By Moira de Kok, Utrecht University - winner of the 2020 IASPM VNPF Popular Music Thesis Prize [BA]
It is common knowledge that, although not always the focus of attention, a film’s music contributes heavily to its storytelling. During my bachelor in Musicology at Utrecht University, I learnt a lot about how this works technically. For example, film music can play within the story world (diegetic), outside it (non-diegetic), or cross between these two spheres (trans-diegetic). Yet I often wondered how a formal analysis of film music may reveal what a film wants to convey to its audience. More specifically, I was curious how film music could send a political message.
To answer this question, I quickly landed on Pride, a 2014 film directed by Matthew Warchus. It is based on the real-life story of the bond between a small Welsh miners’ community and the London-based support group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) during the 1984–85 miners’ strike in the United Kingdom. The strike’s goal was to prevent pit closures leaving many miners unemployed. As the strike lasted for nearly one year and the miners were without income for this time, groups like LGSM formed to financially support miners’ families. The central topic of the film, then, is solidarity.
Pride seemed like a very useful film through which to explore the political meaning of film music, given both its topic and its use of pre-existing music. For my thesis, then, I analysed how solidarity featured in the music of two scenes.
In the first scene, a miner’s wife begins to sing ‘Bread and Roses’. Gradually, more singers join in, spontaneously harmonising; at some point, invisible instruments can be heard. The source of the scene’s sound becomes ambiguous: some of the voices are surely diegetic, but what about the perfect harmonies and the instruments?
In the second scene, the singer of Bronski Beat is shown from the back as the opening notes of ‘Why?’ sound. This angle makes it that the source of the sound is uncertain – is it really him singing, is it playing over the speakers, is it non-diegetic? Only when the shot changes do we realise that the music is performed on stage diegetically. Still, in that moment of trans-diegesis, Somerville’s voice seems to belong to no body in particular.
In both of these scenes, the ‘fantastical gap’ (as Robynn Stilwell would call it) between diegetic and non-diegetic is crossed in some way. I found that the blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic, onscreen and offscreen, creates an intense connection between the audience and the film. The music connects characters and audiences across identities and communities.
The fantastical gap works together with the lyrics and connotations of the music, as a labour movement song and a queer synthpop song, respectively, to gather the film’s characters and audience into solidarity. This solidarity is both social – as its members realise they have important things in common – and political – as it is directed towards undoing a particular kind of injustice.
In short, the bridging of gaps is the central theme of my thesis. Firstly, both solidarity and trans-diegesis can be considered to bridge gaps. But more importantly, I wanted to show how the gap between politics and film music can be bridged. Much can and should still be done to better understand this gap and its bridges – I certainly look forward to continuing my research on this topic later this year. However, for now, I wish to leave you with two questions: is film music political? If so, what makes it so?
Moira de Kok
Moira de Kok recently completed her BA in Musicology at Utrecht University and is currently a Research Master student there. Broadly, her research interests lie at the three-way crossroads of music, media, and intersecting identities, such as gender, sexuality and race.
Complete thesis available here.
Contact:
Email: m.m.dekok@students.uu.nl
Twitter: https://twitter.com/moiradekok