Komposition für den Film: Mit einer DVD, ‘Hanns Eislers Rockefeller-Filmmusik-Projekt 1940–1942’, ausgewählten Filmklassikern und weiteren Dokumenten (review)

Composing for the Films was first published in 1947 in the United States. Translated from the original German manuscript it is without doubt a seminal text, conceived and co-authored in New York and Los Angeles, the dual foci of the ellipse that was, and is, the American illusion industry – its authors, a philosopher musician and a musician philosopher, both living in exile, both escaping the trauma that had become their homeland under National Socialism. Composing for the Films was the textual outcome of a larger interdisciplinary project, an experiment in reciprocal relations of theory and praxis, the Film Music Project, conducted under the auspices of the New School for Social Research and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Importantly the book was published contemporaneously with the now far more well-known Dialectic of Enlightenment, itself a collaborative project and a kind of thought experiment reflecting what were often the kitchen table conversations of its authors, Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Both projects shared similar theoretical concerns, specifically those around the collapse of culture and everyday life into a closed and reified totality, and the complicity of ‘art’ as an affirmative cultural product, reproducing consumers out of its attending subjects. Setting aside similar worries about the ‘culture industry’, the two books are really quite different. Where the Dialectic of Enlightenment is only descriptive and diagnostic, Composing for the Films twists together its cultural diagnoses and its harsh critique of contemporary film music relations with suggestions for an alternative practice in order to provide models for the production of new musical forms and a progressive reorientation of the subject towards the cultural product: the beginnings of what Eisler and Adorno called ‘an unofficial tradition of genuine art’.¹

The history surrounding the development of the Film Music Project and the writing of the book (1940–47) was tremendously important to the constitution of both, and is covered extensively in this edition with the inclusion of Johannes Gall’s invaluable ‘Nachwort’, a ‘Model for a Liberated Musical Film’.² In 1940, sound film was in its infancy, a mere 11 years old. Cinema was struggling to find its own musical voice (it may still be doing so – a prolonged adolescence?) and an often-fierce debate raged over how film music should sound, what it should do, and what was to be its role in the still emergent medium of sound film. The Film Music Project, initiated by Eisler, responded to that debate with an 82- minute set of ‘practical experiments’ in film music relations, to be ‘analyzed and incorporated’ into a report – what would become Composing for the Films (CF: 138–9). As is well known, the 1947 Oxford and all other subsequent English editions of the book begin with a descriptive critique of ‘Prejudices and Bad Habits’ (which is sadly as often apposite now as it was then), and move to models of alternative music/image relations (‘Function and Dramaturgy’, with examples drawn from Eisler’s own earlier work) and ‘New Musical Resources’. The book then sharpens its critical arc, engaging ‘Sociological Aspects’ and ‘Elements of Aesthetics’ and closes with two key chapters: the first discusses the ‘Composer and the Movie Making Process’ and the final chapter offers ‘Suggestions and Conclusions’. Finally the reader is presented with the Appendix, a ‘Report on the Film Music Project’ and a score of Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain (Eisler’s music for the Joris Ivens film, Regen, a dodecaphonic work presented as a tribute to Arnold Schoenberg on his 73rd birthday). The book’s concerns echo the expertise of the differing intellectual temperaments of its authors, and it is tempting to credit one or the other as it rambles through social contextual concerns on the one hand and quite practical matters concerning musical composition on the other. Adorno wrote in the postscript...