Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  Stephen Book (above right), acting coach, long-time faculty member of the Juilliard School and creative consultant on What Dreams May Come: “It had been another long day and now we go to the editing room where the editor has been putting together the rushes. There's just three of us, editor David Brenner, Vincent and me. We're looking at the first assemblage of the previous day's footage which is the beginning of the scene that we'd been working on that day and would be working on for the next few days. So I'm sitting there watching them pick cuts. And I said ‘Look at all the people.’ Robin passes through them as he comes down these steps. I said, ‘Look at them all – they look like tourists who've been told to smile for the camera.’ Vincent and the editor had been so busy looking at the principals and constructing this assemblage of the scene. Vincent says ‘S**t, you're right, they're terrible.’ So he decides to re-do it tomorrow. The next day I show up on the set. I didn't have an early call time. I just had to be there for when they called ‘action’ for the first time. That set was like three football fields in an airplane hangar. Way in the back is Video Village and way over there is craft services, which looks like a small restaurant. And then there's this huge set with a blue screen and a lagoon and flying people everywhere. So I get my elaborate bagel from craft services, I work my way to Video Village where I sit down in front of the monitors, next to the DP and the costume designer. I'm getting comfortable for the day. And way out on the football field is Vincent on a megaphone. And he goes ‘Stephen – Stephen Book – you're here, good, come here.’ So I put down my bagel and start this long lonely walk with everybody looking at me. And before I get there he announces, ‘Everybody, this is Stephen – he'll be directing all the extras today – take it away Stephen.’ As he walks by me he whispers, ‘Just fix them.’”

  What Stephen Book helped achieve with this scene is the remarkable fact that all the extras seem to be in their own moments, rather than being spectators watching somebody else's. A little boy takes obvious delight in running across water and taking off into the air. Another boy flicks soap bubbles in what is very much his own space, his own private moment, permitted for a few seconds to occupy the very center of the frame. A bluesman concentrates on picking out something we never hear on his guitar. A woman in gossamer floats above a child who plays with her dangling tresses of hair. Two girls splash excitedly in the lagoon, throwing up glistening arcs of water. By the time the mermaid has her moment she has become part of a second scene going on around the one with the principals, a scene made up of these moments of which hers becomes then the most perfect realization.

  Shot F as we have labeled it, the unexpected angle that isolates the “mermaid” moment, is a B-camera shot. On this scale of production the practice is to have an A-camera team covering the essentials while a B-camera typically has a little more freedom to look for shots within the parameters set by director and director of photography. In this instance, the B-camera operated by Kim Marks “finds” the particular angle at F. Editor David Brenner, with Vincent at his elbow, then chooses to place the shot prominently within the larger context provided by the A-camera. But what makes the brief moment so striking is perhaps ultimately that composer Michael Kamen gives it its own brief but tightly synchronized underscoring (opposite), which follows the movement of her body.

  Michael Kamen has said about his work on this film, “I was at an extremely profound juncture in my own life at that time, and the film produced a powerful and personal response in me.” Brought in for only the final month of postproduction to replace a score written by Ennio Morricone, Kamen, with little time, tended to lightly punctuate the film, rather than producing the kind of full-blooded, omnipresent score that Morricone had delivered – and that the producers were now fearful was too intense and over-powering. In fact Morricone's score, which has since been “bootlegged,” is a musical version of a Bierstadt painting and was intended to test the limits of emotional intensity in much the same way, with weighty liturgical passages based on a full choir and string-heavy orchestration and with Morricone's favored voice, Edda Dell'Orso, soaring majestically above it all. Kamen uses the female voice for a similarly “soaring” effect here but in an understated way, with flute and harp over lighter strings, and to personalize the moment rather than reaching for affective intensity.

  Elsewhere, Kamen relies heavily on an existing folksy romantic ballad for the score's main theme (the song “Beside You,” co-written by Kamen and Mark Snow years earlier) and this neatly, accessibly and rather predictably attaches itself to the narrative journey, which is what the producers hoped for when they dropped Morricone. In fact Kamen has said, “the ‘straight lines’ that the music draws [make the film] easier to comprehend.” He did produce some ten minutes of orchestral drama for other parts of the film. But in moments like this one, Kamen's ability to capture the seemingly minor, fleeting detail works extremely well, in some measure perhaps because he was responding very personally himself to such specific moments. So we want to move on to thinking about how music functions in these moments in other films.

  This detail of the mermaid from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is not so much a clever reference in What Dreams May Come (a print of the triptych appears on the wall in Chris and Annie's bedroom) as a helpful reminder that the “mermaid” we have just looked at is not about transcendence as popularly understood. “New Age” appropriations of mermaid symbolism take it determinedly in that direction, but Bosch's mermaid, with the strange armored figure beside her, has two key characteristics: she is bound up in the actual moment and, as Bosch scholar Hans Belting points out, the moment exists in a virtual world that has its own materiality (not an immaterial “spirit” world).

  Michael Kamen's underscoring gives the mermaid we have been looking at her own moment – there is a very definitely self-contained and completed quality about the snippet of music – which becomes an ironic indifference to Chris's onward journey toward the light. Like all the other “extras” in the scene, she is doing her own thing. In her virtual world she has as much to do with other bodies (e.g. the ones Chris will shortly fall through from the sea of faces) as with Chris's quest (and Bosch's companion for her has affectively as much to do with the USS Queenfish in Vincent's Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey as with anything in this film).

  But this moment (right) from Map of the Human Heart is even more instructive in this regard. We have already looked at the overall scene in some detail – Albertine and Avik in the shadowy nighttime dome of the Royal Albert Hall in London where a section of an English orchestra, far below them, has been rehearsing something that sounds like Handel. Albertine has just professed her determination to pass for white, rather than being seen as a “half-breed” in the way she thinks Avik is (with his Inuit mother and white father). Her hair whitened by dust from the German bomb that has exploded nearby, she rises slowly to her feet and composer Gabriel Yared underscores the moment with the piece of music shown here, which has an untamed French-Canadian feel and a very expressive variation of the tempo (rubato) in the playing. David Archer explains: “A plaintive violin melody, through its modal tonality and use of rubato, brings a cultural contrast to the classical orchestra heard rehearsing before. Since the orchestral music is diegetic, Albertine's origins are implied even more powerfully when the solo violin is used as underscore.”

  So something important about the genuinely transformational moment in film (like this one from Map of the Human Heart) is starting to clarify itself for us here. These moments are like Hieronymus Bosch's, distributed across the surface of that great triptych known as Garden of Earthly Delights, and not in the end like an Albert Bierstadt painting, in the sense that they do not assemble themselves into a single narrative image.

  Michael Kamen was brought in at the last minute on What Dreams May Come in order to map a simple musical straight line, as he called it, that would emphasize the narrative rather than the moments, although as we have seen he was drawn personally to some of those moments. Gab
riel Yared (below), on the other hand, is a composer who understands these moments and focuses on them with a clarity of musical perception that makes his meticulous and thoughtful score for Map of the Human Heart a deeply integral part of the film.

  A narrative (the business of a screenplay) is a cartographic exercise over the body of a film. Imagine taking a pen and drawing a heavy line across Bosch's central panel, zigzagging here and there to connect a selection of its moments along the way but basically producing a step-by-step series of linkages in order to tell a story (this man crawls out of this giant egg, gets attacked by this pig, puts on this strange suit of armor, encounters this mermaid, journeys to this city in flames…). Entirely possible of course, and this indeed is what narrative cinema is expected to be able to do and quite rightly so (it sounds like a Fellini film). But the question then becomes whether the moments are allowed their own integrity.

  The brief piece of music on the left utterly respects the integrity of the moment opposite. This is perhaps what composer James Horner meant when, as Yared's last-minute replacement on the film Troy, he said uncharitably of his predecessor, “He just doesn't have any knowledge of writing film scores – real film scores.” Brought in to write a new score for Troy in nine days, in much the same way that Kamen had replaced Morricone on What Dreams May Come, Horner's job was to draw a familiar straight line for the audience to replace what he described as Yared's “lots of sort of Middle-Eastern stuff.” That “stuff” represented a year of work by Yared, researching and developing material that would root the film musically in the way that even the brief piece here re-roots Albertine in who she really is, despite her protested allegiance to the idea of a more universal human being.

  In short, the music is being placed in the moment – not used, like our imagined line drawn across the Bosch panel, to “transcend” the moment in the interests of a larger and perhaps simpler narrative image. In this case, moreover, the music ironically undercuts Albertine's denial of her own identity.

  The idea of a “narrative image” is most easily explainable in terms of film posters which tend to represent the most determined effort to encapsulate a film's narrative in one image. The two posters for Vincent's River Queen (opposite) show this process at work. The one on the left is a very early previsualization when the concept was first being developed and pitched. The one on the right is the final poster for the European release (in this case the Spanish language version).

  It is interesting that some elements of setting, costume, appearance and color survived all the way from early version to release. But it is also apparent that the “narrative image” was fine-tuned along the way. The confident adventuress of the first version becomes the more imperiled woman in the later version, also picking up the film's promotional tagline “With darkness all around, only the heart can see.”

  This was the basis of the film's logline (or pitchable short summary): “Where the forest meets the river…In 1860s New Zealand, a young Irish woman finds herself caught on both sides of the lines during the wars between Mori tribes and the British colonial army. With darkness all around, and desperate to find her son, she discovers that only the heart can see…” It is not too difficult to recognize the effectiveness of logline, promotional tagline and poster here or how a narrative image is being conjured up to encapsulate what the film is offering.

  But there is also an inevitable tension then (and this will occur in every film) between the clarity of the narrative image and the complexity and density that will satisfyingly fill out some two hours of screen time. We are especially interested here, not just in the consequences down at the level of the actual filmic moments we are looking at but also the question of music's different forms of allegiance to the narrative image and to the moment. The “straight line” that Michael Kamen talked about in the last-minute work he did on What Dreams May Come was very much to do with aligning the film more strongly with a narrative image (its poster if you like). The same with James Horner's last-minute work on the music for Troy. This is why some producers evidently expect a composer to do this kind of “fix” in a few weeks or even days – the music is being asked to function at very much the general level of the narrative image, rather than the detailed level where it is carefully “spotted” and worked into moments with their own life and qualities. So Michael Kamen's “Beside You” melody, which already existed, was used as a sort of musical version of the poster and narrative image of What Dreams May Come, although Kamen in the end did a few admirable moments in the film as well.

  The composer on River Queen was Karl Jenkins. We want to look at a scene from River Queen (over the next four pages) with a view to understanding the role that music plays both inside the moment and over the top of the moment, as it were, in order to hook the moment to the larger narrative image. A key question is whether there will be in this any transition from one level to the other.

  We know the narrative setup from our previous visits to River Queen. Sarah has found her lost boy, the child she had with a now long-dead young Mori man. The boy's uncle, Wiremu, had taken him in and he has been raised as Mori. We are caught up in the land wars in New Zealand (Aotearoa to the Mori), as a British colonial army clears villages and hunts down Mori rebels in the deep forest. The two forces now confront each other from entrenched positions on either side of a deep river gully. Mori working with the British (“it's a new world now” says one of them) have captured the boy and are taunting their “cousins” across the gorge by dangling him on a hook over the precipitous drop. Wiremu comes across to plead for the boy's life while Sarah has her penultimate confrontation with Baine, the British officer.

  Realizing what is happening, Sarah runs through the British camp towards Wiremu and his cousin, who are bargaining for her son's freedom. “What are you going to give me for him?” “What do you want cousin?” “Your trigger finger maybe.” Wiremu cuts his finger off with an axe. Sarah gets there an instant later. With this description in mind the following sequence of frames should be clear.

  Seeing too much leads to trauma in River Queen (2005), color frames courtesy of Silverscreen Films and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation..

  River Queen (2005), color frames courtesy of Silverscreen Films and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. (The diagonal on this page marks the moment we will be examining in more detail.).

  When Sarah reaches the edge of the gorge and sees what Wiremu has done (we have marked this moment with a gray diagonal behind the preceding frames for clarity), time seems to stand still for an instant. We see her from Wiremu's point of view and then we see Sarah's view of Wiremu's bloody hand and axe. Having watched the soldiers watching her run through their camp in the preceding part of the scene, this moment briefly freezes another traumatic reversal of the gaze: Sarah is the one looking now and what she sees marks the point when her decision is made to go over to the other side. The boy takes advantage of his captors’ distraction to unhook himself, striking the heavy tackle against the head of one of his tormentors. Wiremu fires a shot into nearby powder barrels that explode, giving Sarah, Wiremu and the boy time to leap through the embankment and down the steep slope towards the river.

  The film's music editor, Peter Clarke (right), was responsible for the complex layering of the soundtrack here, with Vincent at his elbow. The first thing to point out is Peter's production of a short guitar cue – merely a snippet – to underscore the moment when Sarah sees what Wiremu has done. The music at this point needed to get inside the moment but Karl Jenkins’ score (on screen opposite) was getting ready to pile on the layers of narrative drama and the forward momentum instead. Peter's introduction of the tiny segment of guitar is enough to hold the moment. David Archer explains: “This briefly tranquil but pained guitar cue allows the audience to take an emotional pause just before the action sequence. At that moment, Sarah and Wiremu are connected as she realizes the sacrifice he has just made for her son. This realization is then picked up and developed more fully by the c
horal cue that follows their escape. The harmonies sung there by the choir use a similar descending, then rising shape as the guitar did, which helps link the two scenes in the subtlest of ways.”

  In fact in postproduction Sarah's gaze at Wiremu's self-mutilation was cut into the sequence of shots in slow motion and Peter's placement of the guitar cue inside this slowed-down eight-second moment is what gives it its feeling of self-contained integrity.

  Throughout the second and third pages of our preceding frame sequences there is a steadily rising high-pitched drone of strings on the soundtrack, and the creaking of the ropes holding the boy as he sways, with several percussive “hits” marking the action. The guitar arrests this tension – we hear Sarah and Wiremu's breathing – and then the tension breaks when the boy swings the tackle at his captor's head on the last guitar note. So we are emotionally released over the edge much like the characters as they tumble down the cliff face and Karl Jenkins’ cue with full strings, choir, drums and fanfare kicks in with explosive dramatic force. English composer Karl Jenkins has said of his score for River Queen: “I spent a large part of my career writing music for advertising so the process was familiar.” In fact among Jenkins’ best known work for the screen is his TV commercial for Delta Airlines (overleaf) that showed aircraft flying in synchronization like dolphins, to Jenkins’ song “Adiemus.” Jenkins’ River Queen vocalist Mae McKenna and “Adiemus” vocalist Miriam Stockley have recorded an album together called Shabala (Virgin, 1998) that demonstrates the genre of vaguely “tribal” world music which all of these have in common.