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Lindsay Anderson - in his own words
Typed draft of article written by Anderson in 1975 on the use of music in his films (LA 4/5).
Using Music
I have always felt that music is a useful, expressive and important component in film style. The first film I ever made was an industrial documentary for a factory in the North of England which manufactured conveyors for use in mines, quarries, etc. This film was made for very little money, and besides I was almost entirely ignorant of how to shoot a film and how to put one together - so the experience was an extremely valuable one. I realized from the start how important music could be to add sometimes a lyrical element to the picture, and sometimes to sustain or enhance the film's rhythm. (I might also add that, not for the first time, music came in very usefully to cover up the errors in shooting and montage.) We "lifted" orchestral music from gramophone records - Dvorak, Aaron Copland and Strauss - and I was able to learn from this primitive experience the immense value of music to the film-maker.
Of course I didn't learn solely through my own experience. At that date (and today for that matter) the directors whose work I responded to most warmly and most personally were the British documentarist Humphrey Jennings, and the great American film-poet John Ford. Both of these were lyric and poetic film-makers, and both of them used music in a very characteristic and very sympathetic way. Ford's use of simple folk themes (folk-songs like "Red River Valley" and hymns like "Bringing in the Sheaves" or "Shall we Gather at the River?") were often very simply orchestrated, and sometimes played on a single instrument (there are many stories of Dan Borzage, brother of the film director Frank, playing his concertina on Ford's set, and being recorded for the soundtrack). And even when the scores for Ford's pictures were orchestrated in a much more elaborate way, they almost always derived from folk-tunes, or simple, accessible melodies, which strengthened the emotional and poetic impact of the images enormously. I have never admired very much the elaborate film-scores written for Ford by composers like Max Steiner in films like "The Informer" - though these were highly praised in their time. The melodramatic emotionalism, and elaborate "Mickey Mouse" effects never seemed to me true to Ford's personality, and to constitute an intrusive, over-weighty contribution to his movies.
I was also considerably influenced, and perhaps in a more conscious way, by the film style of Humphrey Jennings. Jennings' work is not as widely known outside Britain (or inside Britain, for that matter) as it deserved to be. He was by far the most poetic and the most individual member of Grierson's Documentary movement, and his best work was done at the end of the Thirties and during the war years in Britain. Jennings was a painter and his documentary portraits of the Britain of those years had a strongly individual visual style, and a completely personal style of editing, based on sophisticated, sometimes ironic, sometimes emotional, juxtapositions. But Jennings was also acutely aware of the significance of sound and music. His sense of juxtaposition and significant linking extended to his use of accompanying music. Often this employed characteristic popular themes, or folk-themes somewhat in the manner of Ford. He was also highly skilled in the use of classical music, to enhance a dramatic effect or to contribute an irony or an emotional overtone.
Both Ford and Jennings used music in a way in which one can describe as "humane". That's to say, the music of which they were most fond had strong emotional significance for themselves and for their audiences, binding the two together, and often irradiating their dramatic or documentary sequences with warm or humorous associations from the past. Both, too, were great stylists; and the music in their pictures always performed a strong stylistic or rhythmic function. This is also an aspect of the use of music in cinema of which I have been keenly aware.
Documentary films
are usually made on limited budgets - and this is certainly true of the documentary films which I made during the 1950s. But economy is often the spur to ingenuity, and can be creatively stimulating rather than limiting. When I made a very short film, "O Dreamland", about an Amusement Park in a British seaside resort, I used music from records which were playing on juke-boxes throughout the Amusement Park at the time we were filming. This characteristic, vulgarly powerful sound contributed a great deal to the ironic tone of the film. It also meant, incidentally, that the film could never be widely distributed, as the copyright which would have to be paid to the composers, artists, and recording companies would have been astronomic.
In "Wakefield Express", a documentary derived in many aspects from the work of Humphrey Jennings, about the production of a newspaper in the North of England, I used local brass bands (performing with an endearing lack of skill) and the sound of local school children singing songs in their classrooms. Both these films were shot on 16mm with minimal resources. Slightly more ambitions productions, like "Thursday's Children" and "Everyday Except Christmas", had the benefit of specially composed scores for small ensembles. In these films, too, the themes were derived from popular songs and folk-songs, which audiences could recognize and be easily stirred by.
The only documentary film I have made in the last fifteen years was also strongly lyrical, in fact based on a suite of songs. This was "Raz, dwa, trzy" (English title: "The Singing Lesson"), which I made for the Documentary Studio in Warsaw in 1966. Shot in the Dramatic Academy in Warsaw, and in the city streets, shops, etc. "Raz, dwa, trzy" was at the same time a portrait of the city (an extremely subjective portrait) and a personal response on my part to the charm and talent of a group of fourth-year students who were learning to perform and present songs at the Dramatic Academy. The film had no dialogue to speak of, and was entirely composed of the student's songs, inter-cut with documentary material from the city. It is an almost purely lyric work, and one of my personal favourites among all the films that I have made.
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The function of music in feature films of course varies a great deal, according to the nature of the subject. I have never felt that violent dramatic films require heavy musical accompaniment, except when they have been badly made. My first dramatic film, "This Sporting Life", was provided with a score by the Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard. I asked Gerhard to write the music because I wanted a score which had a strong romantic quality, without being in any way sentimental or over-melodic. Gerhard was a composer who had left Spain at the time of the Civil War, and whose music reflected a strongly romantic, characteristically Spanish personality. But Gerhard was not a sentimental composer, and experimented freely in forms of concrete music, and other non-melodic styles. The music he wrote the "This Sporting Life" was at its best powerful and of exactly the tone I needed to support and reflect a deeply emotional subject. But my collaboration with Gerhard, which started so well, was not really a happy one and serves as an example of the difficulty of employing an emphatically personal, strongly creative artist to contribute music to a film. That's to say Gerhard was not by nature a collaborative artist, and the restrictions and demands that are inevitable in a collaborative medium like the cinema became intolerable to him. He wrote, for instance, a piece of music for the titles section of the film which was abstract to an eccentric degree. When I tried to explain to him that cinema audiences could only be alienated, or at best misled by an overture of this kind, Gerhard became very annoyed and very temperamental and talked about his "integrity" as a composer etc. etc. He refused categorically to rewrite the piece, or rather threatened that if he was forced to rewrite it it would come out even more like it was. I was left with no alternative but to manufacture a musical sequence for the titles of the film out of other pieces of music from Gerhard's score, mixed with effects of cheering crowds, to make what in the end turned out to be a highly effective introduction to the film. But Gerhard never really forgave me.
My most recent film was also based on a text by David Storey: "In Celebration" which I shot for the American Film Theatre in 1974. This was derived very closely from my stage production of 1969, with the same actors who had played the part at the Royal Court Theatre, and using a very full version of the theatre text. Here I used music very sparingly. In fact only the simple piano music which we had used in the theatre to begin the acts or to bridge the scenes. This music consisted of hymns, evocative of the family background of the play and the childhood of the three sons who revisit their parent's home to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. The hymns were played on a rather ancient piano - the recordings were, in fact, the same that we had used in the theatre five years before - which was not very well in tune but gave precisely the nostalgic effect that I felt was necessary. None of the dramatic scenes were underlined by music, and generally it seems to me a mistake to try to emphasize strongly emotional scenes with a strongly emotional score. (Roberto Gerhard had written a violently quarrelsome piece of music to accompany the violent conflict between the two principal characters of "This Sporting Life", when their relationship splits apart and they physically attack each other, but I left it out when we edited the picture.)
Music, variously used, is organic to the conception of "If.." and "O Lucky Man!" In "If..", in fact, there are three kinds of music; there is the traditional music, composed of hymns and the school song, which represents the tradition of the School, which is everything that the hero Mick finds himself in conflict with. Then there is the music which Mick identifies with himself, and with his longing for freedom, and for this we used a recording of a Congolese mass, the Missa Luba. (This is first heard through Mick's own ears, as he lies in his study listening to his record player.) And finally there is the composed score by Marc Wilkinson, which was used expressively to underline or illuminate sequences of liberation (such as the motorcycle ride by the two boys) or of poetry (Mick's friend Wallace exercising fantastically in the gym, watched dreamily by the young Bobby Phillips, or the strange and mysterious sequence under the College stage, where together with the girl the boys open the cupboard and find within it the human foetus in a glass jar.) I had originally asked Marc Wilkinson to write some music for the final onslaught, where Mick alone on the roof tries to hold at bay the attacking forces of Establishment, but we found when we played with the sound tracks in the cutting room that a simple organ version of the College song, which fortunately I had recorded when we were on location, fitted the sequence much better. This is only one of many examples, or course, of how sound tracks and music tracks can be enhanced and how happy solutions can be arrived at in the cutting room - often quite different from the preconceptions one may have had in discussing the picture beforehand with the composer.
The use of music in "O Lucky Man!" broke new ground as far as I was concerned (although I suppose, on reflection, that it may be said to have been foreshadowed to some degree by the whole conception of "Raz, dwa, trzy"). The use of songs to accompany, and commentate and structure the film had been part of the original conception, even while the script was being formulated. I don't think that at the time we were particularly self-conscious about the "Brechtian" style of the film as a whole, though when I look at the picture today I think the approach to the medium is indeed extremely Brechtian.
Alan Price's first song, which drew its inspiration from the title of the film and which accompanied the credits, indeed seems to me extraordinarily akin in feeling and approach to the introductory song of the Brecht-Weill "Dreigroschenoper" - although when we conceived its use, we were quite unaware of this parallel. (Alan's cap, which gives him a somewhat defiant, Proletarian air, was in fact a last-minute thought of mine. Just before we started shooting I took my own cap off and stuck it on his head on impulse.)
Only one of Alan's songs was written and shot after the main shooting of the picture had been completed - the song "Look over your shoulder", which replaced a dialogue scene between Mick and Sir James' chauffeur which I felt, during editing, caused the film to lose impetus, Apart from this, all the songs, with their approximate themes and their precise placings, had been anticipated in the film script, and Alan Price had in fact started work on them from the first full treatment of the film which I gave him, before the full script was even written. Perhaps this accounts for the way they integrate so completely and so brilliantly with the whole texture of the film. Only a few, relatively short pieces of "accompaniment" music were written and recorded after the film had been put together.
I am often asked if I don't think it would be a good thing for the composer of a film to be involved in its conception from the start - that's to say during scripting, and well before shooting. Theoretically, I suppose this may well be the case. But in practice it seems inevitable - with a few rare exceptions, like "O Lucky Man!" - that the film will be shot and largely put together before the composer can start his work. Of course this usually means that the composer has to work under unfair pressure; and it would certainly be a good thing if he were given as much time to do his very important work as all the other people creatively involved in the production of the film. But unfortunately economics (in the Western system at least) usually make this impossible. Certainly I believe that music should be used economically, both as regards the amount of it and as regards the number of instruments used. (Apart from the big, Hollywood-type emotional drama, there seems very little justification for the employment of huge and expensive orchestras.) Certainly if music is imaginatively and sensitively used, it can be a most important expressive part of a film, and make an invaluable contribution to its overall feeling and to the overall rhythm which is, after all, one of the essential ingredients of good film style.
© University of Stirling 2004
