music in krzysztof kieślowski's film "three colors: blue". a rhapsody in shades of...

Music in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Film "Three Colors: Blue". A Rhapsody in Shades of Blue: TheReflections of a MusicianAuthor(s): Irena Paulus and Graham McMasterSource: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jun.,1999), pp. 65-91Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108380 .

Accessed: 30/09/2013 19:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Croatian Musicological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toInternational Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 148.61.13.133 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:20:54 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=croat

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108380?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


I. PAULUS, A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE, IRASM 30 (1999) 1, 65-91 65

MUSIC IN KRZYSZTOF KIE8LOWSKI'S FILM THREE COLORS: BLUE. A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE: THE REFLECTIONS OF A MUSICIAN

To a dear friend and editor Dra2en Movre

IRENA PAULUS

>>Franjo Luei(< School, Slavka Kolara 39, HR-10410 VELIKA GORICA, Croatia

UDC: 778.534.4

Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni dlanak Received: October 12,1998 Primljeno: 12. listopada 1998. Accepted: April 15, 1999 Prihvaeeno:15. travnja 1999.

Abstract - Resume

In the film Three Colors: Blue by Polish director Krzysztof Kiedlowski, music has very important role. Composer Zbignew Preisner de- fined Blue as >...a musical, not, of course, in the Hollywood sense. It talks about a composer who composes for the sake of uniting Europe.<< Kiedlowski required of the composer Preisner to compose music on the basis of the film script before film was shot. So the film narration was

not only scripted, but scored in advance. Com- poser and director found common language in shaping film and music. The task of the music was, according to the composer Preisner >...to depict the film, but cleverly so. This means that there is no need to deal with the external events that we look at on the screen, but what is there in the people, what is in actors, and at the same time in us ourselves, in the audience that is...<<

>The music should depict the film, but cleverly so. This means that there is no need to deal with the external events that we look at on the screen, but what is there in the people, what is in the actors, and at the same time in us ourselves, in the audience that is...<<' These words, spoken by the film composer Zbigniew Preisner, express the essence of the way he worked with Krzysztof Kieslowski. They were spoken just a few months before the death of the Polish director who, after

' Katarzyna BIELAS, 6. 1. 1993, >Kompozitor, niestety Polak<<, Gazeta Wyborcza, Internet article (translated into Croatian by Janina Welle).



66 I. PAULUS, A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE, IRASM 30 (1999) 1, 65--91

work on the trilogy Three Colors, significantly announced >that he was going to shut himself into a room and smoke for the rest of his life: that he was finished with filmmaking.<<2 Although he dedicated part of that life to Biblical themes, and even broke his vow by starting work on the film Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, fate was not kind to him: he died on March 13, 1996.

Kieslowski was fond of running polemics with established standards and >eter- nal<< truths through a documentary and most frequently gray form of realism; he understood the French national motto in Three Colors in inverse proportion to their eternally idealistic interpretation. >>Blue, liberty. White, equality. Red, fraternity... We looked very closely at these three ideas, how they functioned in everyday life, but from and individual's point of view. These ideas are contradictory with hu- man nature. When you deal with them practically, you do not know how to live with them. Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity?<<3 wondered Kieslowski.

And so these three unusually titled films, with their still more unusual lead- ing ideas, turned against themselves in their contents. Blue genuinely put on the intimate uniform of blue, but Julie's infinite grief, her flight from reality and con- cealment within herself became a synonym for a very unusual kind of freedom. Neutral white very likely most successfully managed to reconcile the contrast between the real idea of equality and the distraught cry of the Pole Karol Karol in the French court: >>Where is there equality here?<< Finally, the contradictoriness of red4 corresponds with such perfection to the film Red (the film is interwoven with symbols of the past, present and future) that we no longer know whether the phrase fraternity relates to the unusual relationship between Valentina and the elderly judge, to one of the numerous subplots about Valentina's brother, or just indicates the close connection that exists among the three films.

An inseparable combination: Kieslowski and Preisner in Three Colors: Blue.

The film Three Colors: Blue won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for the best female role and the best photography. Unfortunately, it was disqualified in the Oscar nomination processes because it was presented as being Polish, while the commission decided that it was too French. Since something similar happened with Red, Andrzej Krauze, the brother of the Polish director Antoni Krauze, could not refrain from saying: >>Kiedlowski was a very Polish artist. A lot of people said his Three Colors were not very good because he had lost the Polish soul. I do not think this is true. He just wanted to be out of the Polish context. Generally, Polish

2 Eric C. PARKINSON, 1994, >Blue<<, Time Magazine, Internet article. 3 James BERARDINELLI, >Red&, Internet article. 4 When talking of the contradictoriness of red, we are thinking primarily of a sentence of Johannes

Itten: >>From demonic, uninhibited red-orange on a black background to cloying angelic pink, red can express all transitions between the infernal and the exalted.<< (Johannes ITTEN, 1973 The Art of Color, (in Serbian: Belgrade, Art Academy, Belgrade, p. 102).




films suffer under the weight of this Polish culture and history. When I see a Wajda film, I see all these symbols which only a Pole could understand.<<s

Irrespective of the prizes that Blue won or did not win, we shall deal with that aspect of the film that is usually unjustly neglected, one that constitutes one of the most important, if not the most important, elements of its success. For >>Blue is in a sense a musical, not, of course, in the Hollywood sense. It talks about a composer who composes for the sake of uniting Europe.<<6

If the film's composer Zbigniew Preisner himself understands the film as musical, then we do not need for a moment to consider the real significance of the music. Of course, its importance was always underlined by director Krzystof Kieslowski, who often demanded that the composer should write the music according to the script, before the shooting of the film. >>He said at once what he needed,<< relates Zbigniew Preisner. >>I wrote the music at once, and when he started shooting he had everything, the theme, the songs, the concerto... Shooting the film, he knew exactly what we would do and what kind of emotions the music would create.7< According to Preisner, Kieslowski's attitude to music was really quite distinctive: >>It was not conceived only to underline atmosphere and ambience. Krzystof wanted it to have strength to be an element of the film's narrative. This started happening in the Decalogue, but was really made use of in Veronica (La double vie de Veronique - I. P.) and the Three Colors series, which allowed the music to work alongside the performances, to become part of the stor(ies). Sometimes there was no need for words or dialogue when he used my music.<<8

The dreamlike nature of the Dead March

It is in precisely this way that Van den Budenmayer's Dead March works in Blue. Only once, at the beginning of the film, does the Dead March appear to pro- vide source music, as funeral music in the strict sense of the words. This is the scene of the funeral of the famed composer Patrice and his little daughter, both killed in a traffic accident. Patrice's widow Julie watches the funeral on television from hospital.

Apart from the scene being important for the first appearance of the Dead March, it is also significant for being the first appearance of music in the film at all. In the beginning the film is filled with silence and realistic sounds, so that every appearance of music makes a particular impression, giving deliberate accent to the scene.

We will very soon become aware of the fact that the March is a theme of the film, one that, like an extended motif, represents Julie's suffering through memories of her dead husband. This theme is connected with the darkening of the screen,

M Geoffrey MACNAB, Chris DRAKE, >>Working with Kieglowski<, Sight and Sound, no. 5, p. 19. 6 Katarzyna BIELAS, ibid. 7 Ibid. 8

Geoffrey MACNAB, Chris DRAKE, ibid, p. 20.




the >black hole< in her soul. Although the blackouts and blanks overturn >all the rules of filmic punctuation<<9 they do, together with the music that is an essential element of the suppression of recollections, ideally describe the weight of Julie's emotions.

No verbal explanations, in the shape of long scenes of dialogues, are required alongside the >>black holes<< and Preisner's (or Van den Budenmayer's) music; this is shown by one of the scenes of Julie swimming in the pool (it is impossible not to note that these scenes are always bathed in a most gorgeous blue).

After having borrowed a neighbor's cat to kill a mouse and its young in her flat, Julie swims in the pool weeping. After her comes the prostitute, Lucille, and asks anxiously: >>You're crying?<< Nothing except the sudden blackness and the sound of the March could at this moment have better described the abrupt influx of memory and pain felt by Julie. The music and the black hole say it all. Julie is afraid of the mice, but sees in the mouse with her young a mother with children she has had killed. Here we begin to feel that Julie blames herself for the tragic accident, although she really could have done nothing to save her husband and daughter.10 The sounds of the Dead March on the one hand are just a small but very effective comment to go with the blackness and the mental pain, and on the other are a very powerful expression of the internal life of the main character.

An element of the detachment from reality and the flight into the self, the Dead March in Blue represents one example of oneiric or metadiegetic sound in the film. Mladen Milikevii has spoken of the dreamlike elements of the film; >At the level of pure film, the oneiric implies a filmic pictorialness that stimulates para- doxical experience. While at the rational level the event on the screen is understood as absurd or impossible, at the same time it is accepted as >>reality<< and engages the audience's full psychological and emotional involvement.<1" Accord- ing to Milikevie there are five ways in which the metadiegetic impression is at- tained:

1. Usual filmic noises are omitted, composed music appearing instead. 2. In places where the visions of the past are very short, no more than flashes,

the sound is made dreamlike by transformed noise (transformed by a special sound processor).

3. Non-diegetic music can be considered metadiegetic when from the view- point of the protagonist it is played very expressively, nourishing his subjectivity.

9 Dijana NENADIC, 1996. )>Three colors: blue<< (review), Croatian Film Chronicle, Zagreb, Croatian Association of Film Critics, Croatian National Archives - Hrvatska kinoteka; Filmoteka 16, II, no. 5. p. 106.

10 In confirmation of our conclusion we should note that after the prostitute leaves the pool, a group of children come running, arriving for training, which cannot be a coincidence. It is also not accidental that Lucille asks )>Are you afraid of returning?< She is here thinking: back to the flat, where the dead mice are. But Julie is thinking: to the world, without husband and child, and nods her head.

11 Mladen MILICEVIC, 1995, )>Film sound beyond reality: metadiegetic sound in the narrative film, Croatian Film Chronicle, Croatian National Archives, Hrvatska kinoteka; Filmoteka 16, no. 3/4, p. 103 (quote from Vlada PETRIC, 1995: Oneiric Cinema: The Isomorphism of Film and Dreams, Cambridge, Mass., HUP, printout for lecture Oneiric Cinema, p. 1).



I. PAULUS, A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE, IRASM 30 (1999) 1, 65--91 69

4. A metadiegetic sound is obtained by an increase of the volume of the sound and

5. by the conflict of two different kinds of sound (through, for example, a combination of diegetic and non-diegetic music).12

The first definition best corresponds to the role of the Dead March in Blue. This is, then, composed metadiegetic music in front of which other noises retreat. The concept of the hypnagogic image corresponds to the appearance of the >>black hole< and the loss of all contact with reality (Militevik links it with this kind of metadiegetic music). Psychology calls the moment of coming back to reality the hypnopompic image; naturally, it exists every time Julie collapses into blackness.

Although in each one of these points music and image behave according to all the rules, the academic principle is lost as soon as we observe the way they come in. According to MiliCevik's research, that is (he demonstrates it with reference to the music of Empire of the Sun), the hypnagogic state usually comes in gradually, while the hypnopompic returns suddenly and rapidly. In Kieslowski, both states occur suddenly and unexpectedly, but very carefully thought through, so that every member of the audience experiences Julie's pain still more strongly.

Metadiegesis: sound in the head

With the progression of the accident/unhappiness - suffering - voluntary isolation - gradually return to reality, a parallel progression appears in the film, the creation of a work of music. Just as both narratives actually speak about shifted states of consciousness, so in the second layer of the film we can find examples of metadiegetic sound.

One of the earliest phases of a work of art takes for granted the origin of the idea. The writer thinks of the idea inside himself, the painter sees it, and the musician hears it in his head. How, if at all, can a film director experience, understand and then transfer to the big screen the way a melody, or a whole work of music, comes into being?

The short but significant scenes that together with parts of one theme extend through the film and within which the parts gradually grow into the Concerto for the Unification of Europe show that Kieslowski himself either had the experience of or in some way had a feeling for the sensibility of a musician and composer.

The scene in which for the first time a part of Preisner's beautiful theme is heard goes like this. Julie, after coming back from hospital, stands on the gallery and looks at scores. She flicks them over, as if looking for something. From some-

12 Ibid., p. 103-108. MiliCevif defines diegetic and non-diegetic music as follows: >>Sound that the protagonist can perceive and understand all the time can be called diegetic, such as dialogue, sounds and music that derives from the diegetic space (the scene). Non-diegetic sound is the opposite of this for the protagonists are not aware of its existence, and cannot hear it. It includes, for example, voiceovers, narration and composed music."< (Ibid., p. 103) I keep to the concepts given by Hrvoje TURKOVIC in his conceptual dictionary of film music (Croatian Film Chronicle, II, March 1995, no. 5, pp. 80-86).




where or other part of the theme is heard, yet this is a sound that no one else but Julie should be hearing because it is in her head. She quickly comes down from the gallery, goes to the piano, takes a piece of paper from it and looks long at it. We do not see what is written on the paper, and can only just see that it is music paper, but we can hazard a guess: the theme we are listening to is written on it (it is played on a piano, which makes us think this). Julie slightly nods her head and folds the piece of paper, and at the same time the music suddenly stops, as if cut short. The manner in which the music disappears completely convinces us that the theme we have just heard is written down on the paper.

If the theme had not been played on the piano or had not suddenly ended together with the folding of the piece of paper, one would have no hesitation in saying that it was background music. But in this scene Julie was very conscious of the music the source of which we did not see (we saw the piano, but not the pian- ist). This is, then, background music that can be considered metadiegetic because ?from the point of view of the protagonist it is played very expressively, nourishing her subjectivity?.

Confirmation that the piece of paper really was music paper and that the background theme played was actually written on it can be found only a few minutes later in the scene in which Julie once again takes the paper into her hands. This time, the camera carefully follows the score with her. The scene represents the internal moment of the musician, and everyone who can read a score and can follow the theme will see how deeply it is thought out. Alternations between the score and Julie's face are edited according to the thematic structure, that is, according to the alternation of musical phrases and sentences. This leads to the conclusion that composer Preisner was constantly present not only in the filming, but also in rehearsing the actors and finally at the cutting table.

Switching from the score to Julie's face (according to all the rules of musical form) will end at the moment when there are no more notes on the paper, with however the theme (in the echoing, unearthly performance on the piano) still playing. Julie follows the empty paper with her eyes, and the music still goes on in her head. She, then, is composing, imagining the continued progression of the melody. Thus here, in the earliest phase of the film, for those who know how to listen, the answer to the journalist's question >Did you compose the music for your husband?<< is already given. As far as we are concerned, is there any point at all in recalling our doubt that a film director can show the compositional process?

Both examples show that music in the head, music heard in the self (internal hearing) can be treated as a kind of background music that through its expressive- ness will show the subjectivity of the character and thus become metadiegetic. However, the music in Blue shows that any kind of music in the head can be metadiegetic: even that which is not so very expressive, even that which is hardly audible.

An example of such music can be found in the scene in which Olivier comes to visit Julie after her return home. The real reason for his coming is to take the incomplete score of the Concerto for the Unification of Europe, because he has a feeling that Julie is going to destroy it. Olivier stands alone in the room and goes over the




score of the dead composer. In the background, very softly, can be heard the sounds of various instruments and groups of instruments, similar to the sounds of an orchestra tuning up before a concert, or the sounds from the corridors of a music school or theatre where various pieces of music make their way from various parts of the building. These are the sounds that Olivier quickly perceives with his internal hearing as he turns over the pages of the score.

This is once again sounds in the head, sounds that are heard in the self as a result of reading the score without an instrument. This time too we think of a shifted state of consciousness, similar to that when a man reads sections of a book and loses connection with reality for a moment. This is, then, metadiegetic music, which fits perfectly in with the mosaic of music, composing, deliberate isolation and flight from reality.

With the appearance of music in the head, narrowly understood, and more broadly understood as metadiegetic or oneiric music, the distinction between music that is part of the scene, and source and background music, begins to lose its basic point. Because this is music that is at the same time diegetic and non-diegetic, background, music that is diegetic in content, but which is not heard in the given ambience, being heard only by the person who imagines it or reads the score in themselves. The music accordingly gives depth to the character, revealing what is going on in his head, that is, revealing his thoughts. Oneiric music lets us be intimate with the character, lets us think, breathe, tremble and, in general, perceive just as the character does.

Very considerable skill and art is required to pull this off. The work on the film was, without any doubt, long-lasting and careful, and not a single detail is left to chance. What was needed, apart from the director's firm hand, was close co- operation among all the people working on the film, actors, composer and editor alike. But the result of this co-operation is that the film is experienced three-dimen- sionally, the music being perceived with not only one but with at least two senses. The music is heard, but it can also be seen (we look not only at the figure of the character or a landscape, but the score, the movement and even the tone of the music), felt (through the feelings of the character), thought (sound in the head), and can almost be touched and smelled. Music in Blue becomes a physical body that is not just a fiction and a fantasy, but represents reality, is a real part of Julie's life, a genuine reality, however ugly or beautiful that reality might be.

Theme as Julie

The main theme, which is tightly connected with Julie and her thoughts, certainly contributes to the experience of the music as a living being. Through its structure (the phrases are separated by pauses from each other) it reminds us of the gradualness of the process of creating musical thoughts, but at the same time stresses the isolation, helplessness and listlessness of the young woman. The theme contains the multi-facetedness of Julie's spirit. The theme is the main device for transmitting her thoughts, because she speaks little, and thinks much, giving in to or resisting her own grief.




Example 1: Julie's theme

Visually and audibly the theme is very simple (in a melodic, a harmonic and a formal sense) but in spite of that it is exceptionally beautiful. It owes its beauty primarily to its musical characteristics, and thus corresponds to Hanslick's conception of the musically beautiful.

The first musical aesthetician Eduard Hanslick writes: >Meaningful relationships among tones that are in themselves stimulating, their harmony and opposi- tion, their divergence and convergence, their rises and their dying falls - this is what appeals to our spiritual maturation and what pleases us as the beautiful.<<'3 According to Hanslick, the nature of the beautiful in tonal art is specifically musical, that which is, then, independent of any substance that might accrue to it from without. Accordingly, Preisner's theme, which is clearly inspired by Julie and her sadness, is not beautiful because of its connection with the main character, but exclusively because of its own musical characteristics.

Hanslick's conception of musical aesthetics would work absolutely if it were not a matter of film but only of concert music. Since film music is thought up in relation to images, is both led and inspired by them, it is hard to imagine Julie without the theme, or the theme without Julie. But we have to admit that not even the marvelous acting of Juliette Binoche could adequately express musical beauty. Preisner's theme owes its distinction to its exceptional musical qualities, most of all to the melodiousness, which Hanslick states as being the fundamental form of the musically beautiful.

The theme most commonly accompanies Julie as if it were a thought that is in her head, but in some scenes the melody is quite simply present as an integral part of her character. This is particularly apparent in the scene in which Julie stays the whole night on the steps.

Someone on the stairs is fleeing in panic from an unknown assailant, and Julie listens in terror to the sounds of the chase and the cries for help. The cries from the stairs suddenly die away and, inquisitive, she goes out of her flat. The door closes behind her from the draft, and she realizes that she has not taken the keys of the flat. Just as helplessly and listlessly as the way in which she drinks her coffee every morning, Julie sits in the dark on the stairs. A blue light plays over her head (from some unknown source), and this phenomenon is accompanied by several phrases of Julie's theme. These few tones, separated from each other by pauses, colored by the dark colors of a muttered male choir, are an expression of a deep sigh and resignation to fate, and open up the way to the blue light that, like a halo, plays above Julie's head.

Appearing from image to image, whether as a form of background music, whether as metadiegetic music, Julie's theme contains its own aesthetic beauty, although structurally it is hardly altered at all. The only thing that changes is the instrumentation: it is either carried by the harp (when Julie moves into her new

13 Eduard HANSLICK, 1966, Of the Musically Beautiful, Belgrade, Beogradski izdavatko-grafitki zavod, p. 83.




flat) or by strings (when she makes love with Olivier) or by the muttering male choir (when she sits on the steps), or the one simple piano line rich in echoes (which comes like a dream from Julie's head).

The tempo of the theme absolutely corresponds to the tempo of the film. Just as Kiedlowski was fond of gazing long at his documentary images, he always wondered again and again at the beauty of Preisner's melody. The theme is repeated always in the same tempo, always the same structure, even though clad in a different instrumental garb. This absolutely corresponds to Krzystof Kieslowski's work as a director: work with a great deal of patience, through which he attempted to seize every single moment, so that it should not flutter past in vain, unperceived.

The >struggle< of the theme and the Dead March

The identity of the theme is revealed only just before the end of the film, when Olivier and Julie attempt to complete her dead husband's Concerto for the Unifica- tion of Europe. At a moment of shortage of inspiration, Julie takes a piece of music paper in her hand, saying: >>There is one theme...o This is the Memento, written by the Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer, which Patrice wished to put in the Finale of the Concerto. The theme, then, was not written by Julie, which we might have supposed during the film. The theme is the work of the composer Van den Budenmayer, the author of the Dead March from Patrice's funeral.

The name of the composer Van den Budenmayer crops up in other Kieslowski feature films, from Decalogue to Three Colors. Since the music credits in all these films go to Zbigniew Preisner, it is easy to conclude that he is the real Van den Budenmayer. Some people have nevertheless believed the Dutch composer actually to have existed. The reason for this is the always distinctive style of the invented composer, different to some extent from the style of Zbigniew Preisner; his work is characterized by great leaping intervals (he is fond of using octave and three tone leaps). Although Van den Budenmayer's themes are very acrobatic, and so make considerable demands on a performer, they are, after the example of his forefather Preisner, exceptionally melodic. They are often performed by a high female voice (mainly with a neutral syllable and only occasionally with words), the voice of Preisner's friend from student days, the brilliant soprano Elzbieta Towarnicka. As well as being sung, the work of the Dutch composer is also sometimes played. The composer's favorite instrument was clearly the piano (Julie's theme!), through the sounds of which he attempted to bring out all the warmth of what is actually a percussion instrument (hammers strike the strings!).

Let us recall: in Three Colors: Blue, Van den Budenmayer is the composer of the Dead March and the short Memento, the theme that becomes the trade mark of Julie's isolation.

The link between the Dead March and the theme was strengthened by their real father, Zbigniew Preisner. During the film, Julie slowly comes out of her pain and returns to reality. At one moment she is perfectly calm, enjoying the sunshine, and at another, things go black in front of her eyes, while at a third she attempts to




commit suicide. Preisner shows the sudden changes in her mental state by switching from the Dead March and the beautiful >>sighing< theme; they finally unite in the no-holds-barred struggle in the deep blue pool.

The scene referred to is brought about by previous events. Thanks to a wit- ness of the accident, Julie has learned of the final words of her husband and got her daughter's necklace back. Attempting to palliate the newly awakened pain, she swims in the pool. The music starts the moment Julie suddenly stops getting out of the pool and gets back into the water, gives herself over to helpless floating.

The music of the scene links the main theme and the Dead March, two completely contradictory compositions of the same artist. Since the theme is stated by the strings, and the Dead March by the wind section, the section is experienced as a conflict between strings and wind instruments, life and death, the living Julie and her dead husband Patrice. The themes literally fight, interrupting one another in mid-phrase, drowning each other and >>quarreling<<, in their attempt to do down the >>rival<<. It would seem that their powers are identical, but as the scene begins and ends with the Dead March (an element of the sudden welling up of pain and memory), and Julie once again attempts suicide, it becomes clear that the return to the world of reality will be for her neither simple nor easy. We learn of all this through the music, because the film image (Julie floating on the surface of the water) is very terse from the point of view of supporting the narration of the film's story.

The struggle between the two musical parts is also convincing because of the symbolic meaning of each of the musical rivals.

On the one hand there is the theme. Although it was written by Van den Budenmayer, the theme is, as we have stated earlier, Julie's, in the way of a leitmotif. It accompanies all the transformations the young woman passes through as she struggles with pain, memory and her new life. The melody, structure and tempo of the theme are always the same, its significance changing through the instrumental color. This color is a synonym for the mood and mental state of the unhappy Julie. (We cannot resist the impression that it is no accident that the concept of color in a musical sense is particularly important in a film whose title itself is a color.)

On the other hand, the Dead March, which in this scene so significantly >struggles< with the main theme, represents the memory that will not give Julie peace: these are her dearest ones, who were alive a short time before, and now are gone. This is a fact that a person finds it hard to come to terms with.

Of the symbolism of Van den Budenmayer's themes in Blue, we can observe the particular approach by which Zbigniew Preisner made filmic use of music that within the film's story has its own composer. According to all the laws of film and narration, this music should on the whole be diegetic. But it seldom is, much more often being non-diegetic, background music that sometimes has the role of music in the head, sometimes of metadiegetic sound, but that always works, as we have seen in the previous examples, in the manner of a filmic leitmotif. A leitmotif, it is true, usually represents a person, a thing, place or idea, but in Blue, the leitmotif has several functions and appears as thought, state of mind, reminiscence or mood.




The film theme becomes, then, an expression of internal drama that is hidden and finds expression with much more difficulty than various external manners of dra- matic or musical narration.

Patient repetition of leitmotif (with minimal musical variations) enables the melody to get into the audience's subconscious, like a symbol, to become the clue to the psychological states of the main characters. The lack of musical develop- ment in the themes is justified by their functionality in the film and the way they work on the subconscious of the audience. The music works subconsciously because of its secondary role in the film, the loudness of background music, the way the image attracts the audience's primary attention and so on. The repetition of the filmic themes is also psychologically justified by the need for the music to be remembered through repeated (even if unconscious) listening, so that the viewers are capable of linking it with a given symbol, idea or state of mind. Thus the functioning and use of the leitmotif is not banal and inappropriate to the musically educated viewer (as Hans Eisler emphasizes in his film music criticism) but is adapted to the functioning of the film as a complete work of art. It depends on the skill of the composer whether the adaptation of music to the screen is going to be refined or trivial. In Three Colors: Blue the music is so carefully thought through (by both director and composer) that we can have no doubt as to its complexity and quality.

The mysterious composer Van den Budenmayer

The role of leitmotif and recurring theme in Krzystof Kieslowski's feature films does not belong only to Preisner's music, but also to the character and work of the composer Van den Budenmayer. His name occurs for the first time in the Decalogue (Ninth Commandment, 1988). In this film Kies'lowski wanted to have a classical composer, and so Preisner wrote several sections that stood out stylistically from the musical context. When they once had the music, the composer and the director, both great lovers of Holland, decided that the name of the new composer in the film should be Dutch. Thus Van den Budenmayer was born, composer in the neo-Romantic style who skillfully combines elements of classical romanticism with contemporary techniques of composition.

After Decalogue, the same composer appeared in the film La double vie de Veronique, 1991. This confused many people. In this film, Van den Budenmayer is mentioned as a composer of the latter half of the 19th century, and it is to him that the lovely Concerto in E minor is ascribed. Intrigued, people started combing reference works and history of music textbooks hoping to find something more about this fine composer. Of course, they found nothing, because the real WVan den Budenmayer< was sitting at home in Poland and, under the same pseudonym, writing new musical fragments for the Three Colors trilogy of Krzystof Kieslowski.

There are several reasons for Preisner and Kieslowski having so skillfully and convincingly deceived their audience. First, and most importantly, Preisner always changed his style when a musical work was being ascribed to Van den Budenmayer.




Then, the mystical composer was always attributed with concert music, which was performed in some films, and in others appeared on disc (Decalogue) or CD (Three Colors: Red). In addition, the name of the same composer has been there in four different films (Decalogue: Ninth Commandment, The Double Life of Veronica, Three Colors: Red and Three Colors: Blue.) Finally, the same work by the composer appears in two different films, five years apart from each other - Ninth Command- ment and Red.

When the impotent surgeon Romek bought a disc by Van den Budenmayer (Decalogue), he could not have guessed that five years later the model Valentina (Red) would be listening to the same music. In Red Van den Budenmayer's music appears for the first time in a bowling alley where Valentina is attempting to forget the elderly judge who listens to the telephone calls of his neighbor. The music begins when the camera moves panoramically around the set and continues into the following scene in which the judge is writing an anonymous letter, reporting himself to the police. The music, then, is background, not diegetic, and has the job of linking the two scenes together. What is fascinating is that it is absolutely the same music that plays from Romek's new disc in Decalogue.

Since Red teems with symbols, the meaning of Van den Budenmayer's music in Ninth Commandment should be sought primarily in its symbolism. We shall find it in the key scene from Red, where the old judge recalls his youth (almost identical to the actuality of Valentina) and relates how a woman he loved left him and went off with someone else. If we link this story with the text of the ninth commandment and the motto of the film of that name, do not lust after your neighbor's wife, we will no longer have anything to wonder at in the use of the same musical section in two different films. In both Decalogue and Red Kieslowski interpreted the meaning of the ninth commandment within everyday life. That is why the >do not lust after your neighbor's wife< does not relate to the lovers, but to those who suffer most - the deceived husbands. Listening to the hidden musical message, we can only admire the skill with which Kieslowski and Preisner have managed to link content and symbolism in the two films.

Pulling his earlier works together in Red, Kieslowski made use of the music in one other place. This happens in the scene in which Valentina is listening to the Van den Budenmayer music already mentioned in a CD shop (by chance, the young man and a girl whose fates we are also following in the film are there near her). Valentina is delighted by the glorious soprano (the voice of Elzbieta Towarnicka, Preisner's favorite singer) and decides to buy the CD. While she is in the shop she talks with the salesman who tells her that Van den Budenmayer's CDs are sold out; the air is filled with all kinds of music the shoppers are listening to. At one moment a piece of the main theme from White is heard, done by a string sextet. Thus a link is set up between the two films, Red and White.

Music is hard to remember without listening to it a number of times, and it is still more difficult to recognize a fragment that does not start from the beginning, and so it seems that the composer's message and the reminiscence of White are primarily addressed to practiced ears, to musicians, that is. The scene is musically almost as subtle as the scene from Blue already mentioned, in which Olivier flicks




through Patrice's score, while in the background, hardly noticeably, come the confused sounds of different orchestral instruments.

Three Colors: Red is Krzystof Kieslowski's last feature film. He vowed that after Red he would shoot no more films. Fate lent him a hand, stopping his work on a new project with which he had broken his vow. In fact, it seems as if Kieslowski sensed his coming death, because, although he did not keep the promise given to the press, in Red he caught up his earlier films in various ways. In this he made use not only of the images, acting, fabulae, common characters14 and common scenes of the trilogy15 but also of many other more less obvious filmic devices, among them film music.

The music of composer Zbigniew Preisner is not remarkable only for its purely musical characteristics (of which we can read in Hanslick's musical aesthetics). With the introduction of Van den Budenmayer, the music becomes such an integral part of the film's narration that it is impossible not to perceive the close connection of the Kiedlowski-Preisner films.

In the history of film music, there have often been reminiscences or allusions to other films, the purpose of which is to recall, in a new context, some other filmic story or character. With Kieslowski the purpose is different. He wants the music to refer to itself.

The role of musical reminiscences in other directors' films is only occasionally symbolic and only occasionally requires the maximum amount of engagement on the part of the audience. And film music associations are usually made very bla- tantly, in the effort to awaken the appropriate association in the audience. It is never like this with Kieslowski. He sends his messages quietly, intending them for those who know how to decipher them. In the case of musical messages, they are meant for musicians and all others who watch and listen to films with a deal of care. To those who, like him, revel in every movement of a film, every blink of an eye, every transition and every sound. It is not surprising that a director like Kiedlowski should structure his films around music (and not vice-versa) and that he does not introduce a given character, object, natural phenomenon or idea as the leitmotif of his films. His leitmotif is a very characteristic sound: the music of an invented Dutch composer.

The mystery of the busker

Van den Budenmayer has deliberately drawn us away from the main theme, the music in the film Three Colors: Blue. Let us return, then, to Blue, musically and filmically Kiedlowski's most successful color.

14 The woman barrister who defends Dominique in White is actually the mistress of Julie's dead husband in Blue; all the characters from the trilogy can be found in the marine accident at the end of Red.

15 Scene in the courtroom: the divorce of Karol Karol and Dominique appears in White and Blue; the scene of the hunched old woman throwing a bottle into the bottle bank appears in all three films.



78 I. PAULUS, A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE, IRASM 30 (1999) 1, 65-91

In Blue, two themes that by sheer chance (or deliberately) belong to the Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer are particularly in the forefront. The Dead March and Julie's theme. Both of them will become important parts of the structure of the Concerto for the Unification of Europe, a few bars of which were written by the deceased Patrice. But two themes are not enough for the Concerto; just as Julie, after a certain time, is not enough for herself.

One sad morning, sitting in the caf6, drinking coffee, Julie sees a street musician playing on a recorder. The simple melody seems to bring a kind of secularity into her withdrawn life, and becomes a hardly noticeable beginning of her opening up and coming out of the dark.

The music starts at the moment Julie puts a spoon of ice-cream into her mouth. For a moment it seems to us that the slow, melancholy theme of the recorder represents one more expression of the pain of mother and wife who has lost her fam- ily, because we do not see where it is coming from. And then, slowly, with relish, Kiedlowski shows us the street flautist lost in his playing. Following the movement of the musical sentences, the image, with a slight delay, reveals a new, unusual character of the film and a new, still more unusual music, and then at once shows Julie listening raptly to the music.

Although he knowingly reveals the simple musical structure of the melody, Kies'lowski abruptly halts the theme in mid-phrase with the beginning of a new scene. This is not the first time for Kieslowski to dwell admiringly on music, only ruthlessly to cut it short the next second. Right until the end of the film the director does not allow a single theme to develop, opening thus a musical space filled with expectation. The abrupt interruption of the theme, the beauty of which Kieslowski has been so rapt and delighted by that he attempted to attract the attention of the audience with it as well, seems to have been a deliberate device. And perhaps the objective is to encourage the audience to complete the musical thought that has been set off, encourage them to behave like composers.

The busker's theme appears for the second time in one of the scenes common to all three films. This is the scene of a little bent old woman attempting to get to the opening of a bottle bank to throw a bottle in. The scene is watched by Julie from a bench; she is enjoying the springtime sunshine. The recorder theme recalls the previous scene, but now it is background and not diegetic music.

The theme is edited with the picture in a very particular way, revealing, as a little earlier, the inner structure of the music. The alternations of the musical phrases are linked with the switches between the old woman and Julie, until, to a second musical sentence, the old woman pulls it off and goes, leaving Julie to enjoy the sunshine.

The musical phrases are separated by flashes of sunlight. These are frames blinded by sun, showing what Julie sees and feels. The sun-bathed screen is a powerful antithesis of the >>black holes<, the blackness of which Julie experiences as the consequence of grief and the memory of her loved ones. In this, it seems, the idea that the recorder theme is the return to reality, the reestablishment of links with the world, is confirmed. Naturally, this return is not painless, nor is it unexpected, and in the very next scene the Dead March of Van den Budenmayer will bring about one more >>black hole< in Julie's memory.




The third and final encounter with the music of the busker is a definite proof of the opening up of the young woman. Julie is once again in the caf6 and here she is found by Olivier. It is not by accident that the encounter with the old friend, in love with her into the bargain, takes place at the time when the busker comes onto the street and starts a new tune on his recorder. Nor would it appear to be accidental that the melody is a variation of Julie's theme, which the flautist performs while retaining the typical triplet rhythms of the previous melodies. The triplets recall the barrel-organ, instrument of fairs and streets, the aim of them being to trans- form the theme into light music with a hidden interior beauty.

In spite of all the masks, Julie at once recognizes the theme and decides to ask the busker what he is playing. She knows the answer, but is surprised when she hears that the flautist plays >>whatever occurs to him<<, that he improvises.

The role of the busker and his three different melodies is clear: they (the character and the music) are here to bring a beam of light into the darkness and to rescue the unhappy Julie from the blackness. The first time, the recorder awakens her interest; the second time she enjoys it although she does not hear the sounds of the music; the third time, she recalls the uncompleted melodies that will later lead her to start composing again.

But the busker is a strange man. He plays on the street, sleeps on the pave- ment, and in the last scene is brought to the street by a woman in a vast black car. His way of life is very unusual; he is clearly not poor, but behaves as if he were, and enjoys doing so. He particularly likes improvising for his street audience. Does the discovery of the truth about the busker and his profound love for music awake Julie's dormant love for composition? If it does not do so directly, it certainly does indirectly. Because at this stage of the film the fates of different people start being interwoven, and Julie can no longer avoid new acquaintanceships (the friendship with the prostitute Lucille) or old friends. Her gentle nature, full of kindness for others, finally moves towards what it loves most: music and composition.

Concerto for the Unification of Europe

Julie's love for music, like everything else, is revealed gradually. At the beginning of the film, Julie in no way shows that she loves it. On the contrary, the scene in which she ruthlessly throws scores into the garbage truck says exactly the opposite. Music and sound effects back up this impression. After the death of her husband, Julie goes to the archivist who is keeping the unfinished score of the Concerto for the Unification of Europe. The archivist is thrilled with the music and expresses her admiration in the words >It is lovely. I like the choir.< And points with her hand at the first bar of the score that (in the music in the head manner) the audience can hear at the same time. The composition certainly sounds grand and spell- binding, and its sounds accompany Julie even after the finger of the archivist has ceased to follow the notes. (Here, metadiegetic music becomes background music.) Julie then takes the score and throws it into the garbage truck. The music that we have previously wondered at disappears slowly into the crushing mechanism, and we listen to the gears grinding and ripping it, to the Concerto dying screaming.




Although music is not a living being, especially not a loved living being, the destruction of the score is experienced as the death of a loved person. Of course, it is primarily the composer, Preisner, who is to blame for this, having been capable of composing music that we will fall in love with after the first bar, music the destruction of which will be as much of a blow to us as it is to the archivist and to Julie (by destroying the score that she loves Julie just wanted to destroy the memory of her loved ones).

Treated partially as metadiegetic and partially as background music, the score of the Concerto for the Unification of Europe works in this scene mainly as sounds in the head. It is experienced as a living being that one moment is brilliant in its beauty, and another crying for help because it is being put violently to death.

As we learn from the film, it was Julie's husband Patrice (or perhaps Julie herself) who started to write the Concerto intended for the Council of Europe, to be played by twelve symphony orchestras in twelve great cities of united Europe. The words for the choral passages, which from the beginning fix the attention and arouse admiration, are from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. They are sung in Greek, and speak of love as the only and greatest meaning in life.16

Love is certainly omnipresent in the film. But not only Julie's love for her husband and daughter and her new love for Olivier. It is also her sleeping and newly awakened love for music.

How much Julie loved music and how much she enjoyed composing it can be seen in the scene in which the Concerto is composed, in which Julie and Olivier together attempt to complete the score that has been started. The scene is pulled off so convincingly that it is difficult to believe the actors are not real composers

16 The First Epistles to the Corinthians, 12, 1-13. 1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and I have not love, I am become as

sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal. 2. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge;

and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3. (And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.)

4. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up;

5. (Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;)

6. (Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;) 7. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 8. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be

tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 9. (For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.)

10. (But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.) 11. (When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I

put away childish things.) 12. (For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then

shall I know even as also I am known.) 13. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Verses in brackets are not used in the Concerto for the Unification of Europe.




and that they have never been professionally involved with music. Of course, neither Kieslowski nor Preisner wanted to leave the shooting of this delicate scene to chance, and they instituted special musical training for the actors. >>In Blue,<< says Preisner, >>Juliette Binoche was with me during the recording of the music for the Concerto before the shooting started, a good and very useful experience for us both. She was able to observe the working method of an orchestra, and the techniques of composition, and I was able to explain to her how an orchestra is recorded<<.17

The music of the scene of the composition of one part of the Concerto is a reworking of Olivier's theme. This theme appeared a few minutes earlier, a powerful masculine theme that says where Julie set out for after visiting her sick mother (to Olivier's, of course). It is interesting that themes work their way gradually into the film, so that we are not overloaded with them, and have time to listen to each one properly, to remember it and get to like it. Because of this gradual introduction, some of them dominate the film (Dead March, Julie's theme), because they are there from the very beginning, while others can be heard and admired only a few scenes before the end of the film (like Olivier's theme).

The composition scene is actually a scene of Julie's pain being merged into calmness, into coming to terms with herself and her fate, into a new kind of happiness. Julie is obviously enjoying herself while she is telling Olivier which orchestral parts should be thrown out and which brought in, and expresses her renewed happiness and new finding of herself by being gradually blurred, enabling the audience to enjoy the music completely calmly. This is one of the few examples in the history of film music in which the image deliberately withdraws into the background and privileges music which is usually a subaltern if very important ingre- dient of a film. This means that the external is completely overawed by the internal, material gives way to idea, reality is lost so that it is possible for the whole of the being to be immersed into the sound and the imagination.

In the next frame the picture is clear again, Julie sitting calmly, smiling, free of pain. As if the music has facilitated some kind of inner recovery, there has been some kind of music therapy, not in a literal sense, but much more sophisticatedly. A better word would be healing, not recovery, since Julie has been recovering throughout the film, going through various phases of isolation, finding salvation only in music, the crown of her wishes, hopes and her unsuccessful fight against memories of her loved ones. It is not necessary to insist that this moment is the zenith, in which sorrow, suffering, black holes, deep sighs and struggles with fate vanish. Through music Julie has liberated her inner ego, but has at the same time consciously stepped into the cage of the quotidian, of love, obligations and mo- notony.

The music in the scene appears as if it were welling up from the score. Julie follows the violin part with her finger, listening to it in herself. What is very unusual is that her finger at the beginning slides over the paper, showing the notes very precisely; however, when the music flares up, the finger starts moving faster than the score, as if the music were flowing faster than what is written. Thus after

17 Geoffrey MACNAB, Chris DRAKE, ibid., p. 20.




the first bar we can no longer link the score with what we hear. The question arises whether this is an accidental failing, one that since it is purely musical most viewers will not notice, or whether it is for some reason deliberate?

In spite of all her musical training and conversations with the composer, the actress, Juliette Binoche, does not, nevertheless, have any musical training. Very likely she followed the score by ear, allowing the music to lead her, but got lost at a certain moment. It is hard to believe this, because Krzystof Kieslowski was pre- cise and a perfectionist in everything, and thus in following the score (we might recall the way Julie's theme is followed at the beginning). He must have required the composer to be present in the shooting of such scenes, and such a flaw could arise only if the composer for some reason were not present at the shooting. But this would be a flaw as well.

Much more likely is the other possibility, that the composer and director deliberately allowed to the actress to follow the score instinctively, according to her own feeling for the music, because at that moment the score was not so important any more. Julie finally feels liberated from all her sufferings and pain, she finally revels in life, creating a work of art. It seems logical that in her own liberation she would thus ?liberate<< the music of the score, allowing it to >well up<< and >swell? with its own inner power. The music's ?>lack of constraint<< and >disobedience? to the score were allowed by both composer and director. For in the scene it is any- way no longer important what is seen (the image will later be blurred), and it is much more important what is heard.

Example 2. Concerto for the Unification of Europe, strings part

Having solved the problem of the score, we should say something of the importance of the orchestration, which is quite simply remarkable. One important piece of information is that Olivier starts playing the violin part on the piano. Al- though the only source of music is the piano, the part is played by the piano and violin in unison. The piano appears as a diegetic instrument (we can see Olivier playing, and expect piano sounds), while the violin is metadiegetic (for Julie and Olivier hear the right sound color in themselves, just as written down in the score). Thus the compositional process from the very beginning becomes a process of playing with the colors of the sounds. Some instrumental colors are added, and some are subtracted, colors are combined and mixed, some are put one on top of the other, others remain to shine independently as solo parts. The whole creative process is directed towards having the musical lines there still more enhanced and foregrounded. Color and line rule the film image. These are pictorial concepts that are now totally put into aural frameworks and transformed into musical concepts. Therefore, without any fear that a hiatus will result, the image can for a moment disappear and relinquish its role to music, which is completely in charge of all feelings and senses.

Music becomes the primary filmic element, absorbing all attention. It is heard, seen and imagined. The process of creating music is so carefully planned out that




Kieslowski brings us to a state in which we become worshippers of music, although we might not have been so a minute earlier.

Blue in Blue

When we come to the close connection between musical and painterly color we can no longer avoid recollection of Wagner's idea about the linkage of all the arts into one, which he called opera, and we can call film. Kieslowski provoked the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk with the film's title itself, foregrounding the name of a given color. This has set up a link between the fine arts and the film. And since the film talks of music, and since music occasionally becomes the most important element in it, it is impossible not to wonder where the border between the three arts is. There is no border, because they join, in common points such as color, line, shape and harmony.

In the words of Branko Pra2ik: >By itself, color says absolutely nothing, and only when it is in some connection with other colors can it take on significance and meaning and become expression. There is no painting in which color is an end in itself. It has to be noticed, felt, experienced.<18 Surely these words can be applied precisely to the composition scene in which instrumental colors burst out in the fervor of Olivier's and Julie's act of composition. If the concept of >>picture<< is just replaced by the concept of >music(, Pra2i?'s thesis takes on a new meaning in a different art.

In this scene, Pra2ik's sentence >>While form is subject to control by the intel- lect, color opens up the door to the emotions<19 corresponds to both music and picture. According to the vocabulary of Blue, this sentence is translated as follows: Julie is overwhelmed by emotions the whole of the film, although she attempts to repress them. They well up from her when she composes as well, but directing them into the right form, that of music, she can control them and cope with them. Only at that moment when form encompasses her feelings expressed through music are they trammeled and capable of being made part of everyday life, capable of being presented to the public and the world in the form of the Concerto.

Painting and music, both arts and both oriented to a single given sense, have to find a common language in Blue. And how should they not be able to, when concepts like color, line, tone painting, form, chromatics, harmony and the twelve part circle are used in both arts? Perhaps for this reason the music in the film ?feels somehow blue(.

The significance of the color blue, then, is not connected exclusively with the French flag and the motto of liberty. Kieslowski and his usual scriptwriter Krzystof Piesiewicz aimed at a deeper expression of filmic blue than through its symbolism. Johnnes Itten wrote of the symbolism of blue in painting some twenty years before the creation of the trilogy Three Colors: >>Blue is always cold, red warm. Blue works in an

18s Branko PRAZlC, 1989 Sight and appearance of Art, Zagreb, Mladost, p. 20. 19 Branko PRAZIC, ibid., p. 21.




introverted way, as if it were withdrawn into itself. ... Blue is like a muffled power that is possessed by nature in winter, when all germination, all growth, rest in darkness and quiet. Blue is always shadowy, and in its strongest shades leans towards the dark. It is the intangible nothing, and yet it is present, as the transparent atmosphere is also present.<<20 Is this not the blue that flickers on the face of the unhappy Julie or the blue that in a deep psychological way colors the interior of the pool? This is the color of Julie's spirit, but not of her character (she is black, and dresses mainly in black). And so the music of Preisner also seems blue, for it presents a part of the film and the idea, and thus presents part of the color blue. Through the music we listen to the sound of this color of retirement that >>fills the spirit with flutterings of faith in the infinite distances of the spirit<< and that occasionally falls into >>the abyss of terror, superstition, spiritual unease and loss<< and yet >>signifies the kingdom of the supernatural and the transcendental<<.21

Hanslick, Kieslowski and Three Colors: Blue

Linking music with painting, with its role of providing guiding motifs and talking of its color and feeling, we carry on from Itten's understanding of the creative process when he says that >>in art what is created rationally cannot be of essential importance. Above that is intuitive feeling which leads to the empire of the irrational and the metaphysical, which cannot be expressed by any kind of num- bers.<<22

It seems that painting, before music, succeeded in freeing itself of the disci- pline of set forms and gave itself over to feelings of which art is the most faithful expression. Because what is there creative in keeping to forms that are set in advance, always the same? If form is the basic expression of the beautiful, of which Hanslick talks, then only he who first of all thought up a form is creative, all others being fake artists, plagiarists.

In Blue Kieslowski attempted to reconcile the constant conflict between form and content, genuinely foregrounding form as the basic element of the beautiful in art, but not in so doing underrating the importance of content. Preisner's music subserves both form and content, both inner beauty and external gloss. It does, it is true, endeavor through musical resources to show the extra-musical content (according to Hanslick, music can show nothing outside itself), but adheres firmly to the film's and its own architecture that has been thought out in advance, architecture that is in a real sense >>a symmetry of parts in their sequence<<.23

In fact, >>any work of art that exists in time has some shape to it, even though a familiar pattern may not be immediately obvious. While certain forms (formal designs) may depend on a formal scheme, form, as a process of relationships is

20 Hohannes ITTEN, 1973, The Art of Color, p. 102. 21 Ibid., p. 102. 2 Ibid., p. 32. 23 Eduard HANSLICK, ibid., p. 173.




a universal procedure of integration that is required for meaningful apprehension by a listener.<<24 The direct integration of form and musical meaning could be trans- ferred to the films of Krzystof Kieglowski, their basic meaning being their form, with their content a merely necessary link between the parts.

If we move away a moment from the music (not forgetting that this discus- sion has sprung from it) and cast a >>bird's eye view< at all three films of Three Colors, we will understand that their purpose and being lies above all in the playing with symbolism, with psychological and physical explanations of the painterly phenomenon of music and in the playing with form and its integration with content.

The sequence of films Blue, White, Red is not conditioned only by the order of colors in the French flag. For blue is a cold color and tends to retreat inside, white is neutral, static, while red is warm and outgoing. In this way of looking at colors, white as a non-color stays in the center while the other colors move. Kieslowski accentuates the static nature of white by insisting on content in White, which, unlike the other films of the trilogy, is very well developed. Red and Blue do not stay on the surface like White but stand out either by form (Blue) or symbolism (Red).

This means that if we look at the trilogy as a whole, it could be attributed with the musical form of the tripartite poem A B A1. The irregular overlap of A and A,, that is of Blue and Red, is seen in the arrangement of the main character (female in both films, while in White the main character is a man). The regular tripartite form is confirmed by the static nature or mobility of the colors and the relation of form and content of each individual film.

As for the importance of form in the artistically beautiful, it would seem that Hanslick is right when he said that bare form is beautiful. But we cannot say that he was right in the only way, because he adhered one-sidedly and stubbornly to a thesis he did not allow to be falsified. In the case of Kieslowski, Hanslick's thesis works in this way:

1. The domination of form in Three Colors: Blue brought this film to an aesthetic culmination. Luckily, Kie'lowski did not cross the border that would have brought him to foregrounding form for the sheer sake of it. His form is dominant, but still works for the sake of content.

2. The domination of content in Three Colors: White has given this film a pe- ripheral position in comparison with the other two.

3. In Three Colors: Red, through symbolism of content, an equilibrium is at- tained between content and form.

For this reason Red is a film that is interesting to aesthetes and the wider public alike. For many this film occupies the first place in the trilogy, but for some, who cannot swallow the insistent symbolism of simply every frame, object and character, this is the worst film of the three. In Blue there is no such contrast. Through

24 Mary WENNESTROM, 1975, >Form in Twentieth Century Music(< in Aspects of Twentieth Cen-

tury Music, ed. G. Wittlich, NJ, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, p. 2 (quote from NikSa GLIGO, 1987, Problems of the New Music of the 20th Century: Theoretical Foundations and Critical Evaluations, Zagreb, MuziCki informacijski centar Koncertne direkcije Zagreb, p. 101).




a form that works for the sake of a content that is secondary, the film satisfies the most meticulous aesthetes, theoreticians and analysts.

Let us return to the music and its form. Most commonly, criticism is made of film music because it does not follow classical formal patterns. This kind of criticism springs from sheer lack of understanding, because film music does have a form, if not classical form. Its form is primarily ordained by the image and the events on the screen. This is the case in Kieslowski, although he often required the music to be composed before the film, the film being later cut according to the music. In such cases the composer works according to the script (once again he has a model), while because the film is cut according to the music it becomes the em- bodiment of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Understanding of the form of film music is very important for any grasping of music and image as a whole. >Unlike the visuals of a film which are ever-present and, as a result, have the opportunity for smooth organic growth, music is not one of the ongoing elements of a film. Good film music is used sparingly, and only at those moments where it will be most effective. This important dictum of good film music presents a unique formal problem for the composer. Form in absolute music, such as sonata-allegro or rondo, depends a great deal on the principle of repetition and contrast, but repetition and contrast in a relatively short time span, and without interruption. With film, on the other hand, there may be long sections with no music at all, in which the audience has plenty of time to forget whatever musical material it may have heard earlier. Knowing this, the film composer has several general formal resources at his disposal to achieve some sort of formal unity in his music.<<'

Sometimes there really is the opportunity for the composer to use a traditional formal model. But on the whole this occurs in the case of diegetic music that is consciously perceived. This is the case with the choir from the film The Double Life of Veronica, in the sounds of which the form of the tripartite poem can easily be recognized.

As far as background music is concerned, traditional formal models are seldom useable. According to Roy Prendergast the basic formal sources available to the screen music composer for the composition of an integrated film score are:

1. monothematic scores, 2. developmental scores and 3. the use of the leitmotif. While the monothematic score uses only one theme for the whole of the film,

the developmental score is based on thematic work and powerfully recalls the sonata form.

Preisner's score in Three Colors: Blue builds its form through the use of the leitmotif. We have already shown which leitmotifs are concerned and what their function in the film is. Here we would like to draw particular attention to an unusual feature. In most films the audience becomes acquainted with the leitmotifs

25 Roy M. PRENDERGAST, 1992, Film Music -a Neglected Art, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, p. 231.




right at the beginning, so as to be able to remember them and recognize them easily later. However, Preisner, in Blue, brings the leitmotifs in gradually, with us getting to know some of them at the beginning, and hearing some only near the end. The Dead March and Julie's theme are present from the very beginning, the busker's theme somewhere in the middle, and Olivier's theme only in the closing scenes. However, this music is so powerful and melodic that just those few bars of Olivier's theme can at once be remembered and recognized in the Concerto for the Unification of Europe at the end of the film. The role of the Concerto actually is to tie these pieces together and to make a logic and indivisible whole out of a mosaic.

Although he works with musical fractions that he deliberately cuts off and leaves incomplete, Preisner fits his music fantastically well into the script and other elements of the film, in spite of writing it before the shooting. Photography, editing, visuals, acting, music, sound and color mutually complement and connect up with each other: this is clear from the beginning of the film, and audible from the first appearance of background music on the screen.

This scene occurs at the time Julie is in hospital, recovering from the conse- quences of the accident. Julie is sleeping in a chair on the balcony and is suddenly lit up by a blue light. One does not know exactly where it comes from, probably from the blue glass of the door of the balcony, perhaps the blue light of the television that is on (the same on which the young woman watched the funeral of her husband in the previous scene). The Dead March begins at the same time as the light appears, and since Julie suddenly starts awake, we have the idea that she is woken by the music. Only later will we see that she has been woken by a journalist who has come to see her. The blue light, then, comes from the reflection of the blue glass, brought about by the opening of the balcony door. The music has only a background function.

The function of the music in the scene could be interpreted differently. If we did not see the newspaperwoman at the end of the scene, we might say that the light and the music come from the television that we do not see, but which we have seen in the previous scene. Since the source of both light and music is deliberately hidden and only partially explained at the end of the scene, it seems that the director wishes to create in the viewer the desire to move and see what is happening behind the film screen. If the source of the music had really been the television, then the Dead March would subserve the foregrounding of reality, but since the music is background, it then calls attention to memory of the terrible events. By skilled manipulation of the camera, Kieslowski has managed to awaken the curiosity of the viewer, and link the real and the unreal through this little game with the source of the music.

While in the first part of the scene the close linkage between the elements of the films is highlighted, the second part stresses film music form, achieved by similar means. After Julie's awakening, the audience can hear from offstage the greeting >>Hello< from the still invisible visitor. As Julie starts slowly to move her head towards the voice (the source of which we still cannot see), she is enveloped by deep blackness through which the sounds of the Dead March are once again heard. This is the first >black hole< in Julie's memory. The music disappears together with



88 I. PAULUS, A RHAPSODY IN SHADES OF BLUE, IRASM 30 (1999) 1, 65---91

the darkened screen, Julie listlessly replies >>Hello< and only then will we see the face of the visitor in the frame.

The Dead March, which starts with the turn of Julie's head, and disappears together with the >>black hole<, is bounded in the scene by two >Bonjours?, which means that, as well as music, other filmic elements have taken part in giving shape to the musical form. This film/musical form is tripartite, and completely shows the A B A scheme. Real sound (greetings) works as part of A, while image (the blacking out of the screen) works as part of the central, B part; they both take an equal share in the construction of the musical form, which keeps up with the content, foregrounding Julie's emotions, and stresses the mysterious (playing with the source of the blue light).

Examples in which images help to create musical form are as rare as films in which music is really inseparable from the film and every part of it. In Blue all the filmic elements interpenetrate each other to such an extent that the music (which often aspires to be separate, either classical or popular) cannot survive independently. An attempt to listen to Preisner's music from some recording (and you can try it yourself) is a failure; the music is disappointingly split up and it is hard to enjoy it. Parts that, motif by motif, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, are gradually composed into a meaningful whole the brilliance of which crowns them in the most ceremonious way, listened to on their own are just incomplete fragments without point or inner beauty. The film is designed from the beginning as a whole, and its parts, imagined to work together like a fine piece of cloth, cannot be perceived in separation. And precisely because of this the music, separated from the film, means nothing, while in the environment for which it was created it is full of symbolism, meaning, point and function.

When the music is divorced from the context, the feeling of delicious expectation of the moment when the individual lines gradually converge into a perfect whole is lost. The film is actually conceived in such a way as to grow and take shape gradually, as a musical composition also takes shape. The whole film is that: one big process of composition, which begins from small motifs and develops over sentences, periods, themes, sections and movements to a great concerto.

The link between music and image is visible at the macro- and the micro- level. The essence of the connection is not only in the content and the expression of deep emotions from Julie's interior. This essence is in the image's, in an indirect, sophisticated way (primarily by cutting, editing and camera movement), following and revealing the structure of every theme. Preisner's music is formally clear and almost conventional in its regular sequencing of two bar phrases and four bar sentences. In fact this music is very ordinary, but with the assistance of image and color it becomes beautiful, unusual, interesting and attractive. The image gives the music a dimension that music does not itself have, and which can only with difficulty be called by a given name, since it is not a matter only of visualization.

Talking of the connection between music and image, their complementation and connection with other elements of the film we have partially confirmed and partially rebutted the theses of Hanslick's musical aesthetic >Of the musically beautiful<<. Kieslowski has confirmed the thesis >the beauty of music lies in its form< by




stressing the form in an unusual way through image, visual motion and immobil- ity, line and visual form. The beauty of the music wins us through its own and the film's forms: music becomes still more elevated and aesthetically more desirable.

But when Hanslick says that music can express nothing, least of all feelings, in some situations he controverts himself, justifying himself through an unclear in- termingling of the ideas of sense and feeling. His pen wrote that >the presentation of feelings is not the content of music<26 but also that >>music works on the mental condition faster and more intensively than any other work of art<27. Since the author himself is not certain of what he wants to prove, we shall nudge him a little in the desired direction. For how else can we explain the music in Blue, which is the main vehicle of the deep grief and pain, of the >black holes< and the memories, the flight from reality, but which is also a kind of consolation, hope and faith, an expression of happiness, peace, love, and, finally, spiritual balance?

Of course, Hanslick's considerations could be applied to absolute classical music, which is composed, listened to and experienced in a way totally different to that of other musical genres. Opera, operetta, film and stage music are experienced through their subordination to content, the stage and other elements, and probably could not exist if they had no effect on the feelings of the public. If music could not awaken emotions in the listener, composing film music would be a very risky and unnecessary job. Then we would not be able to foresee the reaction of the audience, and direct it in the desired way through music.

A composer often uses stereotyped musical devices that certainly awaken certain feelings and guarantee an appropriate reaction from the audience. This means that in music there must be something that encourages emotion, something that works on our nervous system and makes it react in a certain way. Of course, music can certainly be experienced in a different way, but the differences among subjec- tive ways of experiencing are in fact minimal. Music abetted by image directs the reaction of the audience to a precisely desired channel, and it is impossible for a tragic scene in a film to work tragically on one person, and humorously on another.

Hanslick's deliberations are carried on by musical theoretician Pavel Rojko, who in his work Music Teaching Methods says that music is sufficient unto itself, because it is its own purpose. Accordingly, there is no need for, no point in, any linkage of music with other arts since it is self-sufficient and resilient. Pavel Rojko's theory, meticulously worked out and explained, does not work, however, when it comes to film music. Arguing from the example of Blue we have shown that film music will in some cases survive with difficulty outside its context, and that an attempt to live independently outside the complex of film arts results in a major loss for it. In Blue it is so much enmeshed in the film's tissue that along, outside, it, the music loses the point, meaning and essence of its existence.

Of course, not everyone can link music so meticulously and precisely with the other arts. We know how Kielowski worked with his associates and that he ex-

26 Eduard HANSLICK, ibid, p. 55. 27 Ibid., p. 117.




pected the maximum from all of them. He left nothing to chance, and the composer had to teach the cameraman to read music, train the actress in feeling, experiencing, hearing and creating music. This is a rare example of such dedicated film work, and the result justified the pains.

In Three Colors: Blue every moment, in every part (pictorial, photographic, musical, setting, acting, technical and so on) has been very carefully thought through, planned in advance and worked out in the mind. Behind it all there is an amazing and unique manner of thinking that offers an ineffable aesthetic and artistic pleasure. It is a pity that the artist has gone for ever and that we will not have the opportunity to see more of his work. Kielowski's works sharpen the artistic appetite to the point of insatiability, and it can be slaked only by the knowledge that there will be no more of it, that it is the only one of its kind. Perhaps it is better this way, for one is valued higher than many. His films and the lovely music of Zbigniew Preisner, which he himself admired so much, are all that remain. Per- haps this is what Kielowski wanted to tell us when he ended Three Colors: Blue with the words:

>>Prophecy may fail, languages cease, knowledge vanish. All that remains is faith, hope and charity. And the greatest of the three is charity.<<28

(translated into English by Graham McMaster)

28 1st Corinthians, 13, 13.




Safetak

GLAZBA U FILMU KRZYSTOFA KIESLOWSKOG TRI BOJE: PLAVO. RAPSODIJA U NIJANSAMA PLAVOG: RAZMIkLJANJA JEDNOG GLAZBENIKA

U filmu Tri boje: Plavo poljskog redatelja Krzystofa Kiedlowskog glazba ima iznimno va2nu ulogu. Skladatelj Zbignew Preisner definirao je Plavo kao >...muzitki film, ali ne, naravno, u holivudskom smislu. On govori o skladatelju koji sklada povodom ujedinjenja Europe.( Naime, redatelj Kie'lowski zahtjevao je od skladatelja Preisnera da napige glazbu odmah po zavrSetku scenarija, kako bi se film mogao snimiti prema glazbi. Skladatelj i redatelj pronaSli su zajednitki jezik koji je sam skladatelj jednostavno opisao rijedima: >Glazba treba oslikavati film, ali mudro. To zna6i da se ne treba baviti vanjskim dogadajem koji gledamo na ekranu, ved onim Sto se nalazi u ijudima, Sto je u glumcima, a istodobno i u nama samima, dakle gledateljima...<<.

Kroz postupno uvodenje filmskih tema - Posmrtnog marga, Juliene teme, teme uliknog svirata i Oliverove teme - Zbignew Preisner je postupno predstavio teme koje podjednako funkcioniraju kao filmske teme i kao teme Koncerta za ujedinjenje Europe, djela koje nastaje tijekom filma.

Osim toga, tema glavne junakinje Julie i Posmrtni mars predstavljali su glazbu koja se javljala u glavi nesretne udovice poput sjedanja i duboke boli, pa ih je skladatelj iskoristio na natin metadijegetskog (oniritnog) zvuka.

Vigeslojnost filma odrazila se u vigeslojnosti glazbe. Svakoj filmskoj komponenti odgovarala je barem jedna glazbena. To se odrazilo i u melodijskom i u formalnom smislu, te u smislu boje, postupka s temama i njihove duboke povezanosti s filmskom naracijom.

Trilogija Krzystofa Kies1owskog Tri boje (osim filma Tri boje: Plavo snimljena su joS dva slihnog naslova: Tri boje: Bijelo i Tri boje: Crveno) inspirirana je bojama francuske zastave i francuskim nacionalnim motom: >sloboda, bratstvo i jednakost<. Za ostvarenje redateljeve intepretacije tog mota posebno je bila va2na uska suradnja i medusobno razumijevanje redatelja i skladatelja.



music in krzysztof kieślowski's film "three colors: blue". a rhapsody in shades of...

Documents