Jarecki saves the most pointed non-verbal commentary, though, for the very end, when the film’s credits roll over the sounds of Paul Robeson singing “The House I Live In,” an idealistic 1940s anthem to utopian American democracy and brotherhood. This comes at the very end of a scathing, emotionally exhausting 2 ½ hour film detailing the targeting of poor and minority non-violent drug offenders to support the “prison industrial complex” in America.

In 2014, forty years after the first screening of Hearts and Minds, director Peter Davis was interviewed for Vogue magazine. He said that in making the film, his goal was “to make a film that was not explanatory but experiential. I didn’t want to instruct or even inform in the usual way; I hoped instead to convey something of the experience of war.”[11] Davis used disparate bits of old newsreels, music, interviews, public and private speeches, movie clips and more to create a sensory collage of sometimes contradictory images and sound. The contrasts of the bubbly cheers of typical suburban American football crowds and high school marching bands intercut with interviews with War “hawks” talking about America winning the war in Vietnam highlight in a borderline laughable way the absurdity of anyone thinking that America had any right to “win” a war in which they should not have interfered in the first place.

By using ironically contrasting music/sound to accompany their imagery, documentary filmmakers such as Davis and Jarecki have ensured that their films became a more participatory, and thereby memorable, experience for their audiences. The film musicologist Holly Rogers has commented, “Narrative in film (with music that contradicts an image) is constructed (or rather completed) by the audience. Filling in the gaps and contradictions with referential knowledge of the sounds/music external to the filmic imagery, the viewer reconstructs the myths (and events) through an act of (participatory) self-narration.”[12] We as audience members, when confronted by a gaping dissonance, whether in film sound/imagery, or actual news/political reports, have an instinct to seek resolution, often through the momentary realization of the absurd and ridiculously transient nature of life itself. Documentary and other filmmakers who used attention-getting devices in their soundtracks such as ironic musical and sound quotes invite the audience to recognize the subversive nature of their commentary, and to hopefully participate further by taking action against society’s injustices.

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.”[13]

– Mark Twain

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

BOOKS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES:

Altman, Rick. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993.

Buhler, James, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.

Chion, Michael. The Voice in Cinema. New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.

Cooke, Mervyn, ed. The Hollywood Film Music Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Goldmark, Kramer Leppert. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. University of California Press, 2007. Ebrary.

Reay, Pauline. Music in Film: Soundtracks and Synergy (Short Cuts). Wallflower Press, 2004.

Rogers, Holly. Music and Sound in Documentary Film. NY: Routledge, 2015. Ebrary.

Ruoff, Jeffrey, “Conventions of Sound in Documentary” in Cinema Journal, 32:3 (1993), 27.

Spence, Louise. Crafting Truth: Documentary Film and Meaning. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2011. Ebrary.

 

WEBLINKS:

LEEMAN, Lisa. Composers Confab: Creating The Best Score For Your Film. IDA (International Documentary Association) website, HOME › DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE › ALL ISSUES › SUMMER 2008 › COMPOSERS CONFAB: CREATING THE BEST SCORE FOR YOUR FILM.

http://www.documentary.org/magazine/composers-confab-creating-best-score-your-film accessed June 30. 2016.

(http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Connections/Film/Music/index.html)

 

critical approaches to film: formal v. socio-ideological analyses

http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Connections/Film/Approach/index.html

 

NOTES

[1]Tom Lehrer, “So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)” (1965) Lehrer said at the time he released this song: “I feel that, if there’s going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them NOW.”) In this song, he references a 1904 patriotic George M. Cohan song and show, Little Johnny Jones.

[2] Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993, 90.

[3] Ibid., 110-112.

[5] Ibid., 115-116.

[6] Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991, 19.)

[7]Barnouw, Documentary, 344-348.

[8]National Film Board of Canada, Pepita Ferrari, director: Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. (40’)

[9] Sean Doyle, “Dance Macabre,” Film Comment, May/June 2016. Online edition from Film Society of Lincoln Center website. Accessed 8 July 2016.

[10]Sean Doyle, “Dance Macabre.”

[11]O’Grady, Megan. “Director Peter Davis Speaks to Vogue.com on the 40th Anniversary of His Pivotal Vietnam Documentary, Hearts and Minds.” http://www.vogue.com/3537663/hearts-and-minds-vietnam-documentary-peter-davis/. Web. Accessed 2 July 2016.

[12] Holly Rogers, Beethoven’s Myth Sympathy: Hollywood’s Re-Construction. http://britishpostgraduatemusicology.org/bpm8/Rogers.html. Web. Accessed 2 July 2016.

[13] Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Following the Equator (More Tramps Abroad). American Publishing Company, Hartford, CT, 1897.