Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (review)

A significant contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on film music, Hillman's study focusses on preexisting music in film. The music in question is primarily German – classical and romantic (Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler) – the cinema in question primarily that of the New German Cinema (Syberberg, Kluge, and Fassbinder), and the project: to demonstrate via the German case study and a sophisticated apparatus of semiotically charged intertextual reception theory how complex issues of culture, history, and national identity can be.

The opening two chapters – on "Establishing a Tonal Center" and "Music as Cultural Marker in German Film" – lay the methodological groundwork and make manifest Hillman's prodigious knowledge in the areas of both film and music. In the first chapter, examples are related from the non-German context in which classical music figures prominently. A brief discussion of the use of Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor in Peter Weir's 1981 Gallipoli segues into Orson Welles's use of the same music in The Trial. This in turn segues into the use of the slow movement from Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21 in C, K. 467 in Bo Widerberg's 1967 Elvira Madigan and then into Widerberg's use of Vivaldi in the same film. From there the discussion goes on to focus on the recurrence of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in Oliver Stone's 1986 Platoon, on David Lynch's use of the Barber in the 1980 Elephant Man, and on George Miller's use of it in the 1992 Lorenzo's Oil. Generally the thrust of these very brief analyses (which also include the music in Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, Psycho, Jules et Jim, and Hotel Terminus) involves a reappraisal of how music can be mobilized in film to underscore issues of identity, particularly national identity.

German national identity, Germany's problematic history, and the problematics of the post-WWII cultural reception of German works that were sullied by their association with the Third Reich are the concern of the second chapter. Hillman considers the methodological ramifications of German culture's having lost its innocence, but not its prestige, over the course of the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century notions of Germany as an apolitical Kulturnation – "a land of poets and thinkers. Above all, a land of musicians and even, from the outset of the first century of cinema, of filmmakers" (29) – never ceased to render music a powerful cultural marker, but how that marking registered on German identity was offset differently, to juxtapose two of Hillman's examples in the interests of his argument, by the terrorist activity of the 1970s and by the unifying and Europeanizing of the 1990s. Hillman then contrasts psychomusicological and semiotic perspectives on how to unpack such a multilayered cultural phenomenon as twenty-first-century Germans listening to nineteenth-century German music in a late twentieth-century film by a well-respected director like Alexander Kluge or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and he concludes that there is much more going on than a physiological process of simply registering a melody.

The chapters that follow set out to establish this complexity by analyzing specific examples, first of one of the most German of musical compositions and then of music in films that wrestle with questions of how German history has destabilized easy forms of national identification. Chapter 3 looks at the checkered history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and its very different resonances in films as varied as Helke Sander's 1977 Redupers (The All-Round Reduced Personality), Makavejev's 1965 Man is not a Bird, and Tarkovsky's 1983 Nostalgia and 1979 Stalker. Especially the Russian filmmaker is shown to have been able to transvalue Beethoven's humanism into European idealism in a way denied Germans by their history. Chapter 4 offers a detailed analysis of the music in Syberberg's 1977 Hitler, noting the preponderance of Wagner and Wagnerian stagings, not to mention Mozart and Beethoven, that Syberberg mobilizes to...