FORMAL FILM STUDY: Movies About Composers

    For those of you who don't know, I am a French Horn player who plans to major in musical performance in college.  Therefore, I have a deep interest in my fellow musicians and composers.  I decided to watch three films about the lives of famous composers to analyze how a film attempts to handle the use of the music.  A composer's life is dedicated to music, yet many symphonies are an hour long or sometimes even longer.  How can a film hope to preserve the importance of the music and not be 10 hours long?
    I picked films about three very well-known and respected composers: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich.

    The first film I chose to watch is Bernard Rose's "Immortal Beloved" about the love life of Ludwig van Beethoven (Played by Gary Oldman).  It was not a film about the music, by no means.  It was a film about who was Beethoven's one true love, and the music was the background noise.  The narrative is set up similar to "Citizen Kane," where we begin with the death of Beethoven and work backwards as Schindler, Beethoven's secretary of sorts, tries to track down the "immortal beloved" by speaking with Beethoven's former flings.  We see the life of Beethoven reflected through the memories each woman has of him.  Of course, in the end, we find the "immortal beloved" and realize that she and Beethoven parted ways by accident and that he truly did love her.  It's all very predictable.  In regards to the music, we hear his symphonies in the background throughout all the scenes, but the pieces that are really featured are the "Moonlight Sonata" and Beethoven's Symphony no. 9, also known as "Ode to Joy." Beethoven performs the Moonlight Sonata several times in the movie, and discusses what it is written about (which relates directly back to our immortal beloved).  The end of the movie culminates with the premiere of the 9th Symphony, abridged, of course, for the sake of time, but the focus is clearly on the music.  (If you're interested, you can listen to the symphony here)  For those of you who don't know, Beethoven was deaf.  The movie seeks to accent this by showing Beethoven's face as music clearly happens around him, yet all we hear is nothing.  We are experiencing what Beethoven is experiencing.  The movie does fudge exactly how deaf Beethoven was.  His deafness was actually a regressive disease, and he could in fact hear when composing the Moonlight Sonata, and even in his later years he could hear very high and very low pitches (Source).  I was very underwhelmed by the use of the music in the film.  If I want to learn about a composer, I want to know his works, and I never felt like that was the intent of this film.

    The second film I chose to watch was Igor Talankin's "Tchaikovsky,"a Russian film about the emotional struggles of Tchaikovsky (Played by Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, the most famous Russian actor at the time).  It tells the story of Tchaikovsky's rise to fame as a composer and the criticism he was under.  The plot is very fluid and honestly up to interpretation.  This film was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Foreign Film and Best Music.  And I can definitely see why.  This film is very abstract in the way it was written, directed, and filmed.  There are many moments when the camera will pan off to watch the snow fall between the trees as we listen to the Fifth Symphony.  To be honest, I felt that any scenes of talking fit in between the music, which meant all of Tchaikovsky's music was the focus.  It made me intensely happy that Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 4 was the opening of the film, with it's loud brass call (listen here).  This perfectly sets the tone for the film, which is mainly about Tchaikovsky's emotional turmoil.  This film plays with silence, just like "Immortal Beloved."  Before Tchaikovsky attempts suicide in the film, he sits down at a piano in the middle of a noisy bar and pounds at the keyboard, yet all we hear is silence.  This emphasizes Tchaikovsky's belief that his music is over and that he has nothing more he can give.  A very different reasoning for using silence, but it's curious to think that in films meant to be about sound, there is particular uses of silence.

   

The final movie I chose to watch was Tony Palmer's "Testimony," about the memoirs of Shostakovich (played by Ben Kingsley, known for his roles in "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List").  Shostakovich's music was heavily influenced by the politics of Stalin's Russia, so this movie is very much about the political play-off between Stalin and Shostakovich.  It follows Shostakovich's rise to fame and then his denunciations by the government.  To really emphasize the politics of the time, news reels about what is happening politically in Russia are placed into the movie very often. This film has won several awards, including a Gold Medal Fellini Prize.  I can most certainly see why.  The film plays with color a lot.  Although the film is in black and white, there are several times where the color red is still included, often in sheets draped over statues of Stalin to show how soaked in the people's blood he is.  Shots of the orchestra performing Shostakovich's work are all in color, showing how the music is the only thing that is important to Shostakovich in the awful world he lives in.  Much of Shostakovich's works were censored by the Russian government.  He was even forced to withdraw the performance of his Fourth Symphony.  Many believe that Shostakovich's works weren't true portrayals of what he was feeling, but this movie seeks to prove them wrong, as is emphasized by the use of color for the orchestra. (Source)  Since the film is about the memoirs of Shostakovich, there are many voice overs as he speaks.  The film, like "Immortal Beloved," begins with Shostakovich's death, and the voice overs are spoken as if Shostakovich is looking back at his life after he has already died, providing commentary on everything.  The end culminates with a scene of Shostakovich on his deathbed, confronting the already dead Stalin, linking the two of them forever.  The end also has about 15 minutes of Shostakovich's very meaningful 13th Symphony (Listen here), about Babi Yar, the place where Nazis murdered over 33,000 Jews, while images of the atrocities committed in the war mingle with propaganda of happy and nationalistic parades.  This very much encompasses what Shostakovich thinks of the war, the ridiculousness of the propaganda and the true horrors behind the facade. 

   All in all, three very different films about three very different people.  "Immortal Beloved" is about the cheeky love life of Beethoven.  "Tchaikovsky" is about the emotional struggle of Tchaikovsky.  And "Testimony" is about the politics of Shostakovich's compositions.  Yet every single one of these films has a goal: to explain what was in the mind of the composer when he composed.
    In "Immortal Beloved," the 9th Symphony is accompanied by images of Beethoven as a child, running from his abusive father and floating in the center of a lake, looking at the stars.  This symphony is about Beethoven's life, wishing he was somewhere else, growing up afraid and beaten down.  In "Tchaikovsky," "Swan Lake" is accompanied with images of Tchaikovsky chasing after the woman he loves, a beautiful opera singer, and once he finally has hold of her she turns into the black swan.  Tchaikovsky is thinking of how she is unattainable, unreachable, and would not be his even if he grabbed hold of her.  In "Testimony," all the symphonies are accompanied by news reels of the politics Shostakovich had in mind while he was writing the piece, including the bombing of Leningrad (accompanying his Seventh Symphony) and the Holocaust images accompanying the 13th Symphony.  Each film aims to understand the composer through his music.  There are varying degrees as to how accurate and well-done it was, but the end goal was the same.  Just as an artist is understood through their paintings and an author is understood through their books, a composer is understood through his music.  That is exactly what the intention of these films are: to understand the composer's music through his life.

Gary Oldman as Beethoven

      As far as how each film was filmed and directed, they probably could not have been more different.  "Immortal Beloved" is a big scale, Hollywood-esque film intended to entertain.  There are many scenes with scores of extras, providing sweeping shots of rabid crowds and full orchestras.  In "Tchaikovsky," there are few characters and much is up to interpretation.  There are simple shots of trees or of him sitting at a piano.  Each scene is quite long and usually takes place in one stationary place.  In "Testimony," the focus is mostly on politics, and includes many political news reels and images.  The shots of the orchestra are of only three or four players at a time, sometimes even less.  Each film is meant to portray the composers through a different lens entirely.

Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy as Tchaikovsky

       As far as accuracy to the life of the composer, it varies.  "Immortal Beloved" is the least accurate of three.  The New York Times says, and I quote, "Two images in Bernard Rose's new film about Beethoven, "Immortal Beloved," have the ring of truth: the sight of a crowd of Viennese mourners frantically straining to touch Beethoven's coffin as a hearse carries it away, and the sight of Beethoven as a young boy, floating in a lake, surrounded by reflections of the heavens."  Clearly, this movie takes as many creative liberties as it wants.  The article goes on to explain how the Immortal Beloved letter was really just an unimportant phase in Beethoven's life and did not have the lasting effect the movie claims it does.  In fact, even our elusive immortal beloved isn't the woman in the movie. (New York Times article)  As far as "Tchaikovsky" goes, it neatly edits out the fact that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, which was part of the pain Tchaikovsky had in life.  It makes a much more romantic deal of Tchaikovsky's relationship with von Meck, a woman Tchaikovsky was in contact with throughout his life, but was merely a sponsor and not a romantic interest. (Source)  "Testimony," is a visual representation of Shostakovich's memoirs as put together by Solomon Volkov.  However, there is a large debate over whether or not the memoirs were forged or whether they were honestly Shostakovich's (you can read more about this debate here).  Clearly, in all of these movies, creative liberties were taken to make things more interesting, or romantic, or monumental.

Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich

      So I think what these three films really get across is that we don't really know what each composer thought.  We don't know exactly how their lives went.  We have our own theories.  These are just each director's theories in regards to each composer.  We may never know exactly why Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was written, but it is entertaining to guess.  The real importance is the music, and how each film treated it.  Real respect was given to the music in "Tchaikovsky" and "Testimony," and slightly less so in "Immortal Beloved."  But each film included important excerpts of the major works of each composer, trying to get across the beauty of the music.  And that is what really matters.

        

Ludwig van Beethoven                     Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky                    Dmitri Shostakovich