Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

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348 CLOSE UP prodigy of animated screen images. Not until this miracle had lost its blush was attention turned to the refining of its technique and to expanding the field of its capabilities, with the resultant divorcing of it from its initial conceptual association with the magic lantern. That a like evolutionary change is destined to follow the present focussing of satisfaction on mere vocality, is a foregone conclusion. Evidences of it are already at hand. The musical scoring of pictures is no longer entrusted exclusively to hacks and tin-pan-alley song writers. The value of intelligent and sympathetic scoring is becoming slowly appreciated. Circus-band accompaniments are giving place to music, and to music designed truly to complement the varying moods of a film and to form an actual, component, interwoven part of it as a facilitative factor in its ideophonic interpretation. Pioneer examples of this coming change are afforded by Cavalcade and Farewell to Arms. The former is almost wholly devoid of characteristic Hollywood jazz. What little there is of it was introduced advisedly as serviceable to a purpose, and was written by the versatile Noel Coward himself. The rest of the musical setting was composed and adapted from the classics by Touis di Francesco, and the result is an achievement of melodic sentiment which is not only in keeping with the spirit of the picture, but which also blends with it as a constituent emotional element of the drama. In addition to the significance of Hollywood's having countenanced this artistic innovation, an illuminating glimpse of the future may be gleaned from Di Francesco's explication of his work on the picture. " In Cavalcade," he says, " I began with a miniature overture played during the running of the annunciative portion of the film. I have a call for the trumpets, the Fate motif going through the score, rising in pitch as the drama mounts in intensity, and either sent out alone or embellished with rich orchestration, as the mood of the play suggests. I used a chorus of eighty voices in several of the sequences because only by giving the audience an impression of a many-voiced crowd could I convey the bigness and dignity of the story's historical events. Combining the chorus with the symphonic background emphasized the chaos of the war scenes. " Recording the full symphony orchestra and the chorus without losing the resonance and the overtones presented an interesting and no little difficult problem. After numerous experiments I finally had a stage constructed to form a sounding board, without which even a piano is dead. That was better, but the results were still short of what I desired. Then I had the stage covered with two coats of varnish and built up the orchestra in perspective, as on an actual orchestra stage, and this, at last, gave me the resonance and beauty I wanted." And thus he goes on to define his methods and to recite the experiments and devices necessary to accomplish his purpose. And they are here mentioned as an indication of the enlarged intelligence and vision now being applied to the musical phase of the cinema. It marks the beginning of a new valuation of music and its employment as a symphonic integrant of pictorial dramaturgy.