Conference Agenda

Diverse strategies have been used by scholars to explicate the relationships between moving images, music, and sound. While highly valuable, studies are often confined to the traditionally supportive role of the score in commercial cinema, treating music as a device that clarifies the narrative and enhances emotional engagement. Feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s works challenge these approaches by resisting fixed narratives and instead prioritizing cinematic structures that function independently of traditional storytelling. Aspiring to create what she called “pure cinema,” Akerman developed films in which formal elements—rhythm, repetition, and contrast—shape viewers’ experiences. These aesthetic choices invite scholars to consider musical structures beyond heard sonorities, as expressive modes that shape interactions between sound, image, and cinematic temporality.

Drawing from Cohen’s (2002, 2013) cognitive studies of musical structures in films and Hanninen’s (2012) theory of music analysis, I argue that Akerman’s films demand from viewers a musical mode of attention that privileges pattern recognition, segmentation, and associative organization across both the visual and auditory domains. For instance, Saute ma ville (1968)—in which a young woman, played by Akerman herself, engages in an increasingly erratic sequence of household chores that culminate in a gas-induced explosion—unfolds as a rondo-like structure, reinforced by a recurring musical refrain (the rondeau theme from Rameau’s Tambourin Suite, RCT 2) sang in voiceover. The theme partitions the film into a series of episodes, each of which explores various acousmatic listening situations presented as household chores-gone-wrong, turning the kitchen into a playground for sonic experiences. News from Home (1976) employs a counterpoint of juxtaposed layers— long takes of Manhattan’s streets, ambient urban sounds, and Akerman voice reading letters from her mother—to explore her experience as an immigrant in 1970s New York. While each layer seems independent at first, their interactions create a cinematic rhythm that gives rise to a narrative of alienation without relying on characters, dialogue, or storytelling.

By expanding the musical object of analysis to encompass moving images and sound, this study engages with cinema’s structural and experiential complexities beyond score-based methodologies. Moreover, this paper takes a step toward developing a versatile, multidimensional model for musical analysis.

In 1830s Paris, a tradition of serious pantomime emerged which for the rest of the century rivaled both conventional theater and opera in its popularity. Centered around the famed Boulevard du Temple, pantomime developed several musical conventions that drew from theater, opera, and commedia dell’arte. These conventions were well documented by writers such as Théophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Paul Hugounet. At the beginning of the 20^th century, pantomime virtually disappeared, essentially replaced by the similar medium of silent film, which adopted some of its conventions.

Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Children of Paradise was an homage to those theatrical and pantomime traditions, and aimed at recreating them on screen. Written by Jacques Prévert, and filmed during the Nazi occupation, the film’s theatrical scenes and Commedia dell’Arte-inspired pantomimes were based on actual 19^th-century works. Composer Joseph Kosma, working clandestinely, wrote a series of pantomime scores for key passages of the film, and like Carné and Prévert, endeavored to meticulously portray the earlier epoch, with precise attention to historical detail and authenticity.

This paper will show how Kosma drew from the long but by-then-forgotten tradition of pantomime music that had become prevalent in the previous century. Kosma was well aware of the writings of the 19^th century authors, and their discussions of pantomime music are reflected in his compositions for the film. In so doing, Kosma was recreating some of the conventions which would later be adopted by the film composers themselves, essentially returning the art-form to the roots of the film-music tradition.

Silence, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō’s novel about Jesuit priests entering Japan to minister to persecuted Christian communities in hiding, was recently adapted to film by Scorsese, who considered the pursuit a longstanding passion project. The novel’s narrative brings issues of culture and colonialism to the fore, where religion operates not necessarily as an inner disposition but as a violent social and material force. While Scorsese’s adaptation is well-known, a Japanese adaptation by Masahiro Shinoda with a score by Tōru Takemitsu preceded his by 45 years. Both films hew closely to the source novel's narrative, presenting a unique case study to compare treatments of music, sound, and religion in parallel scenes, informed by theories of religion and of multimodal analysis.

Shinoda’s adaptation uses the music to maximize the external cultural and political conflict presented by the historical Edo period in which the story occurs. In writing the score Takemitsu imitates historical styles including a gagaku mode hymn and a faux-Renaissance ayre for guitar that explicitly takes on the role of “the West” in conflict with dissonant clusters characteristic of his personal compositional style. In this way the music fits more within a context of identity formation in postwar Japan in which artists such and Endō and Takemitsu engaged discourses of east and west to navigate the traumas inflicted both on and by Japan during World War II.

Scorsese’s adaptation instead adopts a sparing approach to music, opting for an artificial lack of sound at crucial moments to mark religious space. The intensely subjective experience of sound, culminating in God's voice speaking metadiegetically to the protagonist, makes literal an individualistic and internal, though also contestable conception of faith as a universal and dehistoricized human experience. Both approaches displace the question of “religious” music onto assumptions inherent to the perceiver, where sound draws the viewer into religious discourses of authenticity and essence critical to the ultimately divergent trajectories of both films.