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Abstract
From 1936 to 1939, the Spanish Civil War gave several film directors the opportunity to stand side by side with Republican soldiers by filming them in combat. Henri Cartier-Bresson first movie Victoire de la vie (Victory of Life, 1937), then, one year later, as the nationalist side was gaining ground, L’Espagne vivra (Spain shall live, 1938). The music for Cartier Bressons’s two films follows two contrasting strategies: for Victoire de la vie, French composer Charles Kœchlin composed an original soundtrack in a relatively homogeneous style, whereas in L’Espagne vivra, Louis Saguer made use of a compilation of pre-existing symphonic pieces. This article intends to analyse how these two musical approaches align themselves with the contrasting but complementary analyses of the Spanish Civil War provided by Cartier-Bresson's two films.
Notes
1 Cartier-Bresson would be hired again as an assistant by Renoir for La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). Thinking back on this experience a few years later, he wrote: ‘In the United States, being an assistant was a fully-fledged job. For us, it was a step towards becoming a director. But Jean quickly realized (as did I) that I would never become one. Because a great film director approaches time as a novelist does, whereas the photo reporter’s job is closer to the documentary film.’ (Cartier-Bresson Citation1996, p. 72)
2 While shooting Victoire de la vie, Cartier-Bresson, Herbert Kline and the cameraman Jacques Lemare filmed for two days the brigade of American civilians who had come to fight on the Republicans’ side: the Abraham Lincoln brigade. The eighteen-minute-long film, entitled With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade In Spain, aimed at raising funds to help the wounded American soldiers come back home. The long-lost film was finally found in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) by Juan Salas.
3 In the French version of the film, Terre d’Espagne, the commentary was told by Jean Renoir.
4 Alex North is surprisingly mentioned as co-director in the credits of the French version of the film (Cœur d’Espagne), along with Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand who produced it.
5 Komsomolsk (Citation1932, New Earth (Citation1934) and 400 Million (Citation1938). Eisler then signed two scores for documentaries produced by Frontier Film: White Flood (Citation1940) and The Forgotten Village (Citation1941).
6 Following this collaboration, Blitzstein was regularly associated with the Frontier Film productions (Valley Town, dir. Willard Van Dyke, Citation1940, then Native Land, dir. Paul Strand and Leo Hutwitz, Citation1942).
7 Even though he only worked on arrangements for this film, Thomson was nonetheless a great American composer who, along with Copland, gave America its own sound and left his mark on the musical language of documentary film by working with Pare Lorentz, whose two documentaries, The Plow that Broke the Plains (Citation1936) and The River (Citation1937), were very successful upon their release. In these two movies that respectively deal with the issues of intensive agriculture and the need to control the Mississippi river, Thomson used an essentially modal harmonic language and relied on some pre-existing popular melodies (cow-boy songs, military marches) to give a feeling of authenticity to the films while also creating an undeniably poetic atmosphere.
8 Due to his Republican allegiances, the composer was forced to exile himself to Mexico at the end of the Civil War.
9 Russell Palmer was president of Peninsular News Service, a pro-Franco lobby group.
10 Housing Problems (dir. Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, Citation1935), sponsored by the London County Council and the British Commercial Gas Association, was a ground-breaking documentary for direct sound recording: it offered in situ interviews and recorded in synchronous sound the testimonies of the inhabitants of the London slums.
11 Considered as one of the masterpieces of the time, Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread (Citation1932) has an entirely musicalized soundtrack (Brahms’ Fourth Symphony), just like Triumph des Willens is entirely musicalized and never uses a voice-over.
12 A member of the Communist Party, Pierre Unik was also assistant director on Jean Renoir’s film A nous la liberté (Freedom is Ours).
13 The time codes correspond to the version available at the following address: https://parcours.cinearchives.org/Les-films-731-94-0-0.html [Accessed 4 December 2019].
14 As evidenced by Lilian’s album (dedicated to Lilian Harvey) and the Seven’s Stars Symphony, among other works.
15 Kœchlin said that he ‘was full of his subject’ (Kœchlin Citation1938).
16 Kœchlin wanted an ensemble that sounded ‘soft, low and sustained.’ Letter from Kœchlin to Cartier-Bresson, 29 January 1938 (Document archived at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris).
17 Manuscript archived at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in the music department, under the references Ms. 16169 and Ms 16170. The time codes specified between brackets are the ones that are mentioned on this manuscript. The Max Eschig Publishing House owns the final version of the manuscript score.
18 It is the case in another sequence, where villagers are invited by gong strikes to participate in the celebration of the first anniversary of the creation of a hospital (33:29-33:59); contrary to the bombings sequence, Charles Kœchlin’s music is not interrupted at that moment; the gong strikes and the music are overlaid.
19 This introductory theme is very close to the theme that serves as an opening to Kœchlin’s symphonic poem The Law of the Jungle op. 175, a work that was probably composed in parallel and finished in July 1939. Similarly, the melody of example 2 is close to Kœchlin’s Burning Bush. For a study of these extra-filmic inter-musicality occurrences, see Rossi Citation2010.
20 In this film Kœchlin’s method lies in writing melodies first: ‘[during the screenshot] while keeping an eye on the picture I was writing some themes that came to my mind spontaneously, themes that I improvised progressively and which I write in the light of the little red lamp on music paper that I had taken the precaution of taking with me’ (Kœchlin Citation1938, page number missing).
21 See our analysis of the score (Rossi, Citation2010).
22 ‘The score is completely un-Spanish in feeling, its main musical aim [is] to express the idea of the fight for liberty that was so dear to Kœchlin personally, and this does best in triumphant chorales which enclose and unify the work’ (Orledge, Citation1971: 13). The composer himself reinforces this opinion: ‘I didn’t make tourist Spanish’ (Kœchlin, Citation1938).
23 Stéphan Etcharry brought to my attention the gap between this music from the South of the Spanish peninsula and the type of dance in which the men mimic a sort of struggle, a choreography that is more typical of the Northern provinces (Navarra, the Basque country).
24 I would like to warmly thank my colleagues Stéphan Etcharry, Lidia López Gómez, Stanislas Janin and Germán Gan Quesada for helping me identify all these musical pieces.
25 Darius Milhaud was also associated with another film about the Spanish Civil War after he composed the music of Espoir, sierra de Teruel, directed by André Malraux (author of the novel the film was adapted from) and Boris Peskine, released in 1940.
26 The time codes correspond to the version available at the following address: https://parcours.cinearchives.org/Les-films-ESPAGNE-VIVRA-_L-_-731-64-0-2.html?ref [Accessed 4 December 2019].
27 These kinds of symbols are similarly exploited by the opposite side of the conflict. In Defenders of the Faith, we can also find a sequence with ruins (16:31) and a Russian gun is shown (57:23).
28 These songs were recorded on a disc, Chant de la guerre d’Espagne (Songs of the Spanish Civil War) released in 1963.
29 At 07:23, a sort of Andalusian nuba, probably of Moroccan origin, can be heard; at this moment, the documentary is talking about the Moors who support Franco.
30 ‘Music draws filmgoers into a film’s world, measure by measure. It is, I will argue, at least as significant as the visual and narrative components that have dominated film studies. It conditions identification processes, the encounters between film text and filmgoers’ psyches’ (Kassabian Citation2001, p. 1).
31 ‘There may be a scene that is played a shade too slowly which I might be able to quicken with a little animated music; or, to a scene that is too fast, I may be able to give a little more feeling by using slower music’ (Steiner Citation1937, p. 223).
32 Britten also uses this kind of detachment from reality in Coal Face, accentuating the artificiality of the soundtrack. For instance, a choral glissando is used as a sound to illustrate the coal tumbling down, after a miner has hewed it: but the coal falls and the glissando comes a few seconds later.
33 The synchronisation of a noise or a visual movement with a musical figure that offers a sound equivalent is called ‘mickeymousing’ in reference to the Walt Disney cartoons that systematised this process.
34 Source: https://parcours.cinearchives.org/Les-films-ESPAGNE-VIVRA-_L-_-731-64-0-2.html?ref= [Accessed 21 March 2021].
35 The only diegetic (post-synchronised) words heard in Victoire de la vie are pronounced by a group of peasants who shout ‘Alo’ to the camera (10:48) and a distraught survivor who begs: ‘Quiero! Agua!’ (24:02).
36 Interview of the ‘Italian infantry Sergeant Tanna Alfonso, a former farm worker’ (19:11).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jérôme Rossi
Jérôme Rossi A member of CAPHI and an associate researcher at IREMus, Jérôme Rossi is a lecturer in musicology at the University of Nantes. He has written numerous books and articles on post-Romantic music, especially English music of the first half of the 20th century; he is the author of a monograph on the English composer Frederick Delius (published by Papillon Ed., 2010) and he directed a collective work on this same composer (Frederick Delius et la France, Delatour Ed., 2014). For the past ten years, his work has focused on the links between music and cinema. Co-founder of the ELMEC group (Etudes des Langages Musicaux à l’ECran), he recently published Le Cinéma populaire et ses musiciens (E.U.D, 2020, co-directed with Philippe Gonin), La Musique classique au cinéma: du concert à l’écran (P.U.R, 2019, co-directed with Stéphan Etcharry), La Musique de film en France (Symetrie Ed., 2016) and a book on television series music (PUR Ed., 2015, co-directed with Cécile Carayol). He regularly composes music for cinema and television.