Dialogue Without Words Interactions and intersections of cinema and music in films of the French avant-‐garde Ent’racte, Un chien andalou, and Le sang d’un poète Patrick Campbell Jankowski Candidate for the Master of Musical Arts Degree, 2015
March 27, 2015
2
Table of Contents
3
13
31
53
72
91
93
105
Prologue: Setting the Scene
Chapter 1: The Role of Film Music – Far more than “Occupying the ear”
Chapter 2: Timbre, Orchestration, and Harmony
Chapter 3: Interactions of Cinematic and Musical Rhythm, Tempo, and Meter
Chapter 4: The Crucial Element of Form
Epilogue: Fade to Black
Appendix
Bibliography and Filmography
3
Prologue: Setting the Scene
The following is an imagined dialogue between filmmaker René Clair and a conceptual
figure called “The Other”:
RC: The cinema is too young, too imperfect, to satisfy us if it remains stationary.
From the moment it ceases to advance, it seems to move backwards.
The Other: What do you mean exactly by “cinema?” It is a word that may be
taken in different ways in future years.
RC: It is time to have done with words. Nothing is being improved because we
are not wiping the slate clean. Real cinema cannot be put in words. But just try
to get that across to people – you, myself, and the rest – who have been twisted
by thirty-‐odd centuries of chatter: poetry, the theater, the novel… They must
learn again to see with the eyes of a savage, of a child less interested in the plot
of a Punch and Judy show than in the drubbings the puppets give each other
with their sticks.
The cinematic medium provided artists with a new wealth of expressive
possibilities. However, many were contentious over precisely how to influence the
evolution of this new art form. Was it an extension of the theater? Was it a purely visual
art? Was it a mechanical ballet? Was it narrative, poetic, or both? One truth was inevitable:
film offered the greatest control of a viewer’s sensory experience that had yet been offered
in an artistic medium, and in utilizing the cinema, artists could tap into that viewer’s
comprehension of an artwork. Narrative, image, and eventually, accompanying music, were
fused together into a singular experience, but with an added element: the control that the
filmmaker had, through cinematography and editing, of perception. The filmmaker guides
4
the viewer’s eye and ear, and dictates how to perceive a scene. What’s more, they
manipulate time, being able to interrupt the linear flow of a logical narrative in order to
form new temporal relationships in the mind of the viewer.
The newly born relationship between the filmmaker and the composer allowed the
pair to control the interaction of consonance and dissonance between the moving image
and its accompanying music and sound. The cinema came to be known in France as “le
septième art,” a term which remains in common use (Eatwell 2014). Film was
conceptualized as a brand new art form, yet it simultaneously fused together a multitude of
other arts: visual imagery, narrative, choreography of movement, and architecture, both of
set designs as well as in the structuring of images in the editing process. It embodied the
union of image and sound. Between the musical streams of the artistic and the commercial,
intersection is frequent. Such is the case with film: conceived both as spectacle and
entertainment as well as “high art.” Many, including René Clair, recognized the potential
bifurcation between the two streams early on. Clair writes of French film’s shortcomings in
its earliest days, noting:
It was not in the years around 1922 that the French film enjoyed its best
period. At that time, while the American, German and Swedish film
industries were producing original works in each turn (the Soviet
cinema was to take its place in history shorty afterward), the French
cinema seemed lack-‐luster and characterless in comparison. Of course,
France had an interesting “avant-‐garde,” but its purely visual
experiments could be appreciated only by a few people, and the
disagreements between this “avant-‐garde” and the “commercial”
cinema threatened to lead French film production into a blind alley
(Clair 1972).
5
In fact, it was in the realm of “popular music,” that is, the music of dancehalls, jazz
bands, and vaudeville theater, to which those figures essential to the early development of
French film scores would turn for inspiration. These figures included Erik Satie and
Georges Auric, who found an appeal in popular and folk entertainments rather than the art
music that they considered to be tired, overused, and antiquated. Often, it must be noted,
this music was of German origin, signifying the political divide that underpinned the
cultural one. The dissonance between popular art and high art was motivated as much by
politics as by anything else. Among the fundamental characteristics of Dada are absurdity
and chaos. This “anti-‐art” movement, born in Zürich and which flourished in Paris in the
period from 1915 through the mid-‐1920’s, commented on the nonsense of war and on the
contentious political climate. Experimentation, irony and humor were its weapons, and the
establishment was its target (Dorf 2006). Dadaist art challenged the belief that everything
needed to have a reasonable explanation.
Just as the perception of harmony relies upon the relationship of consonance and
dissonance, and the resulting effects of tension and relaxation on the listener, a consonant
and dissonant relationship also operates between music and moving image. It is manifested
perhaps foremost in the deliberate alignment and misalignment of image with musical
rhythm. Erik Satie’s score to Rene Clair’s Dadaist 1924 film Entr’acte – conceived and
premiered as part of the ballet Relâche – exemplifies these techniques. Likely for the first
time in the history of the very new medium, a deliberate effort was made to establish a
carefully controlled relationship between image and music. Drawing upon techniques of
ballet music, Satie fashioned a score that was deliberately synchronized with Clair’s
realization of Francis Picabia’s vision. Satie’s collaboration with scenarist Jean Cocteau,
visual artist Pablo Picasso, and choreographer Léonide Massine in the groundbreaking
succès de scandale ballet Parade presaged this relationship in 1917. The style of Satie’s
music, with its surface simplicity and timbral leanness, proved a perfect match for the
experimental, humorous, and often nonsensical ballet of images that together comprise
Entr’acte. However, significant instances of asynchrony of both pacing and of topic generate
6
tension for the viewer. It is in these moments of deviation from total synchronization that
chaos and absurdity – those subversive traits of Dadaism – are heightened, and strengthen
the film’s impact.
Defying Logic
The function of logic is an important consideration in examining these films of Clair,
Cocteau, and Buñuel, precisely because in all cases, the filmmakers and musicians make
deliberate attempts to defy it. Entr’acte’s creators, per their Dadaist stance, are subversive
and anti-‐establishment in their goals. In 1924, the same year that Entr’acte was premiered
as the intermediary of Relâche, Andre Breton published his two Surrealist Manifestos. The
surrealist movement, while intrinsically linked to Dada, was championed by artists who
sought to sever ties with its predecessor: Entr’acte came just as the last traces of Dada were
fading away. Breton wrote: “Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete non-‐
conformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of
the real world, as evidence for the defense” (Breton 1969). Surrealism taps into the
subconscious experience in that it does not deal in logical relationships. However, the
viewer may inevitably attempt to piece together the occasionally asynchronous interaction
of image and sound, and in doing so is met with a challenge to his or her expectations. This
very challenge enhances an aesthetic experience that is often missing in films that do not
venture into the realm of the unexpected, ironic, subversive, and nonsensical.
Introducing Un chien andalou and Le sang d’un poète
The images and scenarios that would come to comprise Un chien andalou came from
the dreams of two artists. This controversial surrealist short film, made in 1928 by Luis
Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, presents a logical story as though it were dug up from the
subconscious, with echoes of Freudian sexual themes. Un chien andalou was inherently
linked from its very inception with pre-‐existing music: rather than commissioning a new
7
cinematic score, Buñuel instead incorporated musical portions of the scene of Isolde’s
Death– popularly known as the Liebestod or “love-‐death” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde – as well as two Argentinean tangos, as the accompanying music. For the
purposes of clarity, Wagner’s music will henceforth be referred to as the Transfiguration:
the English translation of Verklärung, which was the composer’s own designation for the
scene in an accompanying program note. By incorporating pre-‐existing music, filmmakers
challenge the expectations of the viewer, who may possess some preconceptions about
these musical “found objects”. Through the juxtaposition of these preconceived notions
against the experience of images and scenes, filmmakers open the door to another realm of
expressive possibilities: that of external association.
Jean Cocteau’s own Le sang d’un poète is likewise fashioned as an episodic depiction of
dream-‐like scenarios, though the director resisted the term “surrealism” in his own
description of the film, calling it instead a “realistic portrayal of surreal events” (Fragineau
1972). Cocteau, rather than projecting images of apparently subconscious origin, he
intended to induce a dream-‐like state through which the mind could wander.
The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols.
As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and
by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move
and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and
substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can
make symbols of if he wishes (Cocteau, Preface to The Blood of a
Poet 1946).
8
The Context of the films
The films and scores under examination were created in a time and place of
significant creative energy and drive. Paris between the First and Second World Wars
housed a number of artistic circles with the common goal on upending establishment and
the artistic status quo. One common intention and sense of duty seems to have emerged
among the followers of the Surrealists, Dadaists, Modernists, Cubists, and Les Six: the
establishment of a new and distinctly French art. The concept of a unique French art came
about in music, literature, poetry, dance, the visual arts, and, in the case of Parade, a
synthesis of multiple artistic media. Not coincidentally, the visionary behind Parade was
Jean Cocteau, an artistic impresario and patron who provided the magnetic force binding
the Groupe des Six: a half-‐dozen distinct composers rallying behind Erik Satie. Cocteau
projected his own musical ideals into a manifesto, written in the form of a series of
humorous musings that he called “notes on music.” The pamphlet, titled Le coq et le
harlequín, was published in 1918, and provides a fascinating glimpse into the motivations
of French artists within his broad circle. Cocteau proved to be a central figure in this time
and place. He wrote the scenario to Parade, brought together Les Six, and influenced
Georges Auric – the one member of this group most deeply connected to the director – in
the evolution of his compositional style. Auric would come to collaborate with Cocteau on
the score to the poetic film Le sang d’un poète in 1928 (premiered in 1930) and would later
work with René Clair on his A nous la liberté. Each of these films uniquely exemplifies the
composer-‐filmmaker relationship as well as the early handling of sound in film, as the
technology transitioned from the silent era to the sound era.
The artistic goals of each of these significant figures were propelled and guided by
a “new spirit,” or esprit nouveau, a phrase first coined by the poet Guilliaume Apollinaire in
a description of Parade that accompanied the program at the premiere (Doyle 2005). The
9
cinema was largely Franco-‐centric in its earliest evolution. While the American Thomas
Edison had, with his peephole kinetoscope, invented the technology by which a moving
image could be captured and reviewed, the cinematic experience as we know it today – that
of moving film strips created through a series of camera exposures, assembled and
projected onto a screen for a number of people to view simultaneously – was, in fact, born
in France (Prendergast 1977). The very concept of films as experiences that audiences to
share collectively, as in the theatre, was likewise of French origin. The cinema was born of
the Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895, and grew through the early experiments of
Georges Meliés in the first decade of the twentieth century. Meliés, for the first time in its
early conception, used the medium to relay narratives both realistic and fantastical purely
through the moving image (Prendergast 1977). The new art form was revelatory to French
artists, and though German and Swedish film studios were growing and the American film
industry was booming, French filmmakers sensed that they could create something all their
own. Even with respect to the technique and style of American and German films, the
French did, in fact, utilize the cinematic medium in a very unique manner.
The relationship between film and music was recognized, even very early in the
cultivation of the new medium, as symbiotic. Filmmakers often conceptualized film, both in
formal and rhythmic terms, by using the same techniques that composers utilized in
musical composition. Conversely, a number of musicians would in turn be influenced by the
techniques of cinema, which, in its free approach to the chronology of time and its ability to
abandon straightforwardness in projecting its themes, provided a new collection of
techniques through which musicians could conceptualize their own art form. Musical
equivalents to splicing, jump cuts, zooms and pans began to subtly make their way into
composition. The composer Claude Debussy saw great potential in the cinema, and
recognized the relationship between the medium and music even in its very earliest
incarnation, writing in 1913:
10
There remains but one way of reviving the taste for symphonic music
among our contemporaries: to apply to pure music the techniques of
cinematography. It is the film – the Ariadne’s thread – that will show us
the way out of this disquieting labyrinth (Leydon 1996).
The pursuit of the “new spirit,” in cinema is embodied in the musings of René Clair,
who in 1922 wrote: “How we wish that there were a typically French film style. Perhaps
there is one. But it could only be perceived at a distance. We are too close” (Clair 1972).
Now, nearly a century later, it might at last be possible to examine this small but significant
body of works conjointly, and to find a thread of commonality through them all. In just a
handful of bold, adventurous films, the bold artists that created them cultivated an
interaction between music and image that would continue to evolve over the next century,
and that continues to evolve today. Though the conception of film as an art form has been
continuously altered – and varies depending on the work’s country of origin, director, and
its intended audience – wherever music and film coexist, the viewer is inevitably influenced
by their relationship.
Defining the indefinite
One very important consideration in understanding the function of film music is in
bearing in mind the type of film being examined. There are in essence two extremes in film
types: pure cinema (cinema púr) and narrative cinema. The former involves no narrative at
all, but instead an abstract sequence of images. The avant-‐garde filmmaker Germaine
Dulac, among the most important figures in the movement and a classically trained
musician, likened pure cinema to music itself:
11
“A film’s characters are not the only important things; the length of the images,
their contrast and harmony, play a primary role alongside them. A new drama
made up of movement, finally understood rationally, asserts its rights,
magnificently leading us towards the symphonic image poem, towards the
visual symphony beyond familiar formulas where, like music, emotions burst,
not into deeds or actions, but into sensations” (T. Williams 2014).
Narrative films are essentially akin to filmed theater. However, filmmakers of the
silent era were not yet afforded the aid of recorded dialogue. At best they relied upon an
interspersion of cue cards and pantomime to relay the plots of their films. On the opposite
end of the spectrum, the notion that a film could function more like pure art or a visual
equivalent to symbolist poetry enabled filmmakers such as Clair, Buñuel, and Cocteau to
stray from or abandon the pretenses of plot, liberated from the Aristotelian conception of
space and time.
Entr’acte, Un chien andalou, and Le sang d’un poète all lie somewhere between the
two extremes. There are elements of narrative, but little in the way of a logical story, per se.
As film scholar Martin Marks describes, “during the mature phase of the silent period (from
about 1915 on), most films were products of an industry geared to supplying audiences
with entertaining stories; and music was normally expected (as it still is today) to
underline and interpret the narratives, with careful reflections of a film's settings,
characters, actions, and moods” (M. M. Marks 1997). If the goal of a film is something
different, that is, if it is meant to serve a different function besides simply relaying a story,
then perhaps the goal of that film’s music should likewise differ from the goals of a
conventional score.
These three films, in that they are by nature not expressly plot-‐driven, rely on their
musical relationship more intensely. Because the viewer is not given, as they are in a
narrative film, the stability of a story on which to grasp, in such films they rely more
12
strongly upon music to guide their interpretation than they perhaps would in a narrative
film. Music in a plot-‐driven film is an essential component in underlining the action and in
manipulating emotional response. However, when the logical story is obscured or
nonexistent, the filmmaker and composer cannot rely conventional film scoring techniques
as heavily. If they did, a profound effect may inherently be lost.
What was revolutionary, then, about Satie, Buñuel, and Auric’s approaches to film
scoring is the way that they addressed the problem of specifically non-‐narrative film, that
is, cinema that was closer to a “pure” and abstract aesthetic than to the theatrical. The three
films under examination in this analysis are extremely different in musical scoring. Satie’s
is a mostly continuous piece of music, in which the timing of each musical change is
carefully and closely aligned with the timing of the film. Un chien andalou appropriates pre-‐
existing music as its score, and it is through the juxtaposition of image and scenario with
music that a deeper level of subtextual significance is derived. Georges Auric’s score to
Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète, from 1930, deals in musical topics, motives, and cues, aligned
with the film in such a way as to create either synchrony of meaning or ironic asynchrony.
13
Chapter 1: The Role of Film Music – Far more than “Occupying the ear”
Igor Stravinsky, when asked “What is the function of music in moving pictures?”
responded, in his typically dry tone:
It has got to bridge holes; it has got to fill the emptiness of the screen
and supply the loudspeakers with more or less pleasant sounds. The
film could not get along without it, just as I myself could not get along
without having the empty spaces of my living room walls covered with
wall paper. But you would not ask me, would you, to regard my wall
paper as I would regard painting, or apply aesthetic standards to it
(Stravinsky 1946).
Almost as soon as film music came into being, a heated debate began about its
function, as well as its value. There were two conceptions of music early on in its marriage
to film: either that it was exclusively “background music,” or that it was akin to incidental
music. These two conceptions are somewhat similar in function, yet the idea of music as
pure background is more similar to Satie’s “furnishing music,” in that it is intended to
simply coexist with a film’s action, unnoticeably. It was, for lack of a better word, among the
earliest incarnations of “Muzak” or “ambient music,” as it is called today. Early film
projectors were quite noisy, and the first film scores, usually performed by pianist with
music combining a selection of familiar melodies with pure improvisations, were as much a
practical necessity as they were an artistic contribution to the experience.
From the small scale of a solo piano grew the small ensembles that performed the
first film scores: around the size of a typical theatrical pit orchestra. The title of Entr’acte
even alludes to this notion of theatrical incidental music, and though this title has been
shortened in common practice, the full description, as printed on the original score, was
Cinéma: Entr’acte symphonique de “Relâche.” The film was never meant to stand on its own,
14
but as an intermediary between the acts of the ballet/theatre piece. It is important to
contextualize the film in this way, as there are many connections, both visual and musical,
to the larger scale ballet. An investigation of the film’s relationship to the ballet is beyond
the scope of this thesis. For the purposes of examining the interaction of music and film, the
focus will be on the cinematic Entr’acte itself.
Many of the earliest French films, in the first decade of its existence, functioned as
filmed theater, wherein a mostly fixed camera simply reflected the scene from the vantage
of an audience member. Examples may be found the early films of Meliés, including his
famous Voyage dans la lune. Though it is a fantastical and imaginative film, functionally, it is
little more than a series of set pieces: a stationary camera films the action before it. Editing
had not yet been conceived as a complex art capable of manipulating a viewer’s temporal
and visual comprehension of a scene. Arguably the first true orchestral film score to come
about in France – that is, music written exclusively and expressly for the purpose of
accompanying a film – was L’assassinat du Duc de Guise, a historical work from 1908
directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes. The music, composed by Camille Saint-‐
Saëns, was never intended to align temporally with the images on screen with any degree
of exactitude. The independence of the score is evidenced by its life as a standalone
orchestral suite, divided into a brief prelude and five scenes, perfectly embodying the
concept of incidental music (M. M. Marks 1997).
The composer and theorist Frank Martin wrote in 1925 that “music in cinema has
no other object than to occupy the ears while the whole attention is concentrated on vision,
and to prevent their hearing the exasperating silence made by the noise of the projector
and the movements of the audience. It is important, then, that it should not distract the
attention by a richness and novelty that would divert the eye from the spectacle” (Manvell
1949). Such a strongly held opinion is not far removed from Stravinsky’s, and although
these words should be taken with a grain of salt, they reflect one concern of filmmakers at
the time: that music, in its interaction with the film, could potentially overpower the image.
15
In collaboration, filmmakers and composers often sought a delicate balance wherein music
would enhance the visual experience without oppressing it. Dr. Paul Ramain, a widely
disseminated theorist in the early days of Parisian avant-‐garde film, and likely well known
to both Satie and Clair, writes: “if the film is beautiful, the music will be vanquished by the
film, and if the music is sublime, then the film will be vanquished by the music” (Manvell
1949). The type of music that does not grab the attention too strongly would come to be
known as “underscore,” a term borrowed from opera and ballet.
The three films under examination each demonstrate the essentiality of film music
in differing manners, and also exemplify three unique types of “filmmaker-‐composer”
relationships. Satie worked very closely with Picabia and Clair, and Entr’acte was always
conceived as a collaborative musical-‐cinematographic-‐artistic statement. As such, the score
of the film is unique to the style of the film that it accompanies, and the score is so deeply
aligned with the film that the music can hardly stand on its own. Luis Buñuel never
commissioned a new score for Un chien andalou. The musical works that he incorporates
into the film (Wagner’s music and tango) had already existed and the film can therefore
either serve as a reaction to that music or can simply coexist arbitrarily with it. The degree
to which Buñuel built the film around this music is debatable. However, the music’s
alignment to the imagery and its effect on the viewer's comprehension of the film is quite
significant, particularly when one is privileged to see the sound-‐synchronized version that
Buñuel produced in 1960.
Le sang d’un poète
Auric’s score to Le sang d’un poète is distinct both from Satie's score and from
Buñuel’s use of pre-‐existing music. The composer wrote a series of cues that maintain their
own topical independence. They do not share the strung-‐together unity of Satie's score, nor
are they meant to coincide in conjunction with one another. The way in which these cues
relate to one another and with the scenarios occurring on screen establishes their own
16
significance. Unlike the continuous musical accompaniment of the other two films –
continuity referring to the fact that music is continuously playing and mostly unbroken by
silence – Auric’s cues are more asynchronous to, and at times misappropriated to the
images. Cocteau also frequently separates the cues with prolonged periods of silence.
Unlike Satie, Auric was in fact not present during filming, and was instead asked by Cocteau
to produce cues of music based on ideas, concepts, and themes before having seen the film.
The composer recalls: “He told me simply, evidently: in such-‐and-‐such a passage, I imagine
a music with this kind of character. It ended there. When I played my music, when he heard
my music, there was no discussion of any sort between us. He was happy with what I had
done” (Auric 1999). Cocteau claimed to have “shifted and reversed the order of the music
in every single sequence. Not only did the contrast heighten the relief of the music, but I
even found at times that the ‘displaced’ music adhered too closely to the gestures, and
seemed to have been written on purpose” (Fragineau 1972). This is an entirely different
manifestation of the composer-‐filmmaker relationship than in the other two cases. Though
Auric’s music is less rhythmically tied to the moving image than is the case with Satie’s
score, it still relies as much upon the imagery to provide it with substance, just as the
imagery relies upon the music to enhance its own meaning. The ambiguity of the complex
film is imbued with elements of Cocteau’s own ambiguous public persona. In “shifting” the
music throughout the film, one might imagine that Cocteau had an apathetic attitude
towards music in relation to film. As Cocteau scholar Jann Pasler describes, though Cocteau
was initially quite opinionated about the direction of new music – as Le coq et le harlequin
demonstrates – evaluating it as a vessel of confrontation and disturbance, when it came to
the role of music in his own films and art, he surprisingly enough seemed content to leave
well enough alone and to allow the composers to speak for themselves (Pasler 1991). In Le
sang d’un poète, Cocteau juxtaposes music against image, and in doing so, juxtaposes his
public persona against his true, internal self. He once told an audience seeing the film that
“one must let the film act like Auric’s noble accompanying music,” adding that “Auric’s
music gives nameless nourishment to our emotions and memories.” (Cocteau, Preface to
17
The Blood of a Poet 1946). The enigma of Cocteau emerges in his enigmatic use of music in
Le sang d’un poète.
Entr’acte
Satie’s score to Entr’acte is sometimes called a “model of film music.” In reality, it is a
model of a very specific kind of film music: that which might best accompany the Dada,
anti-‐narrative, stream of consciousness parade of images comprising Rene Clair’s
realization of Picabia’s absurd vision. The film was unlike anything that had come before,
and therefore warranted a score that was unlike anything yet written. Though its run time
is only around 17-‐18 minutes1, it is comprised of over three-‐hundred different shots. To
call it cinematographically complex is almost an understatement: it is a multi-‐patterned
work, and instantaneity underscores its style. For a film with such frequent shifts and such
a mercurial tone, a score that followed in the conventional silent score tradition would
betray its style, rhythm, and form. Though the score to Entr’acte exemplifies brand new
compositional techniques, that is not to say that there were not important precursors in
Satie’s own compositional history.
Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement exemplifies the concept of music as purely
“background.” Satie’s three sets of pieces – titled “furnishing music” though a precursor to
what would come to be called “ambient music” – are connected to film music in that they
serve the function of “occupying the ear.” However, this is where the relationship between
the two essentially ends. Film music is inevitably more noticeable, and regardless of
whether the score was intended to reflect upon or relate to the events occurring on screen,
the audience naturally seeks to correlate the two. The popularly held notion that film music
is somehow an outgrowth of ambient music is not entirely accurate. Satie intended for his
furnishing music to be ignored by the audience to the best of its ability. He equated these
1 The original run-‐time depends on which account one reads, and the most reliable version in existence today is the 1967 version, with a score conducted by Henri Sauguet.
18
works with “light and heat,” proclaiming that it simply “creates a vibration: it has no other
goal,” and generates “comfort in all its forms” (Gillmor, Erik Satie and the Concept of the
Avant-‐Garde 1983). Upon examination, this unobtrusive music has very little in common
with the score to Entr’acte. For music intended to serve solely as background, Musique
d’ameublement No. 1, is rather disturbing when given significant attention. It is not the
melodic line, harmonic underpinning, nor timbral qualities themselves that admonish the
piece to the background of the listener’s consciousness, but rather the inherent repetition
of the same gestures. After numerous repetitions of exactly the same music with no
perceptible alteration, the listener may begin to assume that in fact the composition will
remain static and unchanging. Repetition breeds expectation, and expectation breeds
either tedium or satisfaction, depending on the perception of the listener. The music ceases
to challenge the listener’s negotiation of expectation and reality, and therefore ceases to
hold his or her active attention, becoming essentially white noise: meditative and trance-‐
inducing. One could argue that if too much attention is paid to such music then it would
actually become disturbing rather than, as Satie described it, “comforting.” In an account of
the only documented performance of Satie’s Musique d’ameublement during the composer’s
lifetime – in the intermission of a play by Max Jacob in 1920 – the composer recalled that
the audience at first sat quietly and listened to the music, not understanding Satie’s
intention. He described this music as that which “completes one’s property; it’s new; it
doesn’t upset customs; it isn’t tiring; it’s French; it won’t wear out; it isn’t boring” (Gillmor,
Erik Satie 1988, 325). On the invitation to the play’s performance, the composer and Darius
Milhaud included a note stating “We urge you to take no notice of it and to behave during
the intervals as if it did not exist. This music, specially composed for Max Jacob’s play
claims to make a contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting
in a gallery, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated” (Templier 1932, 42).
René Clair recalled the premiere of the likewise experimental ballet Relâche, from
which Entr’acte is derived. He noted that the work was received with “shivers and screams”
from the audience, satisfying what were Picabia’s intention from the outset. “Booing and
19
whistles mixed together with the melodious clowning of Satie who, as a connoisseur of
noise, doubtlessly appreciated the background reinforcement lent to his music by the
protestors” (Dale 1986, 23). In its repetition and apparent simplicity, the score to Entr’acte
has much in common with furnishing music, yet the experiences of each case are markedly
different. The repeated units in Entr'acte evolve and develop over the duration of the
musical score, and are inherently tied to the moving image. Though the music “furnishes”
the film, it is not meant to be ignored.
Another experimental work of Satie that points strongly to his compositional
technique in Entr’acte is his Sports et divertissements, dating from 1923, around the same
time that he first began to explore the collaboration with Clair and Picabia. The composer’s
preface describes the work, which is made up of a series of short pieces for solo piano, each
accompanied by an image by the artist Charles Martin.
This publication is made up of two artistic elements: drawing, music.
The drawing part is represented by strokes – strokes of wit; the musical
part is depicted by dots – black dots [i.e., blackheads]. These two parts
together – in a single volume – form a whole: an album. I advise the
reader to leaf through the pages of this book with a kindly & smiling
finger, for it is a work of fantasy. No more should be read into it (q.
(Gillmor, Musico-‐Poetic Form in Satie's "Humoristic" Piano Suites
(1913-‐14) 1987) .
Figure 1 on the facing page shows an image of Satie’s score to the movement
“La comedie italienne” from Sports et divertissements. Charles Martin’s
accompanying illustration is shown as Figure 2.
20
Figure 1 – Erik Satie, Sports et divertissements, La comedie italienne – 1914-1923
Figure 2 – Charles Martin, Sports et divertissements – 1914-1923
21
Sports et divertissements was the result of an experimental venture into the realm of
image and musical alignment, yet clearly differs from film score composition. The
experience of association for the solo piano piece was intended for the performer rather
than for the audience, as the images were printed along with the score. In the act of playing
the music, the performer associates the images with their accompanying music. It is a
technique not unlike the one experienced by the first accompanists to silent films, who
improvised music “in the moment” that aligned with the moving images on screen. Satie’s
venture into film score composition is likewise presaged by his humorous 1917
neoclassical Sonatine bureaucratique for solo piano – a caricature of Clementi’s Sonatina,
Op. 31, No. 1 – in which the narrative of a bureaucrat’s typical day is printed in the score
above the notated music. Figure 3 on the facing page shows an example from the opening of
the score.
22
Figure 3 – Erik Satie, Sonatine bureaucratíque (1917) – allegro – mm. 1-23
23
Like the score to a silent film that exists only in the mind of the performer, Satie establishes
a vague and humorously arbitrary association of narrative and music, though most of the
relationship is completely incidental, as can be seen in the score. In no way does the
musical composition seem to correspond with the action of the narrative. In some ways,
Entr’acte is a synthesis of these two compositional methods, in that it accompanies both
images and, to a certain extent, some semblance of a “narrative.” The film depicts situations
– a ballet dancer, a chess game, a funeral procession – which are narrative in their
descriptive nature, but the order of the images in the film, in a frenzy of juxtaposition,
defies narrative logic. The same technique would be used in Un chien andalou and Le sang
d’un poète: a residual story, embellished with surrealistic imagery.
Films which generate their own context
Entr’acte functioned as a component of a larger vision by Francis Picabia and Erik
Satie, the musical figure perhaps at the time most closely aligned with the Dada movement.
Even Satie’s own writings reflect the syntactical games of Dadaist poetry. The identities of
these two figures are omnipresent throughout both ballet and film. A brief cinematic
“Projectionette” to the ballet, shown before the first and second acts, depicts, in slow
motion, Picabia and Satie leaping through the air around a cannon, aimed at the audience,
shown at 00:31 in the film. They fire the cannon at the camera, and, resultingly, at the
viewer. This work, they seem to imply, is meant to have the explosive impact of a firing
shot. It will, in the quality of its instantaneity, strike the viewer like a speeding bullet,
before they have time to react.
Both Buñuel’s and Cocteau’s films also open with something of a statement piece: a
representation of how they intend for the audience to approach the experience. Buñuel’s
film opens rather infamously with a scene in which shots of a moon being obscured by a
cloud are intercut with close-‐up shots of a woman’s eyeball being sliced open by a razor,
seen at 1:27. Buñuel informs the audience visually in this prelude – independent from the
24
rest of the film’s “plot” – that the old ways of seeing are useless: one cannot rely on trusted
vision and expectation in comprehending the film, which inherently defies logic. The
director wrote, regarding the film: “Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that
might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open
all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to
explain why" (Edwards 2005, 24).
In a similarly cognizant manner, Cocteau opens Le sang d’un poète with a prologue
at 1:33, in which the director explains via cue cards the nature of the poet, and his own
description of how the viewer should approach the film. It is important to recall that in the
film, Cocteau casts himself, the filmmaker, as the embodiment of the “poet.” While the
protagonist of the film is the cinematic embodiment of the poet, Cocteau aligns himself with
that protagonist. Likewise, Buñuel himself portrays the character who slices open the
woman’s eye at the start of Un chien andalou. Thus, in all three films, the filmmakers
themselves are present from the outset, appearing on screen in some manner, whether in
person or through their words, to guide the viewer’s experience.
Cocteau’s title cards at the opening of Le sang d’un poète, intercut with shots of a doorknob
opening, which symbolize the opening of the mind, and the opening of new artistic doors,
tell the viewer:
25
Every poem is a coat of arms,
It must be deciphered.
How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these muzzles, these
unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars
and these fields of blue!
Free to choose the faces, the shapes, the gestures, the acts, the places that
please him, he composes with them a realistic documentary of unreal events.
The musician will underline the noises and the silences.
The visual motif of a pillar collapsing – representing “smashing statues,” or the concept of
defying convention and abandoning old principles – both opens and closes the film, and
functions as the transitional image between episodes, as shown at 2:22. All three
filmmakers provide a contextual framework for their films. The viewer is made aware from
the very outset that they must be prepared for a new experience.
Cocteau significantly heightens the role of Auric – who gets second billing to the
director in the opening credits – by specifically calling the viewer’s attention to the music.
In the opening title cards, Cocteau writes: “The musician (Auric) will underline the noises
and the silences.” The use of silence, revealingly, is a very important techique in the film,
used to great effect by the director. Cocteau establishes a relationship between music and
his film from the outset, including, revealingly, in the title card of the film, the first thing
shown: “Le sang d’un poète, de Jean Cocteau, musique de Georges Auric.”
The film is neoclassical in both its themes and in its tone, and Cocteau considered it
to be a “poetic film.” He places significance on music as a punctuating and commenting
element within the action of the film: cinematic poetry akin to the music-‐accompanied lyric
poetry of Homer. Le sang d’un poète is the first in a trilogy that Cocteau came to call his
26
“Orphic Trilogy,” and the idea that a film can function like a poem with a musical
accompaniment harkens back to millennia-‐old poetic traditions.
Entr’acte
The very fact that the cinematic Entr’acte occurs within the larger context of a
musical work like Relâche naturally draws its music to the fore. Both Cocteau and Buñuel
linked music and film through recorded audio, while the music for Entr’acte, by the mere
presence of a live pit orchestra in the scene, takes on a more prominent role. The film itself
was referred to by its director as a series of “visual babblings” (Dale 1986). The provocative
nature of Relâche and of its cinematic Entr’acte is evidenced by the humorous tone of the
film. Clair recalled Picabia’s explanation that the film was to be shown in the middle of the
two acts “just as they used to do before 1914 during the entr’acte at cafe-‐concerts” (Clair
1972). The film has become far more famous and notable over time than the ballet in which
is plays a part. This ballet, a Dadaist “meeting of the minds” was meant to shock and
astound, and Francis Picabia – a central figure in the Dada movement and the creative mind
behind Entr’acte – wrote earnestly to Satie that “people will feel a sensation of newness of
pleasure, the sensations of forgetting that one has to think and know in order to like
something” (Dale 1986). The title of the theatrical work is itself a joke, as in French
“Relâche” signifies the cancellation of a performance: in short, the ballet was called, in
translation, “No Show Tonight.” Fittingly enough, the first performance was in fact
cancelled, due to the illness of Jean Börlin, the choreographer and lead dancer, who also
plays a hunter in the film that ends up murdered and in a casket. People took the title, at
first, quite literally, thinking that the ballet itself was a practical joke, or “the apotheosis of
Dada” (Elder 2013).
Throughout the film, preposterous jokes abound, and visual non-‐sequiturs
are prevalent. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamps, central artistic figures in the Dada
movement, make cameos, playing a game of chess at 4:28. This is a veritable hodgepodge of
27
an artistic “who’s who,” much in the same way that Parade, Satie’s ballet, was a multimedia
collaboration of the most significant figures in Parisian modernism and cubism.
The origins of the film lie with Picabia, who casually jotted down its scenario on a napkin
that he provided to René Clair. The scenario that he provided is as follows (extracted from
R.C. Dale’s The Films of Rene Clair, Volume I):
Francis Picabia’s Original Scenario to Entr’acte
Curtain.
Picabia and Satie load cannon in slow motion, shot should make as much noise as
possible. Total time: 1 minute.
During the entr’acte.
1st. Boxing between white gloves on black screen: 15 seconds.
Title from explanation: 10 seconds.
2nd. Chess game between Duchamp and Man Ray. Stream of water directed by Picabia
hosing down the game: 30 seconds.
3rd. Juggler and old geezer: time 30 seconds.
4th. Hunter shooting at ostrich egg on stream of water. Dove comes out of egg, comes
back to perch on hunter’s head, second hunter shooting at it, kills first hunter:
he falls, bird flies off: time 1 minute, title 20 seconds.
5th. 21 people on their backs showing bottoms of their feet. 10 seconds, manuscript
title 15 seconds.
6th. Ballerina on transparent glass, cinematographed from beneath: time 1 minute,
title 5 seconds.
7th. Blow up balloons and rubber screens, on which faces and inscriptions will be
drawn. Time 35 seconds.
8th. A burial: hearse drawn by camel, etc. Time 6 minutes, title 1 minute.
28
René Clair’s role in the making of the film, as the man who realized Picabia’s
scenario and vision, is no less significant. Clair does not adhere strictly to the concepts that
Picabia describes, and the film lacks Picabia’s “titles” that would add an element of
explanation. Perhaps the director believed these titles might detract from the ambiguity
and instantaneity of the experience of the film. Though the visual motives and the basic
structure of Entr’acte are Picabia’s, Clair’s realization leaves its own significant mark on its
organization and especially on its cinematic rhythm. In assembling it, the director stated:
I had written out a script, but I found myself straying from it considerably as I
cut the film. The film really came together in the cutting room. It was there that
I was able to get down to the business I was really interested in. I wanted to
give it a continuity of sorts, but not a continuity of story. I tried to make things
grow from one subject into another” (Dale 1986).
This revealing statement demonstrates that the film’s tone, pacing, and style have as much
to do with the art of editing as with the art of cinematography. Likewise, this
conceptualization of the film as a continuously evolving art work, meandering from one
subject to another while slowly revealing some cross-‐relationships, is significant and is also
reflected in Satie’s unique film music. Clair freed the camera from its stationary position,
and utilized the arts of cinematography and editing to completely upend the viewer’s visual
interpretation of the film. His unprecedented and experimental use of the camera
demonstrated the multitudinous possibilities in the new cinematic art form.
Superimposition, layering, jump-‐cuts, and rapid editing all captured motion in a new way.
Just like Parade demonstrated all that could be done in ballet, and Relâche calls into
question nearly every convention of the genre, Entr’acte showcases all that could be done
with the camera and in the editing room.
29
As the film progresses, the viewer is subjected to Clair’s frequent shifts in the
rhythm of editing. In the latter part of the film, non-‐sequitur jump cutting is used far less
frequently: the rhythm of editing slows at the beginning of the chase scenario, but then
steadily accelerates to the end, becoming uncontrollably fast to the point of inducing
disorientation. Though the editing speed quickens to the end and becomes disjoint, the
actual relationship of the images becomes more logical. In this sense, there is a greater
sense of unity reflected in the rhythmic and structural cohesiveness that emerges in the
latter part of Satie’s score. Clair scholar R.C. Dale observes that “the second half of the film
abandons the collision-‐cutting principles observed in the first part. Now the visual
absurdities, where they occur, appear within the shot rather than by contiguity, or between
the shots (Dale 1986). Satie’s music underlines this continuity by reserving the longest
continuous stretches of mostly consistent musical ideas for the latter parts of the film.
One disruption of the viewer’s linear and logical understanding of time occurs in the
transition from the episode of the hunter to the funeral march scene, at 9:23. The viewer
glimpses, in a brief shot, the funeral hearse before the shooting of one hunter by the other,
seeing the result prior to seeing the cause. Such visual jokes abound in the film, which,
above all, was meant to encourage laughter. Picabia himself conceptualized cinema as “an
evocative invention, as rapid as the thought of our brain.” (M. Marks 1983). Thus, there is
instantaneousness both in the film’s intent and in the viewer’s response to it. Relâche was,
in fact, billed as an Instantaneist Ballet: the rapid changes of its imagery and scenes are, by
their very nature, unpredictable, with Satie’s film score underlining these changes.
The conception of music’s role in the total experience the ballet Parade foreshadows
the ideas that would come to form the central techniques of early film scoring. Cocteau
wrote on the first page of Satie's handwritten score to that work: "The music for Parade is
not presented as a work in itself but is designed to serve as a background for placing in
relief the primary subject of sounds and scenic noises” (Doyle 2005). The inclusion of the
spoken word in the form of carnival barkers, as well as the added sounds of typewriters,
30
gunshots, milk bottles, and foghorns, in effect draw the sounds of the outside world into the
theater. Rather than utilizing the ballet theatre as a means of disconnecting from reality,
Cocteau sought to knit the production into the audience's experience of reality. It is a
manifestation of diegetic music, wherein the characters in the production are, by
implication, often hearing the music just as the audience is. The mixture of diegesis and
non-‐diegetic music would come to play a significant role in silent and early sound film
music, as sound effects became intertwined with the scores themselves.
31
Chapter 2: Timbre, Orchestration, and Harmony
Satie’s Musical Aesthetic and its Effect in Entr’acte
It is fitting that Erik Satie would compose the score to Entr’acte, a film that fits his
own artistic personality, and the aesthetic that would come to be heralded as the
signature style of Les Six. This style, imbued with ironic detachment and a stripped-‐down
aesthetic, lends itself well to film score composition in its very unobtrusiveness. Cocteau,
a champion of Les Six, wrote of Satie, in his infamous manifesto on music Le coq et le
harlequin. In the text, he made the following three consecutive observations:
• Satie is the opposite of an improviser. His works might be said to have been completed beforehand, while he meticulously unpicks them, note by note.
• Satie teaches what, in our age, is the greatest audacity, simplicity. • Has he not proved that he could refine better than any one? But he clears, simplifies, and strips rhythm naked (Cocteau, Le coq et le harlequin: notes
concerning music 1921).
Although the orchestral score to Entr’acte, the composer’s final composition, is large
by Satie’s standards both in terms of length as well as in instrumentation, the full forces of
his ensemble are rarely deployed all at once, saving a full tutti for only the very end. The
leanness of his composition, rendered as such by detached articulations and a frequently
homorhythmic construction, gives a sense of clarity to the music that underlines the
subtleties of instrumental shifts that occur as the film progresses. The score exists in
several versions. It was conceived first for a small pit orchestra, consisting of a single flute,
oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, a single trombone, and a small
compendium of strings and percussion (M. Marks 1983). Darius Milhaud produced a
reduction for four-‐hand piano in the same year, and a two-‐hand reduction came later, first
32
published in 1926 (Satie and Milhaud 1926). The cabaret aesthetic of Satie’s
instrumentation is in line with the jazz-‐hall sound world to which those in Satie’s artistic
circle often looked for musical inspiration. It is far removed from the lush “Wagnerian” film
scores often associated with narrative film, and is distant even from the large-‐scale
orchestral scores of such early examples as Breil’s music for The Birth of a Nation in 1915.
Satie’s rhythms and starkly juxtaposed harmonic shifts reflect the angularity and visual
juxtaposition of the film.
One need only look to 2:19 at the very opening of the film, in which images of
rooftops are distorted and turned about, seen at various angles, in order to find a visual
manifestation of this stark angularity. Similarly, the concept of moving in and out of focus –
as in the brief glimpse of traffic at night in a square at 3:27 – is another visual motif in the
film reflected in Satie’s shifting patterns. The music imitates this angularity in almost cubist
fashion. Parade from almost decade earlier, not coincidentally, was billed as a “cubist”
ballet (Doyle 2005).
The timbre of the Entr’acte score is often lean, metallic, and strident. René Clair
recalled the premiere of the ballet, writing that in the opening moments of the “cinema,”
the conductor Roger Desormiere, “seemed both to conduct the orchestra and to unleash a
burlesque hurricane from his imperious baton” (Dale 1986, 31). The shrill opening of the
score, beginning at 2:19, is underpinned by “oompah” rhythmic ostinati between the bass
drum and cymbals. The effect is striking to say the least, and comes off, in this “burlesque”
style, as even vulgar. Satie effectively underlines the provocative nature of the film by
calling to mind the burlesque show even in the timbre of the orchestra, and the composer
once referred to the film as “pornographic” (M. M. Marks 1997). Not coincidentally, this
strident opening cue of eight bars will become the structural motto that comes to
punctuate moments throughout the whole film, signifying important moments and tableau
changes.
33
This brief cue functions as the ritornello in Satie’s cinematic rondo form. The motto
is immediately attention-‐grabbing, and defies the notion of music as background. Upper
winds screech against the static bass line. Due to its imminent noticeability – made more
pronounced through Satie’s incessant repetition of the motto – it is an ideal way to open
and close sections of the film, and to serve as a punctuating point. This music simply cannot
be ignored by the viewer, straying far from the concept of film scores as wallpaper. What’s
more, Satie imparts a great deal of tension from the beginning of the score, in that the
Figure 4 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 1-8 (Unit 1)
34
upper voice and bass hover around the key of A major, yet never conclusively state that
key. Quintal harmony on the downbeat of the first measure, in which the tones B, F#, and
C# are stacked over an E in the bass, seem have a vaguely dominant function, yet never
properly resolve. Instead, Satie prolongs this irresolution, undermining F# minor as a
possible key. Meanwhile, the bass line outlines an A major arpeggio, through E -‐ C# -‐ A, but
the upper voices never follow suit. This technique, evocative of some of Stravinsky’s music
in Petrouschka, sets the tone for the entire film, embodying in one cue elements that recur
throughout the rest of the score: an undulating melodic contour; a wide-‐spread range, with
the majority of the timbral weight on the upper end thereby amplifying the stridency of the
top-‐heavy score; a transparent and lean bass orchestration; and a repeated rhythmic
ostinato. Even in this one musical fragment, the recurring musical theme of simultaneous
motion and stasis emerges. The descending bass line helps to establish the overall A major
tonality of the motto. However, from there, the bass is completely stuck on the pitch A,
stepping down through G-‐sharp and F-‐sharp, but never again arriving on E: the root of the
dominant harmony implied by the upper voices. There is a sense of great discomfort
generated by this ambiguous music. Satie substitutes instability for stability, and it is
appropriately ironic that the motto to which the entire score will return as a point of stasis
and arrival is itself incredibly unstable.
Incessant repetition emerges early on in the score. An initially active bass line seems
to exhaust the ability to move on, often drawn by some gravity back to where it began.
Likewise, the top voice sits jarringly on the second scale degree, adding a great deal of
tension to the cue. The scoring, spacing, pitch content all teeter on the edge of comfort, and
if it were not for the accompanying imagery, the score might surely irritate the audience.
This is music that at first screams for attention, and then, by virtue of repetition, slips
somewhat into the background.
By way of instrumentation, the score to Relâche and to the cinéma is fairly sparse,
calling for fewer forces even than some preceding works, such as Parade (1917), Socrate
35
(1920). The decision to score the work for such a small ensemble of musicians seems
deliberate and artistically motivated in this case. As Satie scholar Robert Orledge describes
it,
The orchestra is even smaller, and the continually mixed ‘cabaret’ scoring more
restrained. The percussion accentuation is sparing, with the tarolle and
cymbals only being employed for ten bars in the final number. Indeed, Satie’s
judicious selection of instruments is such that the whole band never plays
together – there are no timpani, percussion or oboe in the final bars, for
instance. Favorite devices, such as doubling the first violins and cellos in
octaves, or blending the clarinets with the violas and the bassoons with the
double-‐basses, still persist, but there is very little unison doubling, and no string
double stopping for extra sonority. The orchestra is used to reflect the form, in
that the many recurring passages have the same scoring, and the use of
orchestral contrast between phrases is more noticeable (Orledge 1990).
The shifts in instrumentation and timbre to which Orledge refers are just some of
the many parameters in which Satie’s score embodies the principle of continuity and
discontinuity at play. Though some elements, such as rhythmic units, may be held equal,
the shifting sonority creates, like the distortion of a lens, a new way of hearing the same
passage of music. One instance of this occurring in the film visually takes place at 5:43 in
the ballet scene (Satie’s Cue IV), when the dancer is filmed, to use Satie’s description,
“pornographically” from below. She is then filmed in darkened silhouette, as well as from
the front. This manifests seeing the same image from multiple angles and from multiple
vantages. Likewise, Clair films a traffic circle in a street scene, at 3:31, both during the day
and at night. Satie’s music shifts enhance these visual shifts, and the theme of “the same yet
different” arises. As Martin Marks notes in his exhaustive analysis of the film score and its
original orchestration, “Entr’acte is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet in A, and bassoon; two
horns in F, two trumpets, and one trombone; strings; and a percussive battery that includes
36
snare drum, cymbals, wood block, bass drum, a gong, triangle, and tambourine. Only in the
last twelve measures do all members of the orchestra play together.” (M. Marks 1983).
Satie’s score is akin to chamber music in that pairs and groups are often juxtaposed against
one another. There is also a practical purpose for this technique: in a score of almost
continuous music for over seventeen minutes, the musicians will need to rest.
The “cabaret” timbre of the score lends a unique sonority to Satie’s music that
provides it, even in its heaviest moments, with a sense of levity and buoyancy. The leanness
of the score provides it with a sonorous transparency that allows for Satie’s shifting
instrumentation to project more clearly, as in the transition from Unit Number 9 to Unit
Number 10, beginning at 3:28 in the film.
Figure 5– Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 53-60 (Units 9,10)
The same pattern and intervallic arch – an ascent and descent of a fifth, followed by
the same pattern repeated up one whole step – repeats, transposed from A major to the
new key of F major, with no harmonic preparation. Satie first presents the pattern in the
strings, and then repeats it in the woodwinds. The change in color between the two musical
units is achieved by Satie’s clear delineation between instrumental groups. There is very
little of the lush, blended orchestral color of many scores, particularly the stereotypical film
37
score sound. Rather, the segregation of the pit orchestra into groups of instruments
provides the composer with the means by which to achieve contrast through otherwise
very similar musical material. The cues share a great many musical attributes: rhythmic
similarity, contour, and intervallic components. By shifting elements of timbre in and out of
focus, the composer is able to alter some while keeping others the same, providing a thread
of commonality to the entire score, which unfolds like an interrelating patchwork of
patterns.
Meanwhile, Satie’s use of a pit orchestra calls to mind, particularly for Satie’s
audience, the familiar notion of a jazz hall orchestra. Satie spent time as a pianist in such
cabarets, most famously in Le chat noir in Paris, in which he played from 1888 to 1891, long
before the composition of the cinema (Doyle 2005). This part of his history possibly also
contributed to his interest in “background music.” In its populist connotations, the
instrumentation of Entr’acte signifies a sense of levity and lighthearted entertainment.
This notion of buoyancy in music is matched by the constantly shifting patterns in
the musical units, which bounce off one another, often with little “logical” harmonic
connective tissue. One instance of such buyancy is in the Hunter Scene (Satie’s Cue Number
V). If one traces the harmonic trajectory of the Units of this section, Numbers 24 through
27, Satie clearly emphasizes A major, signified by the opening and closing motto, at 7:37.
However, in the interim between these two “bookends” of the motto, the composer’s cues
meander to C major, to F major, and back to A major, accompanied by a shifts in
orchestration. When juxtaposed against one another, the motion between these keys ceases
to sound like a tonal progression of any sort. Rather, Satie merely juxtaposes them for
contrast. Particularly in the first part of the film, which is by far the most non-‐linear in
construction, Picabia and Clair reflect a state of levity and suspension with a visual motif of
bouncing or floating objects, as in the water balloon elevated by a jet of water, the ballerina
suspended in air, and the leaps of the funeral mourners in procession at 10:45. A water
motif recurs throughout the film, often as a non-‐sequitur, with no logical function except to
38
remind the viewer of the fluid nature of the film, and of the fluidity of logic and the human
thought process. The recurring image of a paper boat floating not on water but in the air,
superimposed onto rooftops, is among the most striking images in the film. It is a vehicle
taken out of its proper context, floating in the realm of the unbelievable and the ridiculous.
The film itself is not “heavy” in tone. Picabia famously wrote, around the time of the
premiere, that it “respects nothing but the right to laugh hysterically,” a sentiment well
aligned with Dadaist philosophy (Dale 1986). When, in the final portion of the scene, Börlin
is shot by another hunter – played by Picabia himself – and ends up in a funereal coffin, the
filmmakers establish a symbolic “deflation,” foreshadowed by deflating balloons from the
opening part of the film. Death and burial in the ground signify the ultimate acceptance of
gravity. However, the filmmakers get the last laugh, as rather than the actual burial taking
place, Picabia, with the wave of a magic wand, causes both the corpse of Börlin and the
parade of mourners to evaporate into thin air. Levity and buoyancy triumph over gravity,
logic, and to some extent, reality.
At Satie’s Cue IV – the tableau of the Ballerina, beginning at 5:25 in the film – the
orchestration suddenly and jarringly changes color, shifting away from the strident “wind
band” sonority of the previous material to a far more soft and delicate orchestration, with
more textural density in the string section than in the winds. The wind instruments -‐
clarinet, flute, English horn – are used in solos, or in small groups, rather than in a unified
timbre. Satie thereby imparts grace to this music that matches the aesthetic beauty of the
ballet dancer. As the scene is mostly consistent in its visual subject, meaning that the
viewer is only asked to focus on one topic – the dancer – for an extended period of time, the
consistency of orchestration in the scene helps to isolate it as a singular tableau. This
relates to the formal underpinning of the film, wherein the rhythm of editing slows, and the
narrative becomes more cohesive towards the center of the film. There is a greater sense of
timbral unity at this point in the film that was hitherto missing.
39
Satie cleverly employs the principle of orchestral reinforcement, almost in the vein
of a Rossini crescendo, towards the end of the film, in which the funeral hearse, led
inexplicably by a camel, comes loose from the reigns of the procession and rolls off
downhill. It is a chaotic, uncontrolled moment in the film, and the growing orchestration
carefully underpins this.
Undulation
Among the most significant and recognizable musical motifs in Satie’s score is the
recurring use of undulation between pitches. Back and forth steps by the interval of major
and minor second can be found in nearly any moment in Satie’s score, from the angular
chords of the opening motive to the delicate, unobtrusive background texture in the strings
in unit 5. This back and forth motion reflects to a certain extent the mechanical nature of
film itself. Especially in the period from 1924-‐1930, film technology in its most primitive
form was very obviously machine-‐driven, relying on moving parts in order to function.
Satie’s undulating pitch content invokes the very idea mechanism; repetition and
undulation are therefore not only justifiable, but essential, to this invocation. One need
merely glance at any page of Milhaud’s four-‐hand piano reduction of the Cinéma to see,
even in the visual layout of the notes on the page, the overwhelming presence of
undulation, which the musicologist Bruno Nettl defines as one of the basic melodic contour
archetypes of any musical idiom (Nettl 2011). When the endless back and forth parallel
motion of pitches becomes such a pervasively repetitive idea, the listener is naturally
drawn away from linear harmonic progression, and loses their sense of melody as the
guiding force in the experience. Satie’s exploitation of this melodic contour is in many ways
defiantly non-‐Western. Robert Orledge notes that even in his early Gnossiennes for solo
piano, the composer incorporated the “hypnotic effects of repetition from the Javanese
Gamelan” (Orledge 1990). As in gamelan, which the composer encountered at the Paris
Exhibition of 1889, the score to Entr’acte relies upon texture, repetition, and rhythm as the
guiding forces, as opposed to melody and harmony.
40
Particularly in the 2/4 metered units in the first part of the film, and in the duple
meter units of the chase scene at the end – a relationship which exhibits metrical mirroring
across the large scale form – undulation is essential in hypnotizing the viewer as they
encounter the film’s rapidly edited string of images. Only film music can speak in this
language without sinking into tedium, and it relies on the film itself to justify its musical
language.
In the chase scene, beginning at 14:55, undulation, now in the accompanying string
texture, becomes an almost obsessive feature of the music, and takes to the extreme a
source of tension that is present even at the very beginning of the work. What once
represented stasis at this point in the film and score is exploited to represent motion, like
the left and right footsteps and hoof steps of the people and horses in pursuit of the funeral
casket. This push and pull relationship of motion and stasis likewise emerges the harmonic
rhythm of the score, which in its alternation of key areas imitates on a larger plane the
effect of simultaneously moving and yet somehow going nowhere. These musical figures
relate to the images of people running in slow motion, of traffic going nowhere in a town
square, or of a roller coaster at Luna Park, which becomes a visual motif at the end of the
film, at 16:55. They are visual manifestations of the absurd, illogical notion of static motion.
Roller coasters move quickly, ascend and descend, take many unexpected turns, but always
end up back where they started. Satie’s music embodies this very concept.
As a subtle narrative underpinning of this moment, the idea of increasing
instrumental forces reflects the increasing number of people attempting to regain control
of the runaway hearse. In a playful gesture, the director splices in shots of moving vehicles
– horses, airplanes, and rollercoasters – as if to imply that a much larger group of people is
involved in this frenzied chase. As the ensemble forces increases, so too does the cast of
characters on screen. Satie matches this increasing intensity with the rhythmic acceleration
of the music, simultaneously temporal and harmonic.
41
Orchestration and Timbre in Auric’s Score to Le sang d’un poète
The cabaret aesthetic endures in the compositional technique and style of one of
Satie’s followers: George Auric. Though the component instruments of the ensemble may
be similar, Auric’s use of his pit orchestra ensemble is far different. Whereas Satie’s score is
a continuous orchestral work, intended for performance live alongside a showing of the
film, Auric’s orchestra is unseen and deliberately ambiguous. Each cue, composed with its
own unique instrumental configuration, has an independent sound, and there is no
indication to the film’s viewers of the constituency of the full ensemble. With Auric’s score,
one senses the phantom-‐like presence of film music as it would remain from then on in
cinematic history. Pre-‐recorded sound separates the viewer from the orchestra, creating an
air of surrounding mystery.
The opening cue to Auric’s film, over the title cards, encapsulates a variety of styles,
moods, and senses in just a few seconds of music. Entr’acte, in its original inception, did not
include a title card, and Un chien andalou begins with a visual prologue. However, Cocteau’s
film begins with a series of title cards and credits, and Auric’s music functions as an
overture. At 00:22, there is nothing to see apart from credits, and only music to set the tone
for the film that will follow. Auric juxtaposes a triumphant fanfare in the brass with a jovial
gigue-‐like compound meter rhythm that adds an element of the dance. Into this, he also
intersperses the nervous pulsation of a trumpet melody that alternates between D major
and minor, adding an degree of tension to this otherwise celebratory music. Just following
this first cue, at 0:54, the music shifts to a new cue with a melancholic and pastoral theme
in the winds, beginning with a soliloquy in the solo flute. Two very distinct timbral worlds
are juxtaposed against one another in stark contrast. This pastoral cue continues as the
first image appears on screen: that of Cocteau in contemporary attire on a film set, masked
with an ancient Greek facial covering and a Hellenic tunic. When the first image appears,
therefore, the viewer is already presented with a major visual theme of the film: a sense of
42
implacable time, matched by the neoclassical elements of Auric’s music. The ironic
juxtaposition of the classically-‐informed fanfare and gigue motives against the parameters
of modern cabaret scoring and the shadings of jazz in the “blue-‐note” contrast of D minor
and major, are apropos to this visual juxtaposition. What’s more, by the unique scoring of
each cue, Auric disassociates each any sense of attachment to reality and reason. As
exemplified by this juxtaposition in the opening minute in the film, there is never an
indication of what orchestration might follow the one heard in the present moment, and so
one is unable to guess at what may come. As Cocteau claims was one of his purposes with
the film, it induces a dream-‐like sense of detachment from reality.
At times, Auric’s choice of instrumentation and incorporation of sound effects is
deliberately unconventional and symbolic of the events taking place on screen. Among the
most profound of these moments is in the fourth and final episode, in the card game scene,
in which the angel of death descends upon the characters in the courtyard in order to
transport the spirit of the poet, embodied in the dead corpse of the child lying in the snow,
to the spiritual world. To underscore this moment, at 39:10, Auric uses no conventional
instrument, but rather the sound of a wine glass. The ethereal, otherworldly timbre seems
to come, like the angel, from somewhere far removed from the physical world. Later film
composers would use the Theremin to evoke alien life or the supernatural. The
discomforting juxtaposition of this sound with the melancholic cue that follows, scored at
first in two trumpets, and afterwards introducing more instruments, effectively juxtaposes
the worlds of the metaphysical and the physical. This is made more discomforting when, at
40:39, the sound of an engine overtakes the musical texture. To call this diegesis is not
accurate. There is physical mechanism on screen that generates this sound. It is grating and
pure noise. Meanwhile, Cocteau’s camera cuts to shots of an audience looking upon the
scene apparently unaffected. Cocteau’s point is clear: the soul of the artist is dead, and the
audience does not notice. The use of mechanical noise enhances this discomfort. When the
noise recedes, at 41:34, the melancholic cue returns, unaffected. The angel takes the Ace of
Hearts from the hand of the man playing in the card game, a moment underscored once
43
again, at 42:30, by the ethereal sound of a wine glass that plays as the angel ascends once
again to the spiritual world. The juxtaposition of these timbres is a powerful effect. Music
disappears entirely at 43:10, when the male card player realizes that he will lose the game
without the Ace of Hearts, and commits suicide. This moment is underscored by the
diegetic sound of his own beating heart: the auditory manifestation of life itself. When the
man finally commits suicide, his heart stops beating, but no sound of a gunshot is audible.
Cocteau’s sensitive employment of recorded sound creates a disassociation for the viewer.
This situation is clearly not realistic, for the logical sounds of the real world, like the firing
of a gun, are absent. However, the presence of the diegetic sound of the heartbeat provides
some link between this and the physical world. The recorded heartbeat used in place of
music relates to the use of the recorded sound of breathing used elsewhere in the film: in
preceding episode two, in which the poet is struggling through the hallways of the Hôtel
des Folies-‐dramatiques, at 26:20.
In the closing scene whereupon the angel descends upon the scene, the careful
mixture of music, noise, ethereal and diegesis all come together to place the viewer in a
realm of experience hovering somewhere between dream and reality. The fact that music
and sound do not occur simultaneously, but rather in juxtaposition, is crucial to this
experience, as music becomes, ironically, the viewer’s emotional connection with the
characters on screen. The musical cues tend to arrive in response to the disturbing
imagery, likewise underscoring the viewer’s own disturbed response. The next musical cue
does not arrive until minutes later. In the interim, the audience looking upon the scene
applauds and mutters to themselves, commenting on the “theatrical” action. It is a macabre
scene, and the deafening absence of music to underscore it demonstrates Cocteau’s reliance
upon silence for effect. The filmmaker wrote revealingly in Le coq et le harlequin: “The
impressionists feared bareness, emptiness, silence. Silence is not necessarily a hole; you
must use silence and not a stop-‐gap of vague noises.” Silence for Cocteau is a tool: an
auditory blank gallery wall upon which he hangs Auric’s musical paintings. When the next
of Auric’s cues plays at 47:40, following this discomfortingly prolonged period of silence,
44
the music is ominous: a dirge over a forboding, pulsating bass line, as the statue – the
product of the artist’s creation – retreats from the screen and is shown lying broken into
multiple pieces. A menacing drone comes to the fore, over which a closing fanfare in the
trumpet sounds: far darker in tone than the jovial fanfare that opened the film. A martial
snare drum announces the continuous march of time, as Cocteau’s narration closes the film
with the statement “The mortal tedium of immortality.” Time and eternity are at odds in
the film, which closes with the destruction of a pillar that began at the start.
Sources and Effects of Harmonic Irresolution
One element shared by the scores to all three films, and which enhances the sense of
continuity among them, is the irresolution of harmony. Satie’s score meanders between
juxtaposed key centers as a means of avoiding a sense of trajectory and finality. Points of
cadence seem to come unexpectedly, often unprepared by expected harmonic motion. This
effect is likewise enhanced by the composer’s handling of tonal centers throughout the
work. At most moments in the score, with the exception of the chase scene, a governing key
area is obvious, and is frequently a point of return. However, Satie seldom establishes that
key in a means that allows it to sit comfortably in the ear. Rather, like the buoyant images
in the film, and like the inharmonious quality of non-‐sequitur images, particularly towards
the beginning of the film, Satie’s handling of harmony keeps it afloat, suspended above the
gravity of resolution.
This principle is exhibited in music underscoring the ballet tableau, at Satie’s cue IV.
The music of this scene, beginning at 5:25 in the film, provides one of the few truly melodic
themes in the entire score. This seems appropriate, given that the previous “visual
babblings” provided little reality to latch onto, and the lasting image of a ballerina, which is
for the first time not spliced with quick cuts to other non-‐sequitur images, provides the
viewer with a moment of semi-‐logical visual stability. At last, there is something lasting for
the viewer digest: the image of a ballerina, appropriate to a cinematic Entr’acte to a ballet.
45
Everything seems to make sense in this scene visually, and to correspond with this, Satie
provides some semi-‐logical musical stability. The tempo has slowed and the meter has
changed to 3/4, isolating the music from what came before. Eight-‐bar units unfold
predictably, and the melody in the upper winds unfolds in a clear ascending and
descending arch. Yet, something is still unsettled about Satie’s music in this scene.
46
Figure 6 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 125-156 (Units 20 - 23)
47
The overall harmonic “gravity” is clearly E major, yet the composer approaches and
hovers around this key with a light touch, avoiding anything resembling an authentic
cadence until the very end of the scene. Rather than overtly stating the tonic, the first four
measures only allude to it, opening and closing in the Dominant key area. When in the
following four measures Satie provides the Tonic E on each downbeat, a sense of tonality is
fleetingly established, In each measure, the harmony ‘escapes’ on the weak beats, and the
addition of D-‐natural destabilizes the tonic. In unit 21, the tonal area shifts to the parallel
minor, and instead of returning to E major, meanders farther away in unit 22 to C major.
Only by virtue of a repeat is E major at first “reasserted.” Curiously enough, the B-‐natural
staccato eighth notes, in their C major context in unit 22, sound like the leading tone to C.
Yet, both in the repeat back to unit 20 (units 20-‐22 repeat once in the film), and in its
continuation to Unit 23, the B actually functions as the fifth scale degree, creating a V-‐I
motion back to E major.
Satie rounds out the tableau with a definitive closing in E major, and one of the few
punctuating cadences in the entire score. However the cadence it is weakened both by its
arrival on the third beat, and by the insertion of a C# between the B and E in the bass line.
Satie provides an essential harmonic closure to the tableau, marking an important
structural point in the semi-‐narrative structure of the film. He follows this with the
repetition of the opening unit that punctuates these moments of structural significance
throughout the score. However, the brevity of this moment of closure prevents a sense of
stasis. The viewer experiences a continuation of motion even while acknowledging a
structural close. Although the tableau exhibits a skeletal E major context, the meandering
away to non-‐harmonic areas in this section adds a degree of levity, as though the pitch
content is somehow trying to escape the gravity of E major. Of course, the “logic” of the
entire scene is revealed to be an enormous joke, for the ballerina is revealed to have a
beard. Though the viewer may have felt that they had settled into a predictable, semi-‐
narrative tableau, the filmmakers reveal even this expectation to be in vain. Satie’s suitably
48
uncomfortable music, logical to a degree and yet simultaneously incorrect, foreshadows
this joke. However, there is no clang of percussion nor a shocking orchestral forte to
underpin the punch-‐line of the joke, as one might expect of silent film score convention.
Rather, the nonchalance of the music actually makes it more surprising, as though the
orchestra were unaffected by the joke itself. Even Satie’s handling of that very moment
defies our expectation. Ridiculous though the joke may seem, it is simply absorbed into the
absurd vision of Entr’acte as a whole.
Delayed Resolution in Wagner’s Transfiguration, and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou
The music of Wagner’s Transfiguration embodies the idea of harmonic unsettledness.
The harmonic trajectory of entire opera, in the words of Richard Taruskin, functions as the
pursuit of a harmonic resolution that only occurs in the final measures of the last scene,
when the two title lovers have both died: thus implying that resolution for them can be
found only in death, away from the light of day and reality. Buñuel’s choice of this music to
underscore portions of Un chien andalou heightens the theme of unfulfilled sexual desire.
The filmmaker once noted that “for me, throughout my life, coitus and sin have been the
same thing . . . and I also have felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and
death.” For Buñuel, the symbolic undertones of the idea of Liebestod or “Love death” are
quite clear. It is no surprise that he returned to the Tristan theme on numerous occasions
during his career as a filmmaker.
Harmonically, Wagner’s music yearns for resolution that only occurs in Buñuel’s film
when the male protagonist has died. Buñuel’s handling of this point in the film is ironic, as
the man dies alone in an implied suicide, and his lover runs off with another man who can
presumably fulfill her own sexual desires. This new couple does in fact die together, but
that final scene is underscored by carnal, erotic tango. The most basic plot line of the film is
actually quite similar to Wagner’s. As Taruskin summarizes Tristan und Isolde: “The story is
negligible: a man and a woman are seized with a forbidden love (act I); they attempt to act
49
upon it but are forcibly separated, the man being mortally wounded in the process (act II);
the man dies and the bereft woman, overwhelmed at the sight of his corpse, dies in
sympathy (act III)” (Taruskin 2004).
The transfiguration scene from Tristan und Isolde, the Humperdinck concert version
of which is used in the film, unfolds in a series of waves. Buñuel’s incorporation of this lush
music which by its very construction unfolds linearly, defying vertical cadence points and
continuously evading resolution, is quite very self-‐aware, and verging on cliché. This music
naturally contrasts with the extremely vertical, percussive, and punctuated nature of the
tango. The two selections could not be more diametrically opposed. Following the Prologue,
and a disorienting title card noting a time “Eight years before,” Wagner’s music is heard for
the first time, at 2:04. Rather than being presented as a heroic knight, the “Tristan” figure in
the film, the male protagonist, is dressed in the feminine attire of Vermeer’s silk-‐maker,
riding on a bicycle in the street. Among the first significant building “waves” in the
Transfiguration begins at a passage underscored by string tremoli, accompanying 4:10 in
the film. Here, Buñuel aligns this music with a growing sense of desire in the protagonist,
represented by erotic imagery: ants crawl from a hole in the man’s hand and a woman’s
underarm is interposed with images of sea urchins on a beach. When the man looks out the
window at the androgynous figure in the street as they move a severed hand around, a look
of erotic excitement fills his face, and the wave of Wagner’s music continues to grow,
settling on a prolonged Dominant pedal in the bass, matched with a sudden shift to
pianissimo, aligned at 6:05 in the film. Here begins the last of Wagner’s waves in this
sequence of music. The prolongation of F-‐sharp in the bass against a climbing melodic line
in the upper strings and winds creates a profound sense of tension. It reaches its climax at
the precise moment that the androgynous figure is killed, run over by a car after being lost
in thought alone in the middle of the street at 6:20. An important sub-‐textual connection at
this moment is hinted in Buñuel’s shooting script, in which, the director notes (in
translation) at this moment: “It is as though the echoes of distant religious music enthralled
50
her; perhaps music she heard in her earliest childhood. Their curiosity satisfied, the
bystanders begin to disperse in all directions.”
This scene will have been seen by the characters that we have left in the room
on the third floor. They are seen through the windowpanes of the balcony from
which may be seen the end of the scene described above. When the policeman
hands the box over to the young woman, the two characters on the balcony
appear to also be overcome to the point of tears by the same emotion. Their
heads sway as though following the rhythm of this impalpable music. The man
looks at the young woman and makes a gesture as though he were saying: "Did
you see? Hadn't I told you so?" (Buñuel and Dalí, Un chien andalou 1996).
Like the androgynous figure in the street, “enthralled by the echoes of distant religious
music,” the viewer is likewise caught up and in the grip of the music playing at this very
moment. Buñuel seems to almost cross the threshold of diegesis, putting the viewer into
the mind of the characters on screen. Cocteau would explore the concept of diegetic music
to a far greater degree in Le sang d’un poète, yet it is of crucial importance to this scene for
Buñuel. This is music that, in its harmonic tension, grabs the viewer’s attention, drawing
them into the same hypnosis as the characters on screen. “Background music” could not
induce the same effect.
The crest of this dramatic wave occurs simultaneously with an orgasmic expression
on the man’s face, who seems not disturbed but fulfilled by the death of the figure. In
Wagner’s opera, resolution and the realization of love come only in death. In Buñuel’s film,
sexual gratification comes with the same. However, at this point in both the Transfiguration
and in Un chien andalou, nothing is yet complete. Buñuel quiets Wagner’s music, beginning
at 6:38, leaving it unresolved. Rather than having his desires fulfilled, as it turns out, the
man is only left with his desire heightened, and he immediately turns to the woman in the
room with him and begins to charge at her sexually, a moment which coincides with the
51
reintroduction of the carnal “tango” music, interrupting the completion and resolution of
the Transfiguration for a time.
The true resolution in Wagner’s music is not presented in the film until the second
instance of the Transfiguration in the film, in the sequence beginning at 10:49. Here, Buñuel
begins the music in media res, “dropping the needle” in the midst of the climactic growing
wave. This scene is a dramatization of suicide, in that the male protagonist from before in
the film, conflicted and weak, is murdered by a reflection of himself, in the form of a sporty,
youthful outgoing “ladies man” figure, likely the protagonist’s youthful self from earlier in
his life, as indicated in Buñuel’s shooting script. While the protagonist could not realize his
own sexual desires, he is suppressed and literally killed by the idealized version of himself,
a doppelgänger played by the same actor.
It is no accident that the climax of Wagner’s passage, replayed twice in the film,
occurs simultaneously with a moment of death. Here, Buñuel aligns the moment of erotic
climax with a moment of death: a figurative Liebestod, or a play on the French conception of
orgasm as Le petit mort. However, following the symbolized suicide of the male
protagonist, Buñuel allows the music to play out to its close, rather than fade it out.
Following his death, at 12:02, the scene immediately transitions, in a leap of space and
time, to an open field in a park. The man falls dying through this transition, and the figure
of a nude woman, likely the female protagonist from before shown from behind, appears in
the field. He briefly touches her shoulder, in a final attempt at erotic satisfaction, but she
disappears, “transfigured.” As the man’s body is carried away, the Tristan chord, that
unresolved dissonance that permeates the entire opera, is heard at 12:52, and Buñuel this
time allows Wagner’s harmonic tension to find resolution, implying that death has fulfilled
the protagonist’s desires.
Even in the highly contrasting sections of tango music, Buñuel very carefully
chooses to end each cue with an open cadence, creating the effect of an elision between
52
scenes: a seamless transition. The “resolution” of the tango’s dominant is Wagner’s
Transfiguration. Like Wagner’s music, even the accompanying tangos reflect an inherently
unresolved quality. At 2:02 in the film, the tango ends on a dominant chord and therefore
sounds inconclusive. This moment aligns precisely with the beginning of the Wagner cue,
and a transition to, perhaps, a different “time” in this incoherent narrative, as signified by
the nonsensical cue card noting a point in time “eight years later.” Following the scene
accompanied by the Transfiguration music, another tango cue plays under a scene of sexual
pursuit of the male protagonist towards the female. To align music and action, Buñuel
actually splices in material from a different tango, beginning at 8:25 in the film. In all
likelihood, the inclusion of this second tango was meant merely to fill in the gap between
this cue and the next emergence of the Wagner theme, a fact that again demonstrates the
degree to which Buñuel intended for the music to align precisely with moments in his film.
However, in the sound version from 1960, Buñuel splices in a dominant chord at 10:47 just
before the music of Wagner emerges once more. Buñuel very carefully and deliberately
chose the unresolved dominant harmony to create a particularly irresolute effect at this
moment in the film. When in the final scene of the film, in which the decrepit bodies of the
two new lovers are shown rotting on a beach, at 15:40, the dominant chord of the tango
humorously serves as the final punctuation to the entire film, under the word “Fin.” In
order to achieve this, Buñuel splices the tango theme at 15:43, so that its conclusion will
coincide perfectly with the concluding image of the film. To end the entirety of Un chien
andalou with this inconclusive, open-‐ended punctuation is the equivalent of ending a
sentence with a question mark rather than a period: Buñuel intends for the audience to
question everything that they just experienced, and provides no answers himself.
53
Chapter 3: Interactions of Cinematic and Musical Rhythm, Tempo, and Meter
Perhaps the most critical difference between a still image a film is that the latter
possesses the capacity to evoke rhythm and motion. Its images are assembled in a specific
order, and the length of those shots likewise corresponds to a specific pacing. As Clair
described film in 1924, “it can scarcely be denied that the cinema was created to record
motion.” He further expands:
If there is an esthetic of the cinema, it was discovered at the same time as the
movie camera and the film, in France, by the Lumiere Brothers. It can be
summed up in one word: motion. Outward motion of objects perceived by
the eye, to which we would add today the inner motion of the unfolding
story. From the union of these two motions there can arise that phenomenon
so often spoken of and so seldom perceived: rhythm (Clair 1972).
Clair, like many of his contemporaries, particularly in the Russian school of
filmmaking, conceptualized cinematic devices in musical terms. Perhaps it is partly due to
the inherently musical nature of the cinema – the shared formal, structural, rhythmic,
motivic, and topical parameters – that the two media are so interrelated. Both music and
film occur linearly in time, and for a viewer or audience member, the experience is likewise
linear. Any unique moment that occurs in the experience can occur only once, and
establishes, due to what came before, an expectation of what will come after. The
experience is both instantaneous and reactionary. In our attempt to link the two, we must
rely on both the experience in the moment, and a later evaluation of that moment.
Clair wrote of his interaction with Satie in the preparation of the score to Entr’acte:
54
That old master of young music, he measured out each sequence with meticulous
care and thus prepared, in a day when cinema was still silent, the first musical
composition written image by image for a film. Conscientious to an extreme, he
worried about not finishing his work on time, so he sent me friendly admonitions
set down in his inimitable calligraphy: “What about the film? When? Time passes
(and doesn’t pass by again). Am scared you’ve forgotten me. Yes… Send me news of
your marvelous work right away. Thanks a lot.” (Dale 1986).
Satie’s conception of the score aligned closely with the rhythm and editing of the film, as
evidenced by his eagerness to see the visuals themselves, rather than simply going by
Picabia’s loose scenario. Unlike the method by which Auric composed the score to Le sang
d’un poète – in which the music was composed before having seen any visuals whatsoever
and was inspired solely by synopses – Satie’s score to Entr’acte was so precisely aligned
with the images that the composer relied on seeing the produced film in order to create his
score. Film is inflexible and concrete, unlike ballet and theatre. The music can be adjusted
to match with the film, but the inverse is not true. Satie’s approach to scoring the film is as
much practical as it is artistic. The patterns, because they avoid harmonic or melodic
expectations of phrase structures to make sense, are inherently flexible. Early on in the
film, the units, by their very non-‐sequitur qualities, acclimate the ear to hearing them as
fragmentary. When, in the ballet tableau or funeral tableau, in which the visuals seem more
logically cohesive, so too does the music.
55
A Continuous Rhythmic Thread, Sometimes Broken
Though Satie’s rhythmic patterns often shift from unit to unit, an underlying
ostinato pulse at the eighth note still provides a thread of continuity between them.
Whether orchestrated as an “oompah” figure – with separate voices on the quarter note
beats and others on eighth note offbeats – or as a continuous string of running eighth notes
in one voice, Satie maintains this subdivision. This technique effectively serves several
functions. First, it enhances the “hypnotic” quality of the music, removing it from the
foreground of the listener’s attention, just as the repetitive rhythmic quality of Satie’s
musique d’ameublement causes it to retreat to the background of the experience. The use of
a continuous rhythmic thread also maintains a sense of perpetual motion to accompany the
energetic motion of the cinematography. In those few moments in the score in which Satie
draws the music to a point of cadence, the effect is therefore all the more jarring: like
suddenly braking a rapidly moving car. When Satie establishes a rhythmic pattern or
precedent, whether rhythmically or harmonically, any break from that precedent suddenly
and momentarily draws the music to the foreground. The viewer might question why at
these pivotal moments the composer chooses to break pattern.
The first of Satie’s musical units to shift away from the eighth note subdivision
aligns with 3:48 in the film. The units – Numbers 12 and 13 – last for four bars each, and
many other parameters are held constant, including the key of D major, maintained from
the preceding unit. In unit 12, the string voices undulate between the pitches E and F-‐
sharp, and in unit 13, they settle on a repeated E against a changing accompaniment.
56
Figure 7 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 67-79 (Units 11 - 14)
Both rhythmically and in terms of pitch content, everything seems to suddenly
slow. It is likely no accident that these cues align with a point in the score at which Satie
himself wrote a cue mark (Cue III, Scenes from the air; chess game and boats on roof). This
moment therefore signified for Satie some shift in the visual pattern and theme. By slowing
the rhythmic subdivision slightly, the viewer experiences a new auditory backdrop. The
moment also coincides with the absurd image of matches dancing on a man’s head. The
“dance” of the matches is juxtaposed ironically with the sudden grace and regality of the
music’s pulse. For a brief moment, Satie’s rhythmical slowing adds an element of nobility
and almost religiosity to the music, enhanced by the presence of the graceful strings, and
the warm, rich timbre of the trombone. This moment also precedes the subsequent re-‐
emergence of the A ritornello motto from the opening of the score, which punctuates these
57
set changes and shifts in visual and narrative themes throughout Entr’acte. By creating a
more subdued rhythmic environment directly preceding this re-‐emergence of the
ritornello, Satie draws the ritornello further to the foreground. He likely intends for the
viewer to notice this structural moment.
Built-‐in Flexibility
Satie designed the rhythmic and unit-‐based structure of his score such that
measures could be repeated without jarringly interrupting the listener’s comprehension of
the music. His units, for the most part, amount to about eight bars of music in the score,
which coincides almost exactly with the average length of Clair’s individual shots.
Technology in 1924 was primitive by today’s standards, and the playback of a film score
relied literally on the coordination of moving parts, which were not always so reliable. The
score, performed live by the ballet orchestra, needs to have some flexibility in order to
maintain alignment. If the conductor or a pianist performing from the reduction, finds that
the score is slightly misaligned with the moving image, repetitions can be made to realign
the patterns (Dale 1986). Evidence that this was Satie’s solution to the inherent problems
of alignment can be seen in what remains of his original cue sheet (Figure 1 -‐ Reprinted
from Gallez and Satie, “Satie’s ‘Entr’acte:’ A Model of Film Music, Cinema Journal, Vol. 16,
No. 1).
58
Figure 8 – Page 1 of Satie’s cue sheet for Entr’acte – Units 1 - 17
59
Though only the first part remains intact and available for analysis, the sheet clearly
outlines the number of reiterations of units – indicated by repeat numbers – that should
occur in order to align the image and the film. What’s more, it indicates, in Satie’s use of key
signatures rather than named keys, that tonality in the score is arbitrary and ambiguous.
The sheet exemplifies in an early model the process of vamping in cinema, and is not far
removed from similar techniques in ballet. In order to provide some flexibility to
accommodate set changes, the introduction of new characters, and other practical uses,
composers of background music or entr’actes in ballet often include built-‐in repetitions for
adjustment. In ballet, a symbiotic relationship exists between music and dance that music
and film cannot share. The music must “go to the film”, rather than the film responding to
the music. The very unique nature of Entr’acte and its score create very particular
limitations and problems, which are alleviated by the technological advancements of
recorded sound that would become available to filmmakers not long after its premiere.
The importance of the conductor, and Satie’s reliance on that conductor in aligning
music and image, is made clear by several indications in the score. The lack of specific
tempo markings in the manuscript is telling. One would imagine that a score meant to align,
down to the second, with a film would be have far greater specifications in terms of
metronome markings, although one should also recall that metronome markings were
often a source of ironic humor for Satie, particularly in his solo piano music. The
technological realities film projection at the time created an element of unpredictability in
showing a film. Not nearly as reliable in lengths and speeds, as evidenced by the multiple
conflicting accounts of exact running times for Entr’acte, some room for adjustment was
needed (Gallez 1976). Metronome markings were approximations and suggestions at best,
and there are only four tempo indications in the entire score. These marks occur at the
beginning of the score, marked “Pas trop vite;” and at the start of the funeral march scene
(Satie cue VI), marked “Plus lent” and accompanied by a shift to 4/4. They also appear in
the scene following the chase in which the coffin falls and bursts open, marked “Lent,” and
accompanied by a shift to triple meter; and in the final four measures of the score, marked
60
“Large et lourd, en retenant.” Satie implies an inherent flexibility in the very absence of
tempo indications. Why would “Lent” follow “Plus lent” unless the tempo had shifted in the
time between the two points in the score? The material between these two markings is the
accelerando passage of the chase scene, without which the coordination of cue to visual
would completely fall apart. In an autographed copy of the unpublished orchestral score,
the composer wrote, in the music accompanying the scene of the hunter: “Make this
repetition until Picabia has killed Börlin. Stop -‐ then proceed” (Gallez 1976). The cue that
Satie indicates should be repeated is, in fact, the A ritornello motto that introduces the
entire film, and serves as punctuation. It recurs at unit number 27’ – the entire sequence of
Units 25-‐27 being repeated once – and is aligned with the sequence beginning at 9:13 in the
film. That Satie intended to align this cue to exactly correspond with the death of Börlin and
the transition to the funeral hearse scene reveals its significance as a punctuating unit.
Here, it humorously marks the “punctuation” of Börlin’s life. Rather than adding an
additional musical cue to fill this span, Satie meant for this particular motto to underscore
this pivotal moment in the film, and so his built-‐in repetition allowed for that.
The version of the film used in this analysis is a synchronized sound version
released in 1968, for which Henri Sauguet, a Satie disciple, conducted the score. The film
running time conforms to the performance time that the composer indicated in the
autographed score: seventeen minutes and forty seconds. This is likely the most reliably
coordinated recorded version of the film with music that exists in terms of intended tempi,
though the history of the film between 1924 and today has been complex, and to this day
no definitive edition of the orchestral score exists. As Marks notes, “There is much that
could be gained from having a critical edition of the score, and also a scholarly examination
of the film’s own history from 1924 to the present. However, the problems are perhaps less
menacing than stimulating. Silent film accompaniments were, of necessity, inherently
flexible; and some spontaneity should not be denied their interpreters – especially when
dealing with a work of Picabia and Satie” (M. Marks 1983).
61
The composer used a stopwatch to measure the exact lengths of shots, and decided
upon tempi and repetitions from there. This again signifies the close-‐knit relationship
between Satie and Clair in the creation of the film. Satie was often present during the
process of the film’s creation, unlike Auric’s involvement with Le sang d’un poète, wherein
the composer provided cues before having seen the film. Satie’s standard “shot length” unit
is usually about eight bars. The chart outlining the unit-‐based construction the film shows
58 of such units. When the composer delineates, abruptly, from this pattern, it interrupts
the logical flow of the experience for the viewer. One very palpable instance of such
interruption occurs at Unit number 17, aligned with 4:35 in the film. The unit is
constructed as a pattern of 5+2 bars, followed by 3+2. Not coincidentally, it coincides with a
moment in the film in which a chessboard, a symbol of planning and strategy, is destroyed
by a jet of water. The water jet is the visual image signifying the buoyant nature of the film
and its illogical construction. By destroying the logical implications of a chess game, the
filmmakers are commenting on the absurdity of such logic. Satie’s own disruption of logical
symmetry, with his inclusion of unit lengths of disproportionate lengths of measures,
perfectly encapsulates in music this moment in the film.
62
Figure 9 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 97-108 (Units 17,18)
63
Metrical Shifts
Satie, at some points in the score, blurs the lines of metrical shifts coinciding with
significant tableau changes, as in the shift into triple meter for the ballet scene or
quadruple meter for the funeral scene. These two instances, save the return of triple meter
at the end of the film, are the only moments of metrical alteration in the entire score, which
otherwise rolls along in duple time. It is no accident that the longest stretches of logical
action on screen coincide with these set pieces, and that Satie isolates them from their
surroundings by altering the meter. However, the composer’s introductions of these meter
shifts are not always cut-‐and-‐dry. Though an examination of the score clarifies that these
conventions of make logical sense – that a waltz topic should in fact appear in triple meter,
and a funereal procession should appear in quadruple meter – the ear blurs these lines. For
instance, the presence of triplets at the preceding foreshadows the triple meter section of
the ballet scene. It is the first instance of triplet subdivision in the entire score, and
therefore leaps to the foreground by virtue of contrast. Satie’s sudden manipulation of
rhythmic subdivision draws attention to this transitional moment.
64
Figure 10 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 117-125 (Units 19,20)
In another moment in the film, at Satie’s Cue V, at 9:29, the phrase marks and accent
patterns at the Plus lent “Marche Funèbre” at first resemble a hemiolic pattern of three.
Two measures of friction between common time meter and triple hypermeter (3+3+2) play
65
out before the Chopinesque ‘Funeral March’ dotted rhythm begins outright at 9:38, helping
to distort the sense of reality at this moment.
Figure 11 Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 189-190 (Unit 28)
The music exhibits a very deliberate tension between expectation and reality that
matches the absurdity of this funeral procession: the parade of mourners is led,
ridiculously, by a camel, and the processors eat pieces of bread from the wreaths adorning
the hearse. The shadings of a mock Chopin Funeral March from the composer’s B-‐flat minor
piano sonata, Op. 35, is instantly recognizable and draws attention to the funereal theme of
the scene. However, in a film whose purpose to some degree is to upend tradition, the use
of this cliché gesture seems almost too fitting. However, Satie’s incorporation of this cue
into the score, the only overtly discernable extra-‐musical reference in Entr’acte, completely
undermines its cliché quality of predictability. To use an instantly recognizable trope in a
silent film score was common practice in the earliest days of the art form. Many
improvisers at the piano during the 1920’s would likely have incorporated such a gesture.
66
However, the cue plays only until 10:42, at which point the funeral procession actually
begins to move. One would imagine that a “Funeral March” would accompany the actual
movement of mourners. However, just in time for the viewer to become settled into a sense
of predictability, Satie once again unleashes the “burlesque hurricane” of the screeching
opening motto, now played at a crawling speed. Upon close examination of the side of the
hearse, the initials “FP” and “ES” are discernable. Francis Picabia and Erik Satie are both
dead, here in the exact middle of the film. If the composer and scenarist are both no longer
living, who could be around to control the rest of the film’s progress? The answer, in fact, is
no one. From this point on, the film will gradually spin out into uncontrollable chaos,
almost with a mind of its own.
Figure 12 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 191-196 (Unit 28)
Satie’s musical acceleration does not always align temporally with the visual
acceleration. In one of the most effective sequences in the film, just before the chase
sequence, around 12:40, Clair departs from slow motion playback, returning to a normal
pace of editing, yet Satie’s music remains slow. If the pacing of the music were exactly
mapped onto the pacing of the film’s motion, then Satie’s music likewise would have begun
to accelerate, yet it remains unhurried and lags behind. The funeral mourners are clearly in
67
a running stride, but Clair’s slow motion editing at 10:46 establishes a visual conflict
between motion and stasis. The filmmaker, at this moment, is in complete control of the
viewer’s experience. To see the mourners running yet simultaneously halted in their speed
is, by nature, an illogical image. Simultaneously, the extremely slow reproduction of Satie’s
quick music reflects this tension, and further enhances the friction of the scene.
Because of the delayed gratification of the accelerando, which only begins at the
“Chase” cue at 14:56, that accelerando is made all the more effective when it does finally
arrive. For a sequence lasting for several minutes, both the filmmakers and the composer
had to carefully pace the increasing tempo of motion, so that it would constantly feel as
though it were tumbling forward, out of control. As with any crescendo or accelerando,
there is a realistic and practical limit that cannot be exceeded. However, by generating this
rhythmic and temporal friction, Satie and Clair are able to provide the illusion of having
ventured beyond the threshold of reality. At 18:19 in the very end of the chase sequence, at
the point at which the accelerando can go no further, Satie at last manipulates the rhythmic
content of the cells. From 14:56 in the film to 18:19, for well over three minutes of music,
the rhythmic subdivision has been at the eighth note. Now the subdivision breaks loose
into a syncopated rhythm of sixteenth+dotted eighth followed by dotted eighth+sixteenth.
68
Figure 13 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 362-382 (Units 50’, 51, 52)
69
The sense of pulse is broken, as though the figurative wheels had broken loose from the
vehicle propelling the forward momentum of the music. This transition appropriately
coincides with the moment at which the casket finally breaks free from the hearse in the
film: both rhythm and image reach a simultaneous “breaking point.” A moment of silence in
the score before the following “Lent” allows the viewer to catch their breath. Like Cocteau’s
use of silence between Auric’s musical cues as a means of punctuating particular moments,
the sudden break in rhythmic acceleration at this moment in Entr’acte, followed by a brief
moment of calm stasis, recalibrates the viewer’s experience.
Rhythmic Friction and Mock-‐Solemnity
Just before the chase and accelerando begin outright, Satie illuminates the palpable
tension and friction between motion and stasis by including an asymmetrical, dirge-‐like
motive: a solemn brass chant figure, unharmonized apart from doubling in octaves. This
theme is then repeated in the higher-‐voiced winds, with altered instrumentation, and with
an underpinning of snare drum rolls. The passage seems bizarrely out of place, and
seemingly almost archaic in character. Satie’s music exhibits, like the funeral mourners, a
mock solemnity. Beginning at Unit number 41 in the score, aligned with 13:45 in the film,
the awkward hypermetrical groupings of 3+2+2 highlight the discomforting misalignment
between the speed of the action on screen and the pacing of the music. The funeral
mourners are already in rapid motion, yet the music hovers somewhere in a far slower
context. The misalignment of speeds thereby enhances this friction, and the chant is made
all the more unsettling by its vaguely off-‐kilter hypermeter groupings in three. Though in
cut time, the passage actually sounds, due to Satie’s hemiolic groupings and accentuation
across bars, like a brief recurrence of triple meter. The seven-‐bar abridged unit length
likewise disrupts the established eight-‐bar patterns of prior music. The fact that the figure
is repeated twice more enhances its strangeness in this context: Satie prolongs the
discomfort.
70
Within the context of the motion of a funeral march, Satie is perhaps sneakily
harkening back to elements the ballet music from before. Perhaps in an ironic musical
inside joke, the composer poke fun at the absurdity of the whole scene by undercutting
“march music” in triple meter with an incomplete bar at the end of the unit, left hanging on
its own. How can one process properly in triple meter without occasionally being on the
wrong foot? Satie’s music, at this moment, refuses to march forward. In the midst of a score
in which continuity of motion is a distinguishing feature, the halted quality of this passage
draws attention to this misalignment. It is uncomfortably slow.
The function of “slowness” in Le sang d’un poète
Cocteau likewise relied upon “slowness” in Le sang d’un poète to emphasize its
mood. Unlike Entr’acte however, which incorporates periodic moments of slowness for
emphasis, the overall pace of Cocteau’s film is discomfortingly and intensely lugubrious,
Figure 14 – Erik Satie, tr. Darius Milhaud – Entr’acte (two pianos) – mm. 293-299 (Unit 41)
71
perhaps even hallucinogenic. The director wrote, in an essay published with the screenplay
to the film:
The innumerable faults of The Blood of a Poet end up by giving it a certain
appeal. For example, I am most attached to the images. These give it an almost
sickening slowness. When I complained of this recently to Gide, he replied that I
was wrong, that this slowness was a rhythm of my own, inherent in me at the
time I made the film, and that changing the rhythm would spoil the film.
(Cocteau, Preface to The Blood of a Poet 1946).
The prolongation of periods of silence in the film between musical cues enhances this
discomforting slowness, as the viewer sits on the edge of their seat in anticipation of what
is to come. Likewise, when viewed collectively, the vast majority of the film is accompanied
by what may be considered “slow music.” Those rare moments in Auric’s compositions in
which the pacing suddenly quickens are usually moments intended to heighten a mood of
either levity or turmoil.
72
Chapter 4: The Crucial Element of Form
Most conventional narrative films unfold linearly, like a dramatic work or novel,
with the schematic of “Exposition, Conflict, Resolution.” The closest compositional
equivalent to such a form would naturally be opera. As opera is both musical and dramatic,
while the scores to films are by nature instrumental and textless, this comparison between
these two genres is prejudicial. The three films under examination, because they are not
exclusively linear nor expressly narrative in construction, are more suited to a different
formal plan. By adhering to some degree of identifiable formal structures, the scores in all
three cases help to provide an element of stability onto which the viewer can grasp, in an
otherwise very disorienting experience.
Entr’acte and Elements of Rondo Form
A rondo is defined formally by its juxtaposition of repeated ritornelli against
contrasting episodes. All three films are to some degree episodic in form, yet contain
elements of repeated visual and narrative motives and themes, somewhat akin to a
cinematic rondo. Upon examination of the general key areas of the major sections in Satie’s
score, a mock-‐rondo harmonic structure emerges that coincides with the repeated return
of the opening motto as a recurring Ritornello. Elements of this rondo structure lie at the
background of a score into which the composer simultaneously inserted his own
delineating “cues” aligned with scenes and images in the film:
73
Satie’s Cues:
I. Chimneys; deflating balloons
II. Boxing gloves and matches
III. Scenes from the air; chess game and boats on roof
IV. The female dancer and figures within water
V. The hunter and the beginning of the funeral
VI. Funeral March
VII. Funeral procession in slow motion
VIII. The chase
IX. The coffin's fall and the emergence of Berlin
X. The End (Screen bursts and The End)
The first section, encompassing Satie’s cue marks I and II, serves as a kind of
“prologue” to the film: the most meandering and least narrative section. It is centered
predominantly in the key area of A major, which will, as it turns out, serve as the overall
tonic of the entire score. The first “episode” of Satie’s rondo, beginning at Satie’s cue III –
Scenes from the air; chess game and boats on roof – is centered predominantly in the
subdominant D major. This section closes with a brief restatement of the punctuated
ritornello unit in the A major tonic. The following large section, at Satie’s cue IV – the
female dancer and figures within water – is centered predominantly in the dominant of E
major. Cue V – the hunter and the beginning of the funeral – is centered in the tonic A major,
and likewise begins and ends with the punctuating ritornello unit. The Funeral March
episode at Satie’s cue VI is centered in the parallel A minor, which then makes its way back
to the A major tonic in cue VII, wherein the funeral hearse begins to process in slow
motion. This moment again coincides with the return of the ritornello motto, albeit in a
ploddingly restrained tempo. The brief cue IX, in which the coffin falls from the hearse and
Börlin emerges, humorously and unbelievably still alive, begins in A major yet ends in E
major, a I-‐V progression that sets up V-‐I motion back to A at the start of Cue X, the “End”
74
summation of the film. Despite the seemingly meandering key areas of the score, which
sound at first arbitrary, Satie has actually constructed a nearly “by the book” neo-‐classical
mock-‐rondo, even in its harmonic structure: I–IV–I–V–I–i–I–V–I. The somewhat
unconventional move to the subdominant in the second episode exemplifies Satie’s flexible
approach to classical convention. This harmonic scheme is matched by the rondo-‐like
alternation of a ritornello theme with contrasting episodes. It is curious that the
conventional rondo form should underpin a score to a film that, at least at first glance,
seems formless. Satie and Clair both ultimately deliver a joke within a joke: a sense of
detachment governs the whole exercise, not unlike Buñuel’s use of the Wagner
Transfiguration music for his surrealistic film with its bizarre visuals.
Breaking the Pattern in the Chase Scene of Ent’racte
It is no accident that an elaboration the Chase scene, Satie’s Cue VII, is left out
of the above outline, as it marks a significant and deliberate departure from the harmonic
“plan” of the rest of the score. The chase scene begins in the tonic A major, yet quickly
meanders away. Like the runaway hearse being chased by the characters in the film, the
tonality of A has “escaped,” so to speak, becoming out of reach. It is the only point in the
film in which a sense of harmonic gravity is suspended. In each of the large sections, a key
area serves as a gravitational tonal center. Though Satie meanders away from the tonality
that governs each section, he inevitably returns to it, usually in a harmonic ebb-‐and-‐flow
effect, once again reflecting the notion of simultaneous motion and stasis. For the chase
scene, however, once the meter shifts to 2/4 and the accelerando begins, Satie replaces the
“back and forth” harmonic motion with a progressive ascent, underpinned by a steadily
climbing pedal point. Beginning in Unit 44, B and C# undulate in the strings, while the oboe
sustains an incessant E-‐sharp pedal. In the subsequent unit, the strings undulate between D
and E-‐flat, while the E-‐sharp pedal, spelled enharmonically as F, endures. In unit 46, the
strings undulate between E natural and F natural, and the F pedal sustains. In unit 47, the
strings continue to undulate between E natural and F, but now the pedal climbs to G
75
natural. This is yet another example of Satie’s shifting one element at a time, holding other
elements equal, thus creating an effect of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity. Unit
48 is something of an outlier: a brief moment that interrupts the progression and creates a
temporary moment of stasis. The undulation steps down to E and D-‐sharp, and the pedal is
briefly absent. The ear still retains the E natural from the previous E–D-‐sharp figure, and
the instrumentation is altered. One might imagine that Satie inserted this disruption simply
to maintain interest, and to break his own pattern in jest. Unit 49 picks up again where the
progression had left off, and the undulation is elevated to between E and F-‐sharp, climbing
upward while the pedal rises to A-‐flat. In unit 50, the undulation steps upward to G–B-‐
natural, and the sustain rises to B-‐flat.
In the chase scene, Satie establishes a misaligned polyphony: two ascending
lines, that do not always move in tandem: the sustained pedal tone and the undulating
tones. If one traces the common pitch element between each consecutive cue, the line in the
undulating pitches ascends from C-‐sharp to D-‐natural to D-‐sharp to E-‐natural, then to F-‐
sharp and finally to G. Meanwhile, the sustained pitch climbs from E-‐sharp/F-‐natural to G
to A to B-‐flat. Both lines ascend a fourth, but not entirely at the same time. There is a sense
of push and pull between the two voices that creates a palpable tension in the scene. If
every pitch simply transposed upward by a half-‐step or whole-‐step in each consecutive
unit, the obviousness and predictability of the climb might actually work against this
building tension. Instead, Satie’s line ascends upwards, but does so meanderingly and
subtly. The effect is almost unnoticeable to the ear, but undeniable in feeling. One senses
that Satie’s line is building upwards, but the exact mechanism by which he does this is
nearly imperceptible. When matched by the steady accelerando in tempo over the whole
scene, the effect is quite powerful. For a moment, Satie has suspended the neo-‐classical “by-‐
the-‐book” notions of harmonic motion in order to emulate the experience of chasing
something that cannot be caught, and of tumbling forward with uncontrollable momentum.
The “exceptional” feeling of this moment relies upon the standardization of its context.
76
Because a formal harmonic framework is in place, breaking from this framework stands out
in relief, as an effect to enhance the experience of the moment in the score.
The general technique of Rondo form – repeating a “ritornello” between contrasting
episodes – reflects in a formal structure the idea of motion and stasis. Each time the music
ventures to some new area, whether rhythmic, tonal, stylistic, or topical, it is inevitably
brought back to a point of familiarity. In utilizing the mock-‐rondo form, Satie incorporates
an element of self-‐aware neo-‐classicism, yet within this context, the composer incorporates
a modern-‐day Burlesque aesthetic, and mechanical, repetitive music more akin to gamelan
than to melodically-‐oriented music. This contrast between the modern and the classical is
significant, and may serve as a reflection upon the very new medium of cinema. Artists
were struggling to incorporate this novel vehicle of artistic expression within the context of
tradition. That the Entr’acte, a very modern artwork, premiered in the context of a ballet – a
decidedly traditional art form – embodies this conflict between past and present.
A Rondo, particularly when heard for the first time, is an open form: it could go on
for as long as a composer likes. Sonata form, by contrast, establishes an expectation, and a
sense of the scope and scale of a movement from early on. A listener can generally gauge
where they will be taken, and it is through the composer’s manipulation of that progress
towards the conclusion that they create the excitement of the experience. In contrast,
rondo forms can go on endlessly, and therefore induce relaxation and a sense of levity,
which is perhaps why they are frequently, in the classical period, the standard form for
many finales of multi-‐movement instrumental works. As the listener does not anticipate
where he or she will be taken, there is little cause for angst when the journey veers in
unexpected places. The visual babblings and semi-‐narrative structure of Entr’acte functions
in a similar manner: the audience is provided with nothing to suggest where the film will
lead, as there is simply no “plot.” A rondo structure, then, is perfectly suited for a film of
this type.
77
Contrasting Patterns in the Musical Accompaniments to Un chien andalou
Buñuel’s use of integrated musical recordings in Un chien andalou exhibits not a true
“Rondo” structure, but rather an alternating pattern in which the director exploits the
extreme contrast between Wagner’s music and Argentinean tango by juxtaposing the two
against one another, creating a variable auditory backdrop. Buñuel’s use of music therefore
establishes an underlying structure in the film, enhancing the viewer’s comprehension of
its organization. The musical structure unfolds rather simply as Tango – Wagner Part 1 –
Tango – Wagner Part 2 – Tango. Buñuel’s shooting script, printed in translation in the
appendix, outlines the alternation of Buñuel’s musical cues, coordinating these moments
with the pseudo-‐narrative of the film. Like Satie’s score – and unlike the music of Le sang
d’un poète, in which periods of silence and episodic music occur between instances of
recorded dialogue – Buñuel’s “found object” score is continuous throughout the film. Every
moment of the action is underscored by music, and the very contrast between the musical
selections draws the score to the foreground of the viewer’s experience. The use of the
Wagner Transfiguration music stands out all the more because of its juxtaposition against
the tangos. The Argentinean tango cues are highly rhythmic, repetitive, and structured with
conventional phrase lengths, while Wagner’s music is far more horizontal than vertical in
its conception. In this sense, the tango is very much the music of sordid reality. This
‘grounded’ music echoes populist undertones, whereas Wagner’s music symbolizes high art
and an element of mystical spiritualism. The tango music is, not coincidentally, aligned with
the points in the film in which the viewer feels most “in the present.” When the male
protagonist is shaken into reality from a dreamlike state at 6:38, the tone of the film
suddenly becomes far more natural. The viewer is caught up in the carnal desire of the
protagonist, as he looks upon the woman in the room lustfully. The death of the
androgynous figure in the street is distant from the protagonist, as he and the female
protagonist stand in the window looking on. Wagner’s music therefore underpins this
sense of distance from reality. When the man is suddenly stirred from his dream state and
78
lurches toward the woman in the room, both the protagonist and the accompanying music
are jolted to reality.
Though Buñuel initially stood behind the screen with two record players and
literally “dropped the needle” at corresponding moments to create an early “mix tape” of
Wagner and tango, in 1960 the director was able, with the advent of new technology, to
create a precisely timed and coordinated realization of his film, musically aligned as he
intended. For the purposes of study, this 1960 sound edition of Un chien andalou may be
considered the Urtext, or definitive version. Besides the clear evidence that Buñuel
intended for the moment of climax in Wagner’s music to coincide with moments of death in
the film, and that he spliced the second instance of Wagner’s score to directly coincide with
the death and ‘transfiguration’ of the male protagonist, the director’s carefully planned
alignment of music and image further enhances the viewer’s experience of the film.
The film’s narrative structure unfolds in a non-‐linear fashion. A Prologue precedes a
title card, at 2:02, that indicates the action will take place “Eight years later.” It is important
to note that Wagner’s music, in the two instances that it emerges in the film, always
coincides with a title card. The second instance aligns with the title card, at 10:53,
signifying that the action is taking place “Sixteen years before.” This indication is illogical,
and disturbs the viewer’s experience of time in the film, which may or may not unfold
linearly. That Wagner’s music, with its sense of unresolved harmony, coincides with these
moments of atemporality and “timelessness,” is fitting. It is likewise important to note that
the music from the Transfiguration scene in the context of Tristan und Isolde, like that of
most Wagner operas, does not begin cut and dry. Rather, it flows directly from the
preceding scene, in defiance of conventional Recitative-‐Aria structure. Wagner’s music
thereby begins in media res, with no clear beginning. The haze of this appropriation
coincides with the indistinct quality of both the action and the cinematography in the film.
In the scenario that Buñuel prepared and which served as his shooting script, at the
moment at which the second Wagner cue begins, Buñuel writes:
79
At this point, the photography becomes hazy. The newcomer moves in slow
motion and we set that his features are identical to those of the other; they are
one and the same person, but for the fact that the newcomer looks younger and
more doleful, as the other must have been years before.
When watching the film, there is no visual break in the scene, apart from the vague,
unfocused quality of the cinematography. The action takes place in the same room, and in
with the same actor. Only the change in music helps to inform the viewer that this is a
different time, and that the man is encountering the more youthful and exuberant version
of himself. Wagner’s music completely transforms the emotional content of the scene. The
extreme contrast between the tango cue and Wagner’s cue helps to underscore this
transition. Though perhaps the original purpose of film music was to simply “occupy the
ear,” at this moment in Un chien andalou, Buñuel relies heavily on the musical
accompaniment to completely alter the viewer’s perception of the scene.
Film scholar Linda Williams notes that Un chien andalou presents “a semblance of
narrative coherence, much like the feeling when wakened from a dream’s radical
incoherence . . . covered up by the false appearance of intelligibility” (L. Williams 1992).
There is something resembling an inherent narrative structure to the film, but it is
undermined by the unreliability of memory and memory association. Buñuel’s absurd
juxtaposition of Wagner and tango perfectly encapsulates this lack of reliability. As in a
dream, there is no logical reason for Buñuel’s use of either musical source, save to distort
any rational experience of the film.
80
Evocations of Timelessness in Le sang d’un poète – Visual and Musical Non-‐sequiturs
Elements of Cocteau’s use of Auric’s musical cues Le sang d’un poète likewise
embody the concept of timelessness, or suspension in time; as do a number of visual
motives throughout the film. Like the work of most of Les Six, Auric’s music often harkened
back to the classical period, though almost always with a degree of self-‐aware détachement.
Auric’s mélange of elements – classical form, topic, and style – intermingling with other
more modern elements, particularly instrumentation, create a sense of the cues being
somehow suspended in time, which perfectly reflects the tone of the film. Like the score –
which, like Buñuel’s juxtaposition of Wagner and tango reflects the concept of “high and
low” coinciding together – Cocteau’s imagery eschews the clear evidence of any obvious
period. Both Cocteau and Auric are deliberately anachronistic.
Cocteau’s handling of Auric’s cues is quite disjunct. As Auric recalled, for this film,
“Cocteau told me simply: evidently: in such-‐and such a passage, I imagine a music with this
kind of character. It ended there. When I played my music, when he heard my music, there
was no discussion of any sort between us. He was happy with what I had done” (Pasler
1991). Cocteau even claimed to have randomly aligned the music with various scenes, and
relied upon the ironic contrast between image and musical tone to intensify the experience
of the image. Through his isolation of Auric’s musical cues, Cocteau establishes a
discontinuity in the film. Likewise, the juxtaposition of stylistically contrasting musical cues
creates a sense of disorientation: a dream-‐inducing, surrealistic mercurial quality.
Even the intercut moving image of a collapsing pillar presented at the film’s outset
is fragmented and disjunct, and a different portion of this action is presented between each
episode of the film. Preceding the first episode, the pillar begins to fall at 2:17, and only at
the close of the film, at 50:17, is the moving image complete. Perhaps Cocteau means to
imply that all of the action in the film occurs, as in a dream state, within in the metaphorical
81
“blink of an eye.” The whole of the film’s structure occurs within the context of a period
that the viewer cannot properly equate with reality.
Large Scale Form in Entr’acte as it relates to Relâche
Form is far from arbitrary in Entr’acte, nor is it arbitrary in Relâche. In fact, the
ballet is structured as a palindrome in which the form reflects upon itself about the middle.
The diagram on the facing page outlines this form.
82
Figure 15 –Robert Orlege – The mirrored structure of Relâche, from Satie the composer
When taken in this way, the Entr’acte serves as far more than simply a palate cleanser,
or intermediary between the two parts of the ballet, but rather as the very central focus
point of the entire structure. Reflective surfaces and images in the film, including the
83
surface of water and brief glimpses of circular mirrors at 3:10, provide a visual equivalent
to this motif.
Satie’s score, in the pacing of shifts between musical units, likewise resembles a
mirrored structure. It begins with many unrelated musical units rebounding from one
another in line with the imagery; it then becomes more cohesive and unified in topic in the
central Ballerina and Funeral tableaux; finally, it once again spins out of control as the
funeral hearse speeds away. The cinematic rhythm of the film, that is, the speed between
shots, is quickest at the beginning and ending sections of the film, and it is in the middle
that it becomes more unified and deliberately paced. The structure of Satie’s score to
Entr’acte reflects – no pun intended – the mirror structure of the entire ballet. By this
approximation, perhaps the biggest jokes in the film form the central point of all of Relâche.
The bearded Ballet dancer is among these jokes, accompanied by Satie’s own play on meter,
at 6:45, wherein the ballerina is obviously not dancing in the waltz meter of the music.
Likewise, in the central Hunter tableau, Jean Börlin is shot and presumably killed. Börlin’s
cameo in the film is not coincidental: he was, in fact, the lead dancer in Relâche. The
filmmakers, in other words, have killed off the lead dancer of a ballet midway through its
form, just as Hitchcock does to his heroine, with a far different effect, in Psycho. The
screeching timbre of Satie’s Ritornello motto at this moment intensifies its absurdity, and
he follows this with one of the few moments of silence in the entire score: a true point of
rest, at 9:27. From then, the music abruptly shifts into the mock-‐Chopin funeral march
episode. Satie’s use of silence, like Cocteau’s, enhances the shock of this moment. The
music, like the viewer, seems to gasp. Harmonically, even the cadence is incomplete and
unresolved. Rather, Satie’s cue simply comes to an unprepared halt.
Some semblance of logic seems to underpin the film’s construction, in that though it
can generally be broken down into tableaux or scenes – with the later ones becoming more
unified and cohesive in the presentation of their ideas – the use of non-‐sequiturs and
repeated visual motives blurs the lines of formal delineation. The most important features
84
that Satie incorporates to underline the formal construction of the score are repeated
musical motives, in particular the recurrence of the opening Ritornello motive at
structurally significant moments. Likewise, he relies upon the use of points of cadence, and
significant moments of musical change – particularly shifts in meter, and sudden
alterations in tempo – in order to create structural divisions. Satie’s score punctuates the
film in such a way as to make it resemble not a run-‐on sentence, but rather a series of
thoughts that bounce off one another, not unlike some techniques used in Dada poetry.
Behind this absurd score lurks a clear underlying structure, a fact that somewhat betrays
the notion of “instantaneity” that Picabia, Clair, and the composer all claimed were at the
heart of the film and of Relâche. Their greatest gesture of absurdity is the very fact that this
film and its score are actually planned very carefully and logically.
The “Episodic” Use of Music in Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète
Cocteau’s use of Auric’s musical cues in Le sang d’un poète likewise appears to have
been planned quite carefully, despite the filmmaker’s assertion that only “by grace of God”
did any alignment come to be. The structure of Cocteau’s film is very different from
Entr’acte, yet both are, in a manner, “episodic.” While Entr’acte resembles a continuous
stream of thought marked by distinctive tableaux, Le sang d’un poète is assembled in four
“episodes,” each announced by Cocteau’s narration. The first episode, “The wounded hand,
or the scar of a poet,” begins at 2:21. The second, “Do walls have ears?” begins at 11:31. The
third episode, “the snowball fight,” begins at 28:43, and the fourth and final episode “The
profanation of the Host,” begins at 33:39. Each episode in some way evolves into another,
and they all often share similar visual motives. In this sense, the structure of the film
resembles the continuous evolution of dream-‐like thought, and is far more fluid and less
jagged than the frequently juxtaposed images in Entr’acte. The loose narrative of the four
episodes traces the death of the poet, a figure representing Cocteau himself. In the first
episode, the poet is “scarred” by the wounds of inspiration; in the second, he sleeps and
dreams, exploring the resources of his creative mind; in the third, he awakens as a child,
85
drawing from the memories of his youth for inspiration; and in the fourth, he is dead, killed
by his own hand. Like the structure of Entr’acte, Cocteau blurs the lines delineating each
episode. The four distinct episodes in Cocteau’s film each contain their own miniature
“narrative.” One cannot help but attempt to draw parallels between them, however, and the
recurrence of specific musical cues in multiple episodes creates musical links across these
episodes.
Cocteau himself blurs the lines between the four episodes both narratively and
visually. The poet figure, in falling through a mirror, emerges in the second episode.
Likewise, there is no blank screen or title card in the transition from the snowball fight of
the third episode to the final episode scene, wherein the angel of death emerges to collect
the corpse of the child. Rather, Cocteau creates a superimposition of one scene onto
another: a seamless transition. Theatrically, the staging and scenario changes while the
setting itself remains the same, dead corpse and all. The music helps to reinforce this
blurring, in that it elides each scene. Rather than ending each of Auric’s cues, which were all
pre-‐recorded, Cocteau instead allows the music to continue over the scene, bridging the
gaps between them.
However, the juxtaposition of cue against cue, and Cocteau’s occasionally abrupt
splices of the recorded music at times carefully underscore particular moments in the film.
In the passage transitioning from the first episode to the second episode, beginning at
10:22, the poet, in an effort to remove the macabre image of the sinister whispering mouth
from his own hand, transfers it to a statue in his studio. Auric’s music, with a perpetual
motion of continuous running notes, sinuously meandering in the winds, continues to play
over the transition to the next “episode,” as announced by Cocteau’s narration, thus eliding
the scene. However, on occasion, a menacing trill interrupts the music, conveying a sense of
anticipation. Cocteau splices Auric’s music at 12:03, just after the statue shockingly begins
to speak, and the poet realizes that he is trapped in the room. The ceaselessly repetitive
musical cue underscoring this scene reflects the state of the poets mind as he begins to
86
wonder if he will ever escape his studio. There is no door through which to exit, just as
Auric provides no structural ‘exit’ his musical cue; instead, only incessant repetition: the
poet cannot leave, just as Cocteau refuses to allow Auric’s music to shift to a new cue or
topic. At 12:50, the ominous trill sounds once more, perfectly aligned with the moment at
which the poet realizes what he must do in order to escape: plunge through the mirror, and
into his subconscious.
A Hierarchy of Musical Cues in Le sang d’un poète
Among Auric’s many varied, independent cues used in the film – of which there are
over a dozen – only two recur, implying that this pair has a particular symbolic function of
greater import than all other cues in the film. If Cocteau meant for his film to induce a
dream-‐like state, by means of free association, then the director’s use of recurring cues
provides a means through which to establish these connections. Like the recurring visual
motives of the film, the viewer is led to question why the accompanying music from an
earlier scene is reused. As with the Wagnerian leitmotivic technique that would become a
hallmark of later film scores, particularly in Hollywood – notably including in John
Williams’s Star Wars scores – the viewer’s association of music to image is a crucial
component to understanding the subtext of the film. The music, rather than serving merely
as background, enhances and adds depth to the understanding of the visuals, and tells a
story all its own.
The two motives that recur in the film are contrasting and thereby distinctive.
Auric’s distinctive scoring and use of topic – like Satie’s distinctive orchestration of the
Ritornello unit, and the contrasting juxtaposition of Wagner with tango – help to draw these
cues to the foreground. Set apart from their musical surroundings, often by Cocteau’s use of
silence between cues, Auric’s musical themes take on an almost statuesque character.
There is no evolution nor development between two cues; and even within a single cue,
often multiple musical ideas are assembled in what James Deaville refers to as
87
“carnivalesque” fashion (Deaville and Simon 2011). Auric employs contrast within his
musical cues, as Cocteau utilizes contrast between the musical cues.
The first cue to transcend episodes is the sprightly G-‐major music from the first
episode, heard first at 3:08: a gigue-‐like theme scored for high winds, accompanied by the
piano and plucked strings, with the noticeable intrusion of a ratchet, providing the theme a
toy-‐like quality signifying childhood innocence. This music truly embodies the
carnivalesque style that Deaville describes, both in its jovial quality and in its capricious
quality, asymmetrical phrase lengths, and neurotic undertones. Perhaps at this point in the
film, in which the poet is painting in his studio, the theme is meant to represent the creative
artistic process. Heard first at the sight of the five-‐pointed star that scars the poet’s back – a
visual motive that recurs later in the film and which serves Jean Cocteau’s own visual
“signature” – the theme is associated both with a distinct image and with a thematic idea:
that of creativity. The distinctive scoring, particularly Auric’s use of non-‐pitched
percussion, calls attention to this cue. Likewise, the theme underscores an absurd,
dreamlike image: that of a mouth beginning to move on the painting – signifying the
expressive voice of art itself.
When the theme recurs in the film, in the final episode at 34:57, its context is far
different: it accompanies a card game being played over the corpse of a dead youth in the
snow. Two characters recur, though they are now transfigured. The man playing the card
game is played by the same actor who played the poet from episode one, while the woman
across from him is the figure first painted by the poet in that earlier episode, now in human
form. This character later becomes a statue, which is the ultimate fate of the poet himself.
Cocteau’s use of this very distinctive cue at this moment in the film serves several
functions. First, its carnivalesque character heightens the grotesque quality of the scene:
that a game of cards can take place in the same context as the harrowing death of a child.
Likewise, it associates the two characters on screen with their former incarnations. The
music informs the viewer, by association, that these are in fact the same figures, now
88
transformed. Furthermore, if the theme symbolizes artistic creativity, then Cocteau is
perhaps commenting on creativity ironically in the scene. The man pulls the winning card
from the child’s coat. Symbolically, this signifies that he is cheating in the creative process
by drawing from his own childhood for inspiration. As Deaville points out, the snowball
fight of the third episode was based upon a memory from Cocteau’s own childhood, which
further establishes the autobiographical subtext of the film (Deaville and Simon 2011). The
use of this cue in two completely distinct contexts first establishes a connection between
the two episodes and then comments on the disturbing alteration of a petty card game with
the harrowing significance of death. Cocteau’s use of this music in the final scene is highly
ironic, and its cheerful tone seems entirely out of place, discomfortingly so.
The second cue to recur is first presented in the second episode, in the hallway of
the Hotel des Folies-‐Dramatiques, after a transition scene at 13:21 that incorporates special
visual effects with magical results. The poet has descended through a mirror to arrive in
this bizarre passageway of multiple doors, four of which he opens, revealing different
scenes. The mirror, a reflective surface, symbolizes the poet’s looking within himself. When
he falls through this mirror, Cocteau implies that the poet has descended into his own
creative mind in search of inspiration. Each locked door represents a different source of
creative stimulus, whether a memory or a new creation. The poet’s descent into his creative
mind is significantly accompanied by silence. The absence of sound and music in Le sang
d’un poète often affects the experience of the scene as much as the presence of music and
sound. The poet here floats through a vacuous, dark space, and the lack of music seems
deliberately intended to evoke this vacuum. By surrounding Auric’s cues with prolonged
lengths of periodic silence, the cues themselves stand out more in relief, as is the case with
this cue, which emerges first at 15:29, following several minutes of silence. The music
accompanying the scene is far different from the jovial motive of the first episode. This
theme is dirge-‐like and processional, in a minor mode, and subdued in both tempo and
timbre. It evokes an ominous quality, as though Cocteau were using Auric’s music to imply
that when an artist looks within, occasionally disturbing and haunting memories emerge.
89
As the poet looks into each room, peering through a keyhole, the music subsides and
silence enhances the experience of the scene. The situations in each room – the
assassination of a man by firing squad, a bound child escaping the abusive whip of a
schoolmaster, and a hermaphrodite bearing a sign reading “Danger of Death” – are all
disturbing and grotesque in nature, and the ominous tone of Auric’s music appropriately
underscores this. Cocteau fragments Auric’s cues, and incorporates portions only when the
poet is in the hallway.
When this cue re-‐emerges later in the film, it is in the third episode: the “Snowball
Fight” scene. This cue begins at 33:00, and here is aligned with the death of the boy whose
corpse remains lying under the card table in the final episode. The boy may perhaps
represent Cocteau’s own childhood self, and his death is a macabre and disturbing scene,
perfectly suited to the accompaniment of the menacing, dirge-‐like music of the preceding
episode. Here, it is the viewer who is spying on an unsettling scene that it cannot help or
control from its voyeuristic vantage, separated by the cinematic fourth wall. Like the poet
in the preceding episode, looking in on disturbing scenes that he cannot control, the viewer
is helpless and must simply observe. Auric’s use of dissonant, flutter-‐tongue punctuations
in the winds helps to enhance the alarming tone at this point in the film. The dark,
menacing quality of this cue then acts as a foil to the re-‐emerging jovial G major theme of
episode one. At 34:18, Cocteau allows us to hear the pained moans of the boy, as he lies
dying. The absence of diegetic sound during the earlier musical cues makes this realistic
sound all the more effective, as it stands out in contrast. Realistic sounds are rare in the film
and by isolating this particular moment and temporarily muting the film’s musical
backdrop, Cocteau draws the viewer into the scene. It is starkly juxtaposed moment of lucid
reality in an otherwise dreamlike film.
The next musical cue to play after these darkened moments is the jovial G major
theme, at 34:57. The extreme contrast between this theme and the preceding one has a
disturbing effect on the viewer. Cocteau depicts the carefree scene of a card game, and
90
Auric’s light-‐spirited music accompanies it. However, the viewer still notices the corpse of
the dead boy lying just beneath the table. The music seems, for all intents and purposes,
entirely inappropriate. The viewer is left with the tension inherent in negotiating between
the many conflicting elements of the scene. Like the card players, Auric’s music seems
completely unaffected by the scene. This very deliberately calculated misalignment on
Cocteau’s part intensifies the viewer’s ironic comprehension of the depicted situation. The
episode’s title, the “Profanation of the Host,” signifies sacrilege. Cocteau’s use of this music
to underpin this particular scene is likewise sacrilegious, and deeply disturbing.
91
Epilogue: Fade to Black
At the time of their creation, perhaps no one would have sought to draw
comparisons between Entr’acte, Un chien andalou, and Le sang d’un poète. These exemplify
three entirely unique approaches to the cinematic art form, created by completely
independent creative artists. Now, nearly a century later, it might be possible to observe
some larger collective goals amongst them. These films all emerged from a similar time and
place in history. Paris between the World Wars was a dynamic and progressive cultural
mecca. Almost unprecedented immigration to the City of Light just following the First
World War collected an influx of new cultures, including the important arrival of Jazz
music, for instance. These anées folles gave way to a period in which artists exemplified
significant boldness and daring, and the coincidence of the emergence of cinema as a new
art form meant that these artists could utilize this brand new medium to channel their
expressive voice.
Unconventional films do, to some degree, require “unconventional” film music. The
cliché tropes of silent film and early sound film convention could not recreate the same
effects that these perfectly suited musical scores have on the films that they accompany. A
symbiotic relationship between music and the moving image emerges, and the music
breathes life into the images, as the visuals conversely nourish the music. Entr’acte, Un
chien andalou, and Le sang d’un poète are each prized and beloved for the creative energy of
their visual composition. Their filmmakers manipulate the viewer’s experience with
sometimes surreal, often absurd, and occasionally shocking imagery, cinematography, and
editing. The music of these films has been discussed and analyzed in far less detail in
scholarship than the visuals, and new film scores have been written for all three in the
eighty to ninety years since they first premiered. While these new scores can allow us to
experience the films anew, they cannot substitute for the carefully crafted balance of music
and image that the filmmakers and the original composers first intended. It is my personal
hope that in the future, film music will take a higher place in the hierarchy of scholarly
92
analysis, and that definitive orchestral scores for many of these early films might be
published.
In the dark of a theater, as Hitchcock once famously noted in reference to his
infamous 1963 film Psycho, the audience is subjected to a director’s carefully crafted
manipulation of their experience. He recalled: “the game with the audience was fascinating.
I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.” The
composer Bernard Hermann, whose film scores contribute so much to Hitchcock’s
calculated manipulation of the audience, tellingly and appropriately quipped: “he only
finishes a picture sixty percent. I have to finish it for him” (Brown 1994).
93
APPENDIX
APPENDIX 1
The Musical Structure of Entr’acte
Correspo
nding
Time in Film
Unit N
umbe
r
Satie
’s Cue
Num
ber
Satie
’s descriptio
n
Unit D
esigna
tion
Num
ber o
f Measures
Repe
titions in Film
Key Signature
Meter and
Tem
po
Measure # in sc
ore
2:20 1 I Chimneys; deflating balloons
A 8 A 2/4; Pas trop vite
1
2:31 2 B 4 F 9 2:37 3 C 8 C 13 2:46 4 D 8 A 21 2:57 5 E 8 A 29 3:08 6 II Boxing Gloves and
Matches A 8 A 37
3:17 7 F 4 A 45 3:23 8 E’ 4 A 49 3:28 9 B’ 4 A 53 3:34 10 B’’ 4 F 57 3:38 11 D’ 8 D 61 3:48 12 III Scenes from the air;
chess game and boats on roof
F’ 4 D 69
3:53 13 G 4 D 73 3:58 14 A 8 A 77 4:09 15 H + H’ 4+4 D 85 4:29 16 I 4 B-‐flat 93
4:35 17 J + J’ (5+2)+(3+2) F 97 4:50 18 H + H’ 4+4 1 repeat
of 8 bars D 109
5:11 19 K 6+2 D 117 5:25 20 IV The female dancer
and figures within water
L + M 4+4 E 3/4; No designated
tempo change
125
5:41 21 N + O 4+4 E minor 133 5:58 22 P + Q 4+4(+4) 1 repeat
of last 4 bars (Q)
A minor 141
6:21 20’ L+M (Full repeat of Units
L-‐Q)
E 125’
94
Correspo
nding
Time in Film
Unit N
umbe
r
Satie
’s Cue
Num
ber
Satie
’s descriptio
n
Unit D
esigna
tion
Num
ber o
f Measures
Repe
titions in Film
Key Signature
Meter and
Tem
po
Measure # in sc
ore
6:37 21’ N+O E minor 133’ 6:54 22’ P+Q A minor 141’ 7:17 23 R + L’
(rounds out the section)
4+4 E 149
7:37 24 V The hunter and the Beginning of the
funeral
A 12 (extension)
(4+4+4)
A 2/4 157
7:56 25 B’’’ 4 1 repeat C 169 8:08 26 S 8 1 repeat F 173 8:21 27 A 8 1 repeat A 181 8:50 25’ B’'' 4 C 169’ 9:02 26’ S 8 F 173’ 9:13 27’ A 8 A 181’ 9:30 28 VI Funeral March T 2+(3+3)
(2 bars of intro)
A minor 4/4; Plus Lent
189
10:01 29 U 8 (3+2+3) F 197 10:24 30 V + W 4+4 A minor 205
MISSING FROM FILM
31 X 8 A 213
10:43 32 VII Funeral Procession in Slow Motion
A 8 A 2/4 (much slower tempo)
221
10:58 33 D’’ 8 D 229 11:11 34 X + Y 4+4 E-‐flat 237 11:27 35 Z 8 E minor 245
11:43 36 AA 8 D 253 11:59 37 A 8 A 261 12:16 38 BB 8 (2+6) F 269 12:35 39 CC 8 1 repeat C 277 13:13 40 VIII The Chase BB’ (4+4) 1 repeat D 285 13:45 41 DD 7 1 repeat A Cut time
(Accents give the music a
feeling of triple
meter) Pulse
293
95
Correspo
nding
Time in Film
Unit N
umbe
r
Satie
’s Cue
Num
ber
Satie
’s descriptio
n
Unit D
esigna
tion
Num
ber o
f Measures
Repe
titions in Film
Key Signature
Meter and
Tem
po
Measure # in sc
ore
Remains Same
14:09 42 DD’ 7 1 repeat A 300 14:35 43 DD’’ 7 1 repeat A 307 14:56 44 EE 8 1 repeat D 2/4 (The
beginning of
accelerando through Unit 51)
314
15:14 45 EE’ 8 1 repeat E-‐flat 322 15:28 46 EE’’ 8 1 repeat F 330 15:43 47 FF 8 1 repeat C 338 15:58 48 GG 8 1 repeat C 346 16:14 49 HH 8 1 repeat G 354 16:29 50 II 8 1 repeat A 362 16:44 44’ EE 8 1 repeat D 314 17:00 45’ EE' 8 1 repeat E-‐flat 322 17:15 46’ EE’' 8 1 repeat F 330 17:28 47’ FF 8 1 repeat C 17:43 48’ GG C 17:56 49’ HH G 18:09 50’ II A 18:19 51 JJ 8 1 repeat D 370 18:37 52 IX The Coffin’s fall and
the emergence of Börlin
KK 8 A 3/4; Lent 378
18:59 53 LL 8 C 386 19:18 54 MM 8 F Ritardando 394 19:40 55 X Final: The screen
bursts and the end A 8 A 2/4 402
19:49 56 A’ 8 A 410 19:57 57 NN 8 A 418 20:00 58 OO 4 A 6/8 422
96
APPENDIX 2
Un Chien Andalou
Original Shooting Script by Dalí and Buñuel (translated by Haim Finkelstein)
Section Breaks, Musical (in Red) and Timing Cues Supplied by the Patrick Campbell Jankowski PROLOGUE
TANGO
Once Upon a Time ...
A balcony at night. A man is sharpening a razor by the balcony. The man looks at the sky
through the window-‐panes and sees ... A light cloud moving toward the full moon. Then a
young woman's head, her eyes wide open. A razor blade moves toward one of the eyes. The
light cloud passes now across the moon. The razor blade cuts through the eye of the young
woman, slicing it. End of Prologue.
EIGHT YEARS LATER
WAGNER 1:45
A deserted street. It is raining. A character dressed in a dark-‐gray suit appears riding a
bicycle. His head, back and loins are adorned in ruffles of white linen. A rectangular box
with black and white diagonal stripes is secured to his chest by straps. The character pedals
mechanically without holding the handlebars, with his hands resting on his knees. The
character is seen from the back down to the thighs in a medium shot, superimposed
lengthwise on the street down which he is cycling with his back to the camera. The
97
character moves toward the camera until the striped box is seen in a close-‐up. An ordinary
room on the third floor on the same street. A young girl wearing a brightly colored dress is
sitting in the middle of the room attentively reading a book. Suddenly she comes out of her
reading with a start, listens with curiosity, freeing herself of the book by throwing it on a
nearby couch.
2:30 The book stays open with a reproduction of Vermeer's The Lacemaker on one of the
pages facing up. The young woman is convinced now that something is off: she, gets up,
and, half turning, walks in quick steps toward the window. The character we have
mentioned before has just at this very moment stopped, below on the street. Without
offering the least resistance, out of inertia, he lets himself come down with the bicycle into
the gutter, in the midst of a mud heap. Looking enraged and resentful, the young woman
hurries down the stairs and out to the street. Close-‐up of the character sprawling on the
ground, expressionless, his position identical to that at the moment of his fall. The young
woman comes out of the house, and, throwing herself on the cyclist, she frantically kisses
him on the mouth, the eyes and the nose. The rain gets heavier to the extent of blotting out
the preceding scene.
3:11 Dissolve to the box whose diagonal stripes are superimposed on those of the rain.
Hands equipped with a little key open the box, pulling out a tie wrapped in tissue paper. It
must be taken into account that the rain, the box, the tissue paper and the tie should all
exhibit these diagonal stripes, with their sizes alone varying.
3:19 The same room. Standing by the bed, the young woman is looking at the clothing
articles that had been worn by the character -‐-‐ ruffles, box, and the stiff collar with the plain
dark tie -‐-‐ all laid out as though they were worn by a person lying on the bed. The young
woman finally decides to pick up the collar, removing the plain tie in order to replace it
with the striped one which she has just taken out of the box. She puts it back in the same
place, and then sits down by the bed in the posture of a person watching over the dead.
98
(Note: The bed, that is to say, the bedspread and the pillow, are slightly rumpled and
depressed as if a human body were really lying there).
3:56 The woman is aware that someone is standing behind her and turns around to see
who it is. Without the least surprise, she sees the character who now is without any of his
former accessory articles, looking very attentively at something in his right hand. His great
absorption betrays quite a great deal of anxiety. The woman approaches and looks in turn
at what he has in his hand.
4:15 Close-‐up of the hand, the middle of which is teeming with ants swarming out of a
black hole. None of these falls off. Dissolve to the armpit hair of a young woman sprawled
on the sand of a sunny beach. Dissolve to a sea urchin whose spines ripple slightly.
4:38 Dissolve to the head of another young woman in a powerful overhead shot framed by
an iris. The iris opens to reveal the young woman surrounded by a throng of people who
are trying to break through a police barrier. At the center of this circle, the young woman,
holding a stick, attempts to pick up a severed hand with painted fingernails that is lying on
the ground. A policeman comes up to her, sharply reprimanding her; he bends down and
picks up the hand which he carefully wraps up and puts in the box that was carried by the
cyclist. He hands it all to the young woman, saluting her in a military fashion while she
thanks him. As the policeman hands her the box, she must appear to be carried away by an
extraordinary emotion that isolates her completely from everything around her.
5:23 (Build to Climax of Wagner) It is as though she were enthralled by the echoes of
distant religious music; perhaps music she heard in her earliest childhood. Their curiosity
satisfied, the bystanders begin to disperse in all directions.
This scene will have been seen by the characters whom we have left in the room on the
third floor. They are seen through the window panes of the balcony from which may be
99
seen the end of the scene described above. When the policeman hands the box over to the
young woman, the two characters on the balcony appear to also be overcome to the point
of tears by the same emotion. Their heads sway as though following the rhythm of this
impalpable music. The man looks at the young woman and makes a gesture as though he
were saying: "Did you see? Hadn't I told you so?"
5:57 She looks down again at the young woman on the street who is now all alone and, as if
pinned down to the spot, in a state of utter restraint. Cars pass all around her at
breathtaking speeds.
6:15 (Climax of Wagner’s Music) Suddenly she is run over by one of the cars and is left
there horribly mutilated.
TANGO
6:40 It is then that, with the decisiveness of a man fully knowing his rights, the man goes
over to his companion, and, having gazed lasciviously straight into her eyes, he grabs her
breasts through her dress. Closeup of the lustful hands over the breasts. These are bared as
the dress disappears. A terrible expression of almost mortal anguish spreads over the
man's face, and a blood-‐streaked dribble runs out of his mouth dripping on the young
woman's bare breasts. The breasts disappear to be transformed into thighs which the man
continues to palpate. His expression has changed. His eyes sparkle with malice and lust. His
wide open mouth now closes down as if tightened up by a sphincter. The young woman
moves back toward the middle of the room, followed by the man who is still in the same
posture. Suddenly, she makes a forceful motion, breaking his hold on her, freeing herself
from his amorous advances. The man's mouth tightens with anger. She realizes that a
disagreeable or violent scene is about to take place. She moves back, step by step, until she
reaches the corner of the room, where she takes up a position behind a small table.
Assuming the gestures of the melodrama villain, the man looks around for something or
100
other. He sees at his feet the end of a rope and picks it up with his right hand. His left hand
gropes about too and gets hold of an identical rope. Glued to the wall the young woman
watches with horror her attacker's stratagem.
8:00 The latter advances toward her dragging with great effort that which is attached
behind to the ropes.
8:15 We see passing before our eyes on the screen: first, a cork, then a melon, then two
Brothers of Christian Schools, and finally two magnificent grand pianos. The pianos are
loaded with the rotting carcasses of two donkeys, their feet, tails, hindquarters and
excrement spilling out of the piano-‐cases.
SECOND TANGO
8:25 As one of the pianos passes in front of the camera lens, a large donkey's head is seen
pressing the keyboard. Pulling with great difficulty this burden, the man desperately
strains toward the young woman, knocking over chairs, tables, a floor lamp, etc., etc. The
donkey's hind-‐quarters get caught in everything. A lamp hanging from the ceiling is jostled
by a stripped bone, and continues rocking until the end of the scene. When the man is about
to reach the young woman, she dodges him with a leap and escapes. Her attacker lets go of
the ropes and begins pursuing her.
8:49 The young woman opens a communicating door and vanishes into the next room, but
not quickly enough to be able to lock the door behind her. The man's hand having made it
past the joint, is held captive, caught at the wrist.
8:56 Inside the other room, pressing the door harder and harder, the young woman looks
at the hand which wrenches in pain in slow motion as the ants reappear and swarm over
the door.
101
9:08 Right away, she turns her head toward the middle of the new room, which is identical
to the previous one, but on which the lighting confers a different look; the young woman
sees ... A man sprawled on the bed who is the one and the same man whose hand is still
caught in the door. Wearing the ruffles with the box resting on his chest he does not make
the least movement but lies there, his eyes wide open, his superstitious expression seeming
to say: "Something really extraordinary is now about to happen!"
9:25 ABOUT THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
9:42 A new character is seen from the back on the landing; he has just stopped by the
entrance door to the apartment. He rings the bell of the apartment where the events are
taking place. We don't see the bell nor the electric hammer, but in their place, over the
door, there are two holes through which pass two hands shaking a silver cocktail shaker.
Their action is instantaneous, as in ordinary films when a doorbell button is being pressed.
The man lying on the bed gives a start. The young woman goes and opens the door. The
newcomer goes directly to the bed and imperiously orders the man to get up. The man
complies so grudgingly that the other is obliged to grab him by the ruffles and force him to
his feet.
10:17 Having torn off the ruffles one by one, the newcomer throws them out of the
window. The box follows the same route and so do the straps which the man tries in vain to
save from the catastrophe. And this leads the newcomer to punish the man by making him
go and stand with his face to one of the walls. The newcomer will have done all this with his
back completely turned to the camera.
10:53 He turns around now for the first time in order to go and look for something on the
other side of the room. The sub-‐title says:
102
SIXTEEN YEARS BEFORE
WAGNER (Cue beginning later in the score, closer to climax)
10:55 At this point the photography becomes hazy. The newcomer moves in slow motion
and we set that his features are identical to those of the other; they are one and the same
person, but for the fact that the newcomer looks younger and more doleful, as the other
must have been years before. The newcomer goes toward the back of the room with the
camera tracking back and keeping him in medium close-‐up. The school desk toward which
our individual is heading enters the frame. There are two books on the school desk, as well
as various school objects, whose position and moral meaning are to be carefully
determined. The newcomer picks up the two books and turns to go and join the other man.
At this point everything goes back to normal, the fuzziness and slow motion having
disappeared. Having come up to the man, the newcomer directs him to hold out his arms in
a cruciform position, places a book in each hand, and orders him to remain so as a
punishment. The punished character's expression has now become keen and treacherous.
He turns to face the newcomer.
11:46 The books he has been holding turn into revolvers. The newcomer looks at him with
tenderness, an expression that becomes more pronounced with each passing moment. The
other, threatening the newcomer with his guns and forcing him to put his hands up, does
not heed the latter's compliance and fires both revolvers at him.
12:06 (Wagner’s Music begins to face) Medium close-‐up of the newcomer falling down
fatally wounded, his features contorted in agony (the photography's fuzziness is resumed
and the newcomer's fall is in slow motion, in a way that is more pronounced than
previously). We see in the distance the wounded man falling;
103
12:12 This, however, happens no longer inside the room but in a park. Seated next to him
is a motionless woman with bare shoulders, who is seen from behind leaning slightly
forward. As he falls the wounded man attempts to seize and stroke her shoulders; one of
his hands is turned shaking toward himself; the other brushes against the skin of the naked
shoulders. Finally he falls to the ground.
12:22 View from afar. A few passers-‐by and several park-‐keepers rush over to help. They
pick him up in their arms and bear him away through the woods. Let the passionate lame
man play a role here.
WAGNER MUSIC CONLUDES
TANGO BEGINS at 13:33
13:33 And we are back at the same room. A door, the one in which the hand had been
caught, now opens slowly.
The young woman we already know appears. She closes the door behind her and stares
very attentively at the wall against which the murderer had stood. The man is no longer
there. The wall is bare, without any furniture or decoration. The young woman makes a
gesture of vexation and impatience. The wall is seen again; in the middle of it there is a
small black spot. Seen much closer, this small spot appears to be a death's-‐head moth.
13:52 Close-‐up of the moth. The death's head on the moth's wings fills the whole screen.
The man who was wearing ruffles comes suddenly into view in a medium shot bringing his
hand swiftly to his mouth as though he were losing his teeth. The young woman looks at
him disdainfully. When the man takes away his hand, we see that his mouth has
disappeared. The young woman seems to be saying to him: "Well, and what next?" and then
she touches up her lips with a lipstick. We see again the man's head.
104
14:11 Hair begins to sprout where his mouth had been. Having caught sight of this, the
young woman stifles a cry and swiftly examines her armpit which is completely depilated.
She scornfully sticks out her tongue at him, throws a shawl over her shoulders, and,
opening the door near her, goes into the adjacent room which is a wide beach.
13:27 (Splice of one added bar) A third character is waiting for her near the water's edge.
They greet each other very amiably, and meander together down the waterline. (Are their
steps matched with the musical rhythm?) A shot of their legs and the waves breaking at
their feet. The camera follows them in a dolly shot. The waves gently wash ashore at their
feet, first, the straps, then the striped box followed by the ruffles, and finally the bicycle.
This shot continues a moment longer without anything else being washed ashore. They
continue their walk on the beach, little by little fading from view, while in the sky appear
the words: IN THE SPRING
15:56 (Splice of one added bar)
Everything has changed. We see now a desert without end. We see the man and the young
woman in the center, sunk in sand up to their chests, blinded, their clothes in tatters,
devoured by the sun and by swarms of insects.
16:24 -‐ End of Film -‐ Tango ends, intriguingly, on an unresolved dominant chord
(Original Shooting Script by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí Translated by Haim Finkelstein)
105
Bibliography and Filmography
Auric, Georges. Correspndences of Georges Auric and Jean Cocteau . Translated by Pierre Caizergues. Montpellier: Université Paul-‐Valéry, 1999.
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.
Brown, Royal S. "Bernard Hermann." In Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. University of California Press, 1994.
Buñuel, Luis, and Salvador Dalí. "Un chien andalou." Dada and Surrealist Film. Edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli. Translated by Haim Finkelstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Buñuel, Luis, and Salvdor Dalí. Un chien andalou. DVD Reissue. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Produced by Les Grandes Filmes Classiques. Transflux Films, 1928.
Calkins, Susan. "Modernism in Music and Erik Satie's Parade." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (Croatian Musicological Society) 41, no. 1 (June 2010): 3-‐19.
Clair, René. Cinema Yesterday and Today. Edited by R.C. Dale. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum. Paris: Dover Publications, 1972.
Cocteau, Jean. Le coq et le harlequin: notes concerning music. First English Edition. Translated by Rollo H. Myers. London: The Egoist Press, 1921.
Cocteau, Jean. Le Sang d'un Poète. DVD Reissue. Directed by Jean Cocteau. Produced by Studio Canal. Performed by Enrique Rivero Lee Miller. The Criterion Collection, 1930.
Cocteau, Jean. "Preface to The Blood of a Poet." The Criterion Current (The Criterion Collection), 1946.
Cohen, Annabel J. "Music as Source of Emotion in Film." In Music and Emotion: Theory and Research (Series in Affective Science), by Patrik Juslin and John A. Sloboda. Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Dale, R.C. The Films of René Clair: Volume I: Exposition and Analysis. Vol. I. 3 vols. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1986.
Darrell Pinto, B.A. Music, Eros, and Thanatos in the Films of Buñuel, Dalí, Visconti, and Kubrick. Masters Thesis, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 2011.
Deaville, James, and Wood Simon . "Synchronization by the Grace of God? The Film/Music Collaboration of Jean Cocteau and Georges Auric." Canadian University Music Review 22, no. 1 (2011).
Dorf, Samuel N. "Film as Multimedia and Performance: Analyzing Dada Film Music and Erik Satie’s Cinéma ." Edited by Catherine Anne Cooper. Resonance: An Interdisciplinary Musical Journal Spring (2006).
106
Doyle, Tracy A. "Erik Satie's Ballet 'Parade'." DMA Thesis, School of Music, Louisiana State University, 2005.
Eatwell, Piu Marie. "Myths About French Culture." In They Eat Horses, Don't They?: The Truth About the French, 200-‐250. London: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014.
Edwards, Gwynne. A Companion to Luis Buñuel. Tamesis Books, 2005.
Elder, R. Bruce. "An Anti-‐Art Film." In DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.
Fotiade, Ramona. "Un chien andalou." In The Cinema of France, by Phil Powrie, 21-‐32. New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2006.
Fragineau, André. Cocteau on the Film: Conversations with Jean Cocteau. London: Dover, 1972.
Gallagher, Paul. "Jean Cocteau's 'The Blood of a Poet,' 1930." Dangerous Minds. February 19, 2011. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/jean_cocteau_blood_of_a_poet (accessed December 1, 2014).
Gallez, Douglas W. "Satie's Entr'acte: A Model of Film Music." Cinema Journal, Autumn 1976: 36-‐50.
Gillmor, Alan M. Erik Satie. Twayne Publishing, 1988.
Gillmor, Alan M. "Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-‐Garde." The Musical Quarterly (Oxford University Press) 69, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 104-‐119.
Gillmor, Alan M. "Musico-‐Poetic Form in Satie's "Humoristic" Piano Suites (1913-‐14) ." Canadian University Music Review 8 (1987).
Kelly, Barbara L. Music and Ultra-‐modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913-‐1939. Paris: Boydell and Brewer Ltd, 2013.
Leydon, Rebecca Victoria. "Narrative Strategies and Debussy's Late Style." PhD Thesis, Faculty of Music, McGill University, Montreal, 1996.
Manvell, Roger. "Experimental Film in France." In Experiment in the Film, by Roger Manvell, 60-‐101. Detroit: Arno Press, 1949.
Marks, Martin Miller. Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-‐1924. Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Marks, Martin. "The Well-‐Furnished Film Score: Satie's Score for Entr'acte." Canadian University Music Review 4 (1983): 245-‐277.
Motte-‐Haber, Helga de la. "Ent'racte." See This Sound. December 1, 2011. http://www.see-‐this-‐sound.at/works/1 (accessed October 2, 2014).
Nettl, Bruno. Excursions in World Music. Sixth Edition. Pearson, 2011.
Orledge, Robert. Satie the Composer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Pasler, Jann. " New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Jean Cocteau's Identity." The Musical Quarterly (Oxford University Press) 75, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 255-‐278.
107
Picabia, Francis. Ent'racte. DVD reissue. Directed by René Clair. Produced by Pathé. Performed by Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, et. al. Jean Börlin. The Criterion Collection, 1924.
Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music: A Neglected Art. Second Edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.
Rorem, Ned. "Cocteau and Music." In Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary, by Ned Rorem. New York, NY: Open Road Media, 2013.
Rorem, Ned. "Cocteau and Music." In Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, edited by Robin James, 153-‐183. 1984.
Roust, Colin. "'Say it with Georges Auric': Film Music and the esprit nouveau." Twentieth-‐Century Music 6 (2009): 133-‐153.
Sangild, Torben. "Wagner's Tristan in Luis Buñuel's early films: Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'Or." JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning 13 (2014/2015).
Satie, Erik, and Darius Milhaud. "Cinéma." Cinéma: Entr'acte symphonique de "Relâche". Paris: Editions Salabert, 1926.
Schweitzer, Vivien. "Through Erik Satie's Music, a Trip Bac in Time to the Soundless and the Surreal." The New York Times, June 7, 2007.
Stravinsky, Igor. "Stravinsky on Film Music." In The Hollywood FIlm Music Reader, by editor Mervyn Cooke. 1946.
Taruskin, Richard. "Chapter Ten: Deeds of Music Made Visible (Class of 1813, I)." In Music in the Nineteenth Century, by Richard Taruskin. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Templier, Pierre-‐Daniel. Erik Satie. 1971 Reissue. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1932. Townsend, Chris. "The Last Hope of Intuition: Francis Picabia, Erik Satie and René Clair's
Intermedial Project Relâche." Nottingham French Studies 50, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 41-‐64.
Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. University of California Press, 1992.
Williams, Tami. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
![Artforum.com 500 Words [Various]](https://static.documents.page/doc/80x56/6356422086104ea1570c1aab/artforumcom-500-words-various.jpg)
