Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (review)

Amy Herzog's examination of what she calls the "musical moment" in film, from a Deleuzian perspective, provides a multifaceted opportunity for the pursuit of meaning in film and the role that music and musical spectacle can play therein. Much of this volume is devoted to discussing the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), his sometime co-writer, French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930-1992), French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and others—ideas related to time, memory, experience, representation, reality, perception, and identity. According to Deleuze, film is not a static object to be interpreted; rather meaning is generated in a film through the "mutual interactions between subject and object" (4). Thus meaning is never fixed, but constantly evolving, shifting, multiplying. Deleuze was concerned with the unique potential of the cinema to transcend the limits of representation, to move toward an affective and productive power capable of provoking thought and change. Herzog looks to the musical moment as an embodiment of these ideas, as creating an ambiguous and contradictory space in which the potential Deleuze described might be realized.

Herzog defines the musical moment as taking place "when music serves as the dominant force in the work," drawing "attention to itself" (6). These moments, these "dynamic events" (16), these often fantastic musical spectacles, occur in irrational spaces, fairy tale spaces, "aqueous spaces" (159), apocalyptic spaces, and everyday spaces, spaces in which bodies are multiplied, mirrored, and isolated, in which connections are simultaneously created and transcended, in which meanings and functions can be political, engaging with issues of identity, gender, race, consumerist and capitalist ideologies, and in which the transformation of "becoming" can be incited (182). In these spaces, logic and linearity are defied, as are boundaries of space and time; these moments are characterized by contradictions, dualities, incongruities, stutters, ruptures, "glitches, accidents, and discontinuities" (3). Possibilities vibrate and vacillate; trajectories pulse, thrust, and "take flight." And thus these moments possess the powerful potential to reveal, to provoke, to resist, to move, to create, to generate thought and action, even as they reinforce and reproduce the status quo, singing "refrains" that are ever so familiar to their audiences. Here reality and artificiality, cliché and depth of feeling, repetition and difference, reiteration and resistance are inextricably linked, creating both tension and release.

The musical moment is not limited to the genre of the musical (though many of her ideas are clearly grounded in research on the musical) and Herzog's examples involve musical participation at many levels, in different narrative and non-narrative spaces. The works that attract her attention embrace both "high" and "low" art and in fact often play upon the tension between them. The objects of her case studies are not only diverse, but each is also atypical in some way. They include the not very popular cinematic jukeboxes—the Soundies of 1940s and the Scopitone of the 1960s; two Carmen films—Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) and Godard's Prénom Carmen (1983); the films of Jacques Demy, focusing on Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and the fairy tale film Peau d'âne (1970); Esther Williams's "synchronized swimming extravaganzas" (10) of the 1940s; and Tsai Ming-liang's apocalyptic musical, The Hole (1998). It is the links between these very diverse films that make this study fascinating, for in each case, she asserts the power, the affective force (37), of the "false" to create. In Carmen Jones, for example, disconnections between voice and body, the "real" and the "false," high and low, black and white, all produce an overarching sense of artificiality, and a tension that she argues is "the subject matter of the film" (110-11).

Deleuze's conception of the refrain, which Herzog defines as "repetition in relation to wider processes of territorialization" (81), informs her analyses extensively. Connections between "texts" pervade our artistic culture, including music and film, and the analysis of these connections is hardly a...