TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The Creation of a Continuous Stream through the Saturation of Musical Factors

The rhythmic construction and formal density of a piece of music can be employed in an action scene. To better give rise to empathy for the characters’ fatigue, one can take to the factors to an extreme in order to give the sensation of a longer period of time.

Most of the action sequences in the Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass film Jason Bourne and its sequels (2002, 2004 and 2007) are important examples of this; the percussive music by John Powell (composer for the franchise), which is animated while remaining imperturbably regular in its rhythmic swell, provides an invaluable guiding principle for a deliberately graceless and impetuous visual grammar, one seemingly disordered in particular through the unpredictability of its cuts and of the camera’s positions and movements. This is especially the case in outdoor chase scenes, unlike the indoor duel scenes, which most often dispense with these camera movements, both for lack of space and out of concern to desaturate the scene in order to make sparing use of effects. In other words, the viewer’s attention being fixed on only one thread, the regularity of the music makes it possible for the unbridled chase scenes to remain understandable. Here the music takes on the integration function described by Laurent Guido with respect to the musical practices of the newly institutionalised film medium in France in the very early years of the twentieth century.^[1] Music then was “less narrative than it was dramatic, meaning seeking to establish equilibrium during the screening in the emotions, registers, degrees of intensity, etc.” Taking the form of a continuous stream, it attracted little attention. Here the composer sought both to give rhythm to the sequence and to make the music forgotten: Dr Ramain would undoubtedly speak of its “secondary role” and “almost hypnogenetic” function.^[2]

It is amusing to note, moreover, that the density evoked does not necessarily relate to the tempo of the music: a very rapid tempo causing boredom because it is repetitive can be much more painful to put up with than a slow tempo with steady and colourful rhythmic renewals. In this precise context, the viewer’s attention breaks off from the filmic continuum and ends up becoming aware of the passing time, an effect more than undesirable from a dramatic perspective, governed precisely by the need to maintain the viewer’s attention, as Laurent Guido points out, noting the etymology of the English word entertainment.^[3] In this sense, the sequence of the freeing of the zombies from the container in Russell Mulcahy’s Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) is edifying. Charlie Clouser’s music may very well renew its orchestration relatively frequently, but the overall rhythmic dynamic changes only peripherally (with flowing melodic lines whose connection to the action is either absent or hyper-synchronised, dissuading the viewer from paying attention to a stream that intrinsically brings nothing to the narrative). This rhythmic dynamic takes on the purely functional role of padding a space already inundated with cuts, sound effects, trick effects and special effects.