Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border by Guido Heldt (review)

During a period of rapid development in film musicology, Guido Heldt’s Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border offers a timely investigation of music’s many narratological roles in film. The study builds upon earlier literature in the field and makes a useful reference tool for both film and music scholars due to the division of its five chapters into several categories and subcategories. Chapter 1, “Introduction: Film Music Narratology,” provides a general overview of the book’s structure and the author’s main arguments. Heldt first considers narratology within the film medium as a whole before applying a narrower focus on film music specifically— an approach he applies consistently in the text. By drawing narratological connections between film and music, Heldt highlights the latter’s integral role in a movie’s basic structure. Most importantly, he makes it clear that music must not be restricted to the limited labels of diegetic and nondiegetic so commonly employed in contemporary scholarship, which is a concept he expands upon with his analytic approach in chapter 2.

Brimming with information, chapter 2, “The Conceptual Toolkit: Music and Levels of Narration” accounts for nearly 50 percent of the book’s length and tackles everything from extrafictional music in the title sequence to metadiegetic narration and focalization. Throughout the chapter Heldt considers the traditional labels of diegetic and nondiegetic music and warns against a strict reliance on these terms. Rather, he reinforces the significance of what he calls the “fuzzy” areas of film music, or music that does not fit neatly into either above-mentioned category. Discussing, among others, such concepts as would-be-diegetic music, music’s attachment to the storyworld, and displaced diegetic music, Heldt moves systematically through the many different levels of musical narration, further reinforcing the medium’s crucial role in film. Moreover, Heldt offers several examples that demonstrate each concept (an effective technique he employs frequently in the book), which brings these distinctions to life. Keeping this in mind, however, this study is written for a rather specific audience. It is clear that Heldt has a deep understanding of previous literature on both film and film music narratives, which he incorporates heavily into his book; in fact, he does an exceptional job of integrating less familiar French and German scholarship on the subject as well. While this expansive knowledge adds depth to his work, the reader would greatly benefit from having a strong familiarity with the literature in order to fully appreciate Heldt’s arguments.

In the remaining chapters, the author applies his conceptual toolkit from chapter 2 to three case studies. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the narratological aspects of music in musicals and horror films respectively, while chapter 5 demonstrates how musical narrativity can span the length of an entire film. Beginning with chapter 3, “Breaking into Song? Hollywood Musicals (and After),” Heldt discusses classic Hollywood’s diverse approaches to the musical: at one end, musical numbers were hardly integrated into the narrative and characters sporadically broke into song; on the other end, musical numbers were purely diegetic and often performed on a stage, especially with backstage musicals. Following this discussion, Heldt explains how Mark Sandrich’s musical Top Hat (1935), avoids “the strangeness inherent in the genre, and instead mediates carefully between storyworld and numbers” by employing informal stages such as hotel ballrooms, the alleys of Venice, and bandstands (p. 141). With his investigation of Top Hat, the author not only makes use of his analytic approaches from chapter 2, but also prepares the reader for the remaining examples in chapter 3 which, on the surface, appear to abandon or distance themselves from the genre’s traditional style. Noting the rise of rock and roll and a shift in the movie industry, the author explains that despite Hollywood’s redefinition of musicals, the genre...