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Reviewed by:
  • European Film Music
  • Wendy Everett (bio)
Miguel Mera and David Burnand, eds., European Film Music, (Hampshire, England, and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2006), 206pp.

So powerful is music, so dangerous its ability to influence audiences in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways, that classic Hollywood cinema developed stringent rules to ensure its 'silence', as if by not drawing attention to itself, music could be tamed and placed in a position of subservience to the narrative. However, for a whole variety of reasons European cinema is inclined to subvert or ignore such dictates, and displays a fundamentally different attitude to music. It is frequently fore-grounded as a key signifier in its own right, as likely to challenge the narrative as to support it, and demands an essentially creative, personal, and dynamic response from each spectator.

The study of the role and function of music in European cinema is thus particularly fascinating, but has received surprisingly little critical attention to date. The publication of European Film Music, the first book-length study of the subject, is therefore to be welcomed, not least for its potential to encourage and widen critical debate. Edited by Miguel Mera and David Burnand, both of whom are practising musicians as well as film scholars, the book contains twelve essays whose topics range from studies of music in relation to national film movements and periods – Italian Neo-realism, Ealing Comedies, French Heritage cinema, German film from 1927 to 1945, Contemporary Spanish film, and Irish Post-colonialism – to detailed analyses of particular directors, films, and composers – the way that music by the innovative Popul Vuh group functions in the films of Werner Herzog, Elini Karaindou's score for Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day, Zbigniew Preisner's compositions in Kieslowski's films, specifically Three Colours: Red, and the role of silence and music in articulating issues of masculinity in the soundtrack of Claire Denis's Beau Travail. The final essay in the collection, 'Scoring This Filthy [End Page 187] Earth', is David Burnand's account of his own involvement as composer and sound designer for Andrew Kötting's 2001 film, loosely based on La Terre, a novel by the nineteenth-century French writer Émile Zola. The inclusion of an element of practice-led research in a book devoted to film music is an excellent idea, and Burnand's essay offers the reader a privileged insider view of some of the complex and challenging tasks facing the film composer and the inevitable tensions that develop between director, producer, and composer throughout production and post-production.

If the above examples indicate something of the scope of European Film Music, its potential weakness might be that, despite its title, it affords less a European perspective than a collection of disparate takes on particular aspects of individual national cinemas or filmmakers. While this approach is, to some extent, accounted for in the Introduction, where the editors argue that it offers a far more accurate reflection of Europe's characteristic fragmentation and difference than any attempt to impose a single, unified identity would do, it is nevertheless the case that, by invoking the concept of 'European' in its title, the book initially disappoints by not engaging more fully with the admittedly complex questions that this raises. It is, of course, true that the diversity of the European patchwork renders precise definition impossible, but it is surely time to move beyond a mere restating of this fact, not least since the attempt to establish elements of pan-European coherence does not necessitate the provision of clear-cut, fixed, or artificially 'neat' definitions. Furthermore, Mera and Burnand's decision to justify their approach by quoting examples of the arcane tests and points systems that have been developed by organizations such as the European Convention on Cinematic Co-production, in collaboration with primary funding bodies (including MEDIA plus and Eurimages), in a largely unsuccessful attempt to legislate as to whether or not a film can be considered 'European', emerges as something of a diversionary tactic, while the real complexity of the identity issue is not confronted in any new or meaningful manner.

It is certainly a pity that no attempt is made to extrapolate from...

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