Художественная культура (Dec 2023)
Geist-Theme as a Meaningful Absence of Film Music
Abstract
The article is devoted to the specifics of films in which music may not form an essential part of the soundtrack, sometimes appearing only in a few seconds of sound, or may not be present in the soundtrack at all, but have a strong influence on the creation of a cinematic image. The author of the article refers to a musical sound (melody, fragment of a musical piece) as an impulse for the director’s creative search for the artistic image of a film character and the film as a whole, its “inner sound” and rhythmic movement. For some directors, this stage of the creative process is the initial and largely decisive in the formation of the aesthetic atmosphere, artistic stylistics, and features of the dramatic development of a film. In these cases, studies on film music require corrections to the traditional terminology of film studies and the introduction of new terms that adequately reflect the intertextuality and contextuality of visual and musical material and the features of the director’s aesthetics and inner world. Thus, the concept of “leitmotif” becomes insufficient to understand the role of a recurring musical theme in a film in which it exceeds its traditional functional and semantic significance in the development of the drama of a film. The article proposes and justifies the introduction of the concept of geist-theme (from German geist — “spirit”). The material giving the basis for its introduction is the creative work of Belgian directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. The performed analysis allows us to state that the use of the concept of geist-theme in the research on the music of auteur cinema, the expansion of the field of analysis in the hermeneutic approach, and attention to the intertextuality of borrowed musical quotations can give a deeper understanding of the essence of the artistic image of a film.
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