La valeur parenthétique de la musique au cinéma : fondements musicologiques et picturaux

Abstract

In many ways, the opening shot of Werckmeister Harmonies (2001, Tarr Béla, Hungary) contains the multiple issues spectators may encounter in Tarr’s films. In it, we see Valuska, an exalted mailman, lead the local drunks to re-enact a solar eclipse. However, just as the sunlight disappears behind the moon, extradiegetic music starts and the camera begins an upward and backward tracking shot, raising the frame until it is bathed in light behind the bar's bare old light bulb. This synesthesic association of music and light, of the immobility of bodies and the mobility of the frame, is an invitation to think about what constitutes, at the deepest level, the “parenthetical value of music” (M. Chion) and the iconic register of the image in cinema. Filmmakers and music composers are thus able to draw on the ontological properties of music (structure, harmony, instrumentation) and painting (Incarnation and Ascension figures, the visual order of the image) to signify absolute otherness, the exit from filmic time and its diegesis: “when the material of representation comes forward, all that is represented runs the risk of collapsing” (Didi-Huberman).

Keywords

• visual
• parenthetical value
• extradiegetic music
• cinematic signifier
• substractive cinema