Conference Agenda

Serious concerns about film’s social impact first emerged in an organized way about 1910, after the industry transitioned from sideshow amusement to mass entertainment behemoth. Such concerns had particular momentum in Ireland, where cinema’s perceived moral threat intertwined with Ireland’s religiosity and fight for independence. The island had no indigenous film industry, so monitoring the impact of imported films carried special importance for those seeking to protect Ireland from external political and social influences. Calls for censorship in Ireland were made more urgent by the resilience of its cinema market, which remained strong throughout the silent era despite tremendous political instability, including rebellion (Easter Rising, 1916), revolution (Anglo-Irish War, 1919-1921), fierce infighting (Irish Civil War, 1922-1923), and the formation of a new government (Irish Free State, 1922). Among the Irish Free State’s first legislative acts was the Censorship of Films Act (1923).

The Irish Free State's first censor was James Montgomery, who held the post from 1923-1940. Records of Montgomery’s decisions, including his detailed (and often witty) rationales for cutting or rejecting films, were unavailable to scholars until 1998, when the Irish government lifted its embargo on the records. FIlm scholar Kevin Rockett offered the first general analysis of these documents, in his pioneering Irish Film Censorship (2004). This paper builds on Rockett’s work by focusing on an intriguing element of Montgomery’s decisions in the silent era: music. For the first seven years of his work as censor (1923-1930), Montgomery screened films in silence, yet it is clear from his rationales that he thought about the music that would accompany the films and the effect that it might have. He paid careful attention to musical references, routinely slashing scenes referencing jazz or depicting popular dances. He even cut scenes that he suspected would draw “the accompaniment of the most sensuous music” in the theaters and magnify a scene’s immoral potential. My analysis, which is based on the voluminous Film Censor Office documents in the National Archives of Ireland, offers new insights into Ireland’s first film censor, as well on music’s place in the censorship debates of the silent era.

Scorsese often surrounds the hard men who fill his early films with feminine-associated music. This expressive strategy imbues their masculinity with a lyrical quality that also shapes the formal extension of the films themselves as works of art made in/of time.

Film form frequently follows musical form. In Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967) and Mean Streets (1973), fights among young men unfold to near complete playings of 1960s Latin and girl group pop records. Across the length of Taxi Driver (1976), a melody by Bernard Herrmann, titled “So Close to Me Blues” in the conductor’s score, sounds fourteen times, with the tune always honored in the cut (the image track paced to match extended musical phrases). In Raging Bull (1980), three expansive opera intermezzos by Mascagni punctuate at wide intervals a story otherwise told in unscored dialogue and boxing matches.

The expressive content of the above musical choices often work in apparent and pronounced contrast to the characters and screen actions they musicalize. Indeed, anempathic (or counter) scoring proves central to Scorsese’s construction of flawed, morally ambivalent, often inarticulate, frequently very violent white male characters. This lending of lyric musical form and conventionally feminine musical content to hypermasculine characters shapes both the male characters as cinematic figures and the viewer’s experience of cinematic time (which unfolds in these films with the unpredictable flow of art cinema rather than the efficient linearity of Hollywood movies).

This paper analyzes early Scorsese’s anempathic musical choices, understood as both form and content, at two levels of magnification. The distribution of scored and unscored segments across entire runtimes gives these films a larger, intermittently lyrical structure that shapes their respective central characters. Individual cues, whether compiled from popular or classical sources or original compositions, lend surprisingly closed musical shape to chaotic narrative events and create extended zones of contemplation (or revulsion) that trouble any one-dimensional reading of characters or plot, lending Scorsese’s hard men a musical interiority not otherwise present. Evidence drawn upon includes draft screenplays, manuscript scores, recordings used in the films, and Scorsese’s words about the making of these films.

In 2022, the documentary film Yeh Shih-tao: A Taiwan Man premiered at Taiwanese cinemas and film festivals. This film, which is director Hsu Hui-lin’s feature-length debut, follows the life and times of Taiwanese author and scholar Yeh Shih-tao (1925-2008). Although Yeh’s career was shaped by Taiwan’s four decades of martial law (1949-1987), Hsu’s does not set out in this film to review well-known details of Taiwan’s martial law era. Rather, she aims to help audiences “feel how terrifying, how oppressive” it was to work as an intellectual during this era (ethnographic interview, 2023). To this end, Hsu’s film incorporates a wide range of performing arts, including modern dance, spoken theater, and the traditional Japanese narrative art of rakugo.

In this talk, I investigate Hsu’s use of performance genres as a source of “feeling” in documentary film. Although each of the performances featured in the film is based on Yeh’s works, Hsu commissioned all of the performances, workshopped them with the artists, and filmed them “live.” As such, each of these works represents a directorial choice about the relation between the performing arts and Hsu’s documentary goals. Ultimately, I find that Hsu’s film leverages “live” theatrical genres to offer audiences a pedagogy of feeling, rather than a strictly historical account.

Hsu’s use of theatrical forms sets her work apart from both documentary practice and interdisciplinary scholarship on documentary film. First, Hsu’s use of performing arts is distinct from underscoring practices discussed in the growing scholarship on music in documentary film (Donnelly 2014; Rogers 2015; Birtwistle 2016). Second, Hsu’s narrative strategies fit uneasily within socially activist trends in 21^st-century Taiwanese documentary (Chiu and Zhang 2015; Lin and Sang 2012). Finally, Hsu’s work stands apart from documentary films that take music as their object of investigation, such as Ballad on the Shore (Chi 2017) or Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (Chien 2003). As a creative endeavor, Hsu’s film provides new ways of understanding both the tools documentary filmmakers use to educate audiences, and the emotionally persuasive role of music in documentaries that “aren’t only rhetorical but also poetic and story-driven” (Nichols 2015).