Music in Film 03: Star Wars, The Long Goodbye, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

I am writing about films I saw last year that had a strong musical element. Previous episodes can be seen here and here.

Star Wars (1977)

The IFI had this idea of showing films from series sequentially each Saturday morning in emulation of the cinema serials of yore (but sadly did not preceed each screening with an episode of Flash Gordon or King of the Rocket Men). I took the opportunity to see this one on the big screen, even though it was the CGI bullshit version rather than the now buried original release. It's still a fun film and watching does transport me back to when I saw it first. And it features many exciting musical moments, of which the greatest is probably the opening 20th Century Fox fanfare and the switch from that to John Williams' main theme, with the opening salvo an orchestral stab to rival the popular ORCH5 sample. Beyond that there are lot of Wagnerian leitmotivs but the most memorable musical bits are probably the jizz [sic] band in the Mos Eisley spaceport and then the bombastic medal ceremony music.

While I liked the film well enough I did not bother going to any of the sequels or prequels. Star Wars itself is by far the best and the endless attempts to milk the intellectual property have sucked much of the enjoyment from the other ones.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

This is the Robert Altman cat film in which Elliot Gould plays a guy who owns a cat who pisses the cat off by getting it the wrong cat food in a scene that will resonate to all cat owners.

The cat guy is also private detective Philip Marlowe and the film is an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel in which Marlowe is caught up in a complicated caper involving an old friend in trouble, gambling debts, murder, and so on. Only unlike the olde Humphrey Bogart films this is the 1970s and Marlowe is schlebbing through a world where everyone else has given up smoking and the dames are into space cake and yoga. It's also scripted by Leigh Brackett, previously the queen of space opera in the pulp era before moving successfully into screenwriting (she famously wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, following extensive discussions with George Lucas).

Brackett isn't the only link to Star Wars, as John Williams also did the music for this one. The older tune "Hooray for Hollywood" also features but mostly we get endless re-arrangements of the title track (by Williams and Johnny Mercer): initially sung over the opening credits, then as muzak in the supermarket, then being sung by some guy rehearsing in a bar Marlowe uses as an office, later being played by a Mexican marching band, and so on. Apparently this was Altman's idea and it suggests a certain drift into surrealism but I wonder if it also was a way of saving money.

Arnold Schwarzenegger also features. He does not make any music but at one point he starts to take off his clothes.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024)

This is a documentary about the coup that overthrew Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo. But it's got a lot of jazz music in it, as it tries to link the move towards Congolese independence and its aftermath with progressive jazz currents in the United States and also with jazz musicians being used as foot soldiers in the cultural Cold War. It is an odd film in any number of ways. I am not entirely convinced that director Johan Grimonprez successfully knitted together the jazz and Congo strands of the film, but as they are both subjects I am broadly interested in this was not particularly a problem for me. It is also formally interesting in that instead of having a load of talking heads appearing on screen to explain stuff it instead almost entirely featured archive footage, with onscreen text explaining stuff where necessary, combined with voiceover narration from the memoirs of various players in the Congolese tragedy (including our own Conor Cruise O'Brien, from back when he wasn't a reactionary, with excerpts from his book about the Congo read by his son Patrick).

The films is also pretty long (150 minutes), which might put off some people. However the Congolese content is fascinating and I think something people ought to be more familiar with, while the jazz footage is amazing and worth a trip to the cinema on its own, and not just for how funny Dizzy Gillespie is.

For me the two most striking moments in the film were non-musical. Firstly we had Belgium's King Baudouin arriving in Kinshasa (then probably still called Leopoldville) to mark the Congo's independence. At a formal ceremony Baudouin delivers a tone deaf speech pitching Congolese independence as the culmination of the great work of his predecessor, King Leopold II, who took over the Congo and ran it as a giant gulag for his personal enrichment, instituting a regime of such brutality that I sometimes think its main purpose was to make British and French colonial regimes look good by comparison. Lumumba launched an impromptu rebuttal denouncing imperialism, leading Baudouin to mutter to an aide "Is he [i.e. the Congolese prime minister] meant to be speaking?". What makes this all the more fascinating is Baudouin's physical resemblance to Ireland's own Enoch Burke.

And then there is the last known footage of Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was overthrown in a coup thanks to the machinations of the Belgians and the CIA, with the British security services and UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold playing their evil parts too. The footage shows him just before he is about to be bundled onto a plane and flown from the capital to a region controlled by Belgian-backed faux separatist to be tortured and then executed by a firing squad commanded by Belgian officers. Lumumba was always a sharp dresser with great charisma, and even here, as he sits dejected in a white shirt while his guards stuff pages from one of his speeches into his mouth, he exudes a defiance that seems to diminish his enemies.

images:

Patrice Lumumba with his future successor, Joseph Mobutu (BBC: Patrice Lumumba - Why Belgium is returning a Congolese hero's golden tooth)

King Baudouin (Wikipedia)

Patrice Lumumba bound (IPOB Ontario: Last letter from Patrice Lumumba, First Prime minister of Congo (born in 1925, assassinated by Belgium and its Western allies in 1961) to his wife)

Music in Film 02: All You Need Is Death, Eno, The Colour of Pomegranates, Portishead, Lone Star

I continue my trawl through films I saw last year that had a strong musical element. See the previous instalment here.

All You Need Is Death (2023)

This is Paul Duane's odd folk horror about these two song collectors who head up to Enniskillen because they hear there is a crazy lady (played by Olwen Fouéré, obv.) who knows a song that is indescribably ancient but has never been recorded or transcribed. Aspects of the film are deliberately enigmatic, like the early scene where the song collectors meet a client in a car park like they are conducting a shady drug deal rather than engaging in an entirely legal activity. And some of it is pretty funny, like when they meet an old singer (played by Brendan Gleeson), whose daughter makes sure they hand over any money for his songs to her and not to her alcoholic dad.

The soundtrack is by Ian Lynch. He is one of the Lankum people, so you probably have a bit of a sense of what the music sounds like: droney, trad adjacent, etc. He doesn't noticeably lend his vocals to proceedings, with the soundtrack mostly instrumental apart from a couple of points where we have characters on screen singing: the aforementioned Brendan Gleeson (who as well as being an actor has some interest in the world of traditional music), one of the song collectors (played by Simone Collins, who has a background in musical theatre), and then Olwen Fouéré herself singing "Old God Rising". That's the ancient tune the plot revolves around, a song in the language people spoke in Ireland before there was Irish, a song passed through the female line that no man is ever meant to hear. It is deliberately harsh and unnerving, sounding as much like a curse being called down as anything approximating to music.

But is the film any good? One of my friends said that she admired it more than liked it, and I see what she is getting at. You could argue that it is does well at first with the tension building as the song collectors move towards Enniskillen but that it becomes less coherent once the film has to deal with the complicated results of finding the song as opposed to the more focussed quest for it. And the film also has to roll with the limitations of its modest budget as it tries to portray the horrors unleashed by the cursed song. There might also be a sense that the film accelerates a bit too much in the last half or third, with perhaps a bit too much exposition left out in the interests of keeping things moving forward. Perhaps so, but I still like its enigmatic atmospherics and find myself interested in the idea of seeing it again. It is on IFI Home so Irish readers can check it out in the comfort of their homes.

Soundtrack available here.

PNYC: Portishead - Roseland New York (1997)

A film of a live performance by Portishead in New York some time after they released their second album. It made me think of a few things. Firstly, there is Portishead's second album, which manages to sound broadly like the first album except not as good, despite being recorded in a rather different manner: instead of the music being mostly put together from samples it was created by weaving together pieces of original music. The other thing I found myself reflecting on is that while Beth Gibbons is great on record she is less brilliant at fronting a live band: there is something very draining about her way of hanging onto the microphone for dear life while singing every song, with a never changing look on her face suggesting she is dying of the anguish.

The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)

There is music in Sergei Parajanov's enigmatic telling of the life of 18th century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova but really the film is all about the visuals. It is a stunningly beautiful work that repays trips to the cinema whenever it is shown while also being the kind of film that would annoy plot-oriented people. I have developed a theory that this film is a major influence on Wes Anderson, particularly the more recent of his works that did not trouble themselves too much with narrative. As well as going beyond narrative, Wes Anderson films share a commitment to making things look great and might even have recourse to a similar colour palette.

Lone Star (1996)

John Sayles directed this greatest of films, which features a star turn in flashback sequences by Kris Kristofferson as Charlie Wade, the terrifying sheriff of a Texan border community, with the rest of the film set in the then present day after the body of the long vanished Wade is discovered, triggering a murder investigation for which the current sheriff's late father and former sheriff is the prime suspect (there are a lot of sheriffs in this film). A big thing is the way buried secrets of the past don't always stay buried, while the film also interrogates the history of border communities in parts of the United States that used to be in other countries. I really can't recommend this film enough: I think it is one of the five best films I have ever seen.

Music isn't a big presence in the film but there is a bit of Tex-Mex-Mariachi style stuff going on, which fits the whole Mex-American theme.

Eno (2024)

Gary Hustwit made this film about the popular producer, but I think Eno himself had input into the film's central gimmick: that it is different every time it is shown. I only saw it once so I don't know how different it is each time or whether the film has some stuff it always covers with the variation being in how much of it appears, or if the film sometimes leaves out entire sections of Eno's career. What I saw was broadly chronological, interspersed with present day stuff in which Eno yapped away about stuff (either past stuff he had been doing or his curious eating regimen). There was little-to-nothing about Roxy Music but quite a bit about his time working with U2, which was actually very interesting (and possibly would be even to people who are not that pushed about the popular Dublin band). They had quite a bit of footage of Eno and U2 in the studio ("That's great Bono - now could you do it again with a bit more passion") and I was fascinated by how they interacted. I got the sense that one of Eno's strengths as a producer might be a natural aptitude for plámásing people and avoiding confrontation while still pushing them in particular directions. You also got the sense that the members of U2 (who were all still pretty young at this stage) were in awe of Eno as someone who had worked with Bowie and Roxy as well as releasing cool albums of his own.

Eno generally came across as someone who has worked out how to live.

image:

All You Need Is Death (FilmGrab)

Music in Film 01: The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, and others

Let's talk about some films I saw last year, but only where they have a significant musical content.

The Zone of interest (2023)

This is the Jonathan Glazer directed film about the guy who was in charge of Auschwitz, with almost all the action taking place in his house and its garden, which was located just outside the main camp. It features a stunning Mica Levi soundtrack of discordant noises that merges into the sound design, becoming at one with the strange and unnerving noises we hear continuously in the background (shouts, screams, clanking machinery, shots, etc.). The music contributes strongly to the sense of unease that permeates the film. I spent most of my time watching this on edge, waiting for something terrible to happen; then I realised that the something terrible was happening all the time. It does not surprise me that many people picked this as their film of the year, and the music and sound design combo is one reason why I pity people who did not see it in the cinema.

Perfect Days (2023)

Wim Wenders goes to Japan and makes a film about a guy named Hirayama, who cleans public toilets. initially it feels like is a film about the importance of just getting on with it and doing every day stuff as well as you can, with the film starting off by showing a typical day for Hirayama and then repeating that for a bit so you think "OK, this is not a plot film", but then there is a bit of a transition and gets a bit more plot-oriented.

Where does the music come in? Well Hirayama listens to music as he goes about his day. The music he listens to is from the 1960s and 1970s. Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" features (obv.) but also tracks by Nina Simone, the Kinks, Otis Redding and Patti Smith. And he listens to all his music on cassette, which I think is meant to suggest the extent to which he is aloof from contemporary trends. There is also a suggestion at one point that the music Hirayama listens to is somehow more real and engaging than the digital music of the young people, but that's a bit OK Boomer.

Some of the way cassettes are treated in the film seemed a bit fanciful. Like, people are always able to play particular songs from the start and never have to spend ages scrolling backwards and forwards to get to the right point. And at one point Hirayama's idiot co-worker brings him to a second-hand cassette shop, where it is established that second-hand cassettes are very expensive in Japan and that the various cassettes he owns could be sold for a pile of money. I had definite "O RLY?" thoughts at this point but it has long been established that any claim about Japan is somewhat credible.

Nearly all the music in the film is western, although I see from Wikipedia that there is a track by Sachiko Kanenobu; I don't remember when her track comes up in the film but reading about the album it is from on Wikipedia makes it sound like it might be worth investigating (influences of Pentangle, Donovan, and Joni Mitchell) and she so impressed Philip K. Dick that he later produced one of her singles (er wait, did I really read that?).

But there is one striking piece of Japanese-language music. At one point Hirayama listens to "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals. And then later he is in one of those tiny Japanese bars you see in films and the patrons ask the manager to sing her song, and she sings a Japanese translation of the song, except the subtitles reveal that the Japanese lyrics are much more explicitly about prostitution and the song's narrator being trapped in that world (as compared to the English lyrics being so oblique that they make almost no sense when listened to closely).

Anyway, a good film and one I recommend to all cassette fans.

Poor Things (2023)

There is a bit in this Yorgos Lanthimos film where Emma Stone's character dances to music, yes? Overall though I wasn't really sure about this one. While never boring it felt like maybe it was a bit exploitative and wasn't really saying anything.

Dune 2 (2024)

The music was not as memorable as in part one. That might be because it was broadly the same, but also there was no Sardauker throat singing in this part.

Birdsong (2024)

A short-ish documentary by Kathleen Harris about Seán Ronayne, who is on a mission to record the singing of every bird in Ireland. That's nice, birds singing and stuff, except lots of the birds are becoming extinct due to climate change and habitat loss, so it's a bit sadface. I did find myself thinking that for all my sense that meaters are people with no moral compass there might be something to be said for eating wild and unfarmed deer, as they lack predators and are stripping the cover off the landscape that ground nesting birds need to hide in. There might also be something to be said for eating meaters. Or for reintroducing wolves to Ireland.

Devo (2024)

Not mentioned in this documentary is the bit in Watchmen where Laurie finds the night vision goggles Dan uses when he dresses up as Nite Owl and she says they remind her of Devo; then she has to explain to Dan what Devo are, as he is not really into new wave music. And a bit later Dan for some reason is wandering around in the nip but wearing the night vision goggles and he says "I guess I look pretty Devo, right?".