Sportive Thoughts

Erik Olsen of the NYT video unit muses in Lens over the effect of music within a film or video production:

A general rule for us — if there is such a thing — is that the music should be appropriate for the story and not overwhelm the story or gratuitously play on people’s emotions. What constitutes gratuitous use? That good question is hard to answer. Music can be effective at creating a particular mood, or, in more extreme cases, it can also signal whether a particular moment should be construed as happy or sad. Purists might argue that the picture and natural sound alone should be used to establish the emotion of a scene, but is that true?

After considering a few examples, Olsen's lackluster conclusion is that

in the end, it is the characters that count: the setting they are in and the challenges they face. The key is to be judicious and practice restraint, to seriously consider when music is appropriate and when it is not. Music used well will enhance a piece without changing it or detracting from it.

He fails to answer the question he starts with and instead offers an overstatement of the maxim "it depends."

Let's rephrase the question, and in doing so, clarify it: Should music be used to establish the emotion of a film or video scene? Olsen ought have seen the answer in his own statement, "it is the characters that count." If it is true that the characters are the significant element, then it must also be true that the characters should establish the emotion of a scene, likely by being sympathetic or antagonistic. In which case, music must not establish the emotion.

Even so, it is also clear that characters are not exclusively fundamental to the emotional pallet. Following Aristotle, the fundamental piece is the plot or the causal sequence which determines where characters of a certain type end up in certain situations. For example, a story of a lovely woman who is faithful to her husband and does nothing risqué may not arouse much emotion--the story will be dull, for the most part. However a story of a lovely woman who is unfaithful and ruins her husband's life--while maintaining a sympathetic characterization throughout--will cause a great stir in emotions. This latter example is of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a book which poses many difficulties for a reader who wants Aristotle's categories to sit undisturbed, but also tends to prove the point: characters are interesting only insofar as they serve a discreet purpose in the storytelling.

So what do we make now of the question, "should music establish emotion in video?" Obviously the immediate choice whether to overlay music on a scene does depend on what the editor wants to achieve emotionally and how--but that is more a description of what happens in the editing process than a judgement on how one should construct a scene.

Generally speaking, we should instead look at what Olsen is describing. He is describing the process of montage editing. He is describing taking one finished piece of music and combining it with one finished piece of moving photography. The special status of film and video is that multiple artworks can be recombined to construct a new artwork. That process of combination, or montage, is what will ultimately give a finished scene its emotional quality. Therefore, if the emotion comes from the music used, and not the combination of music with imagery, or the combination of various images, or what happens plot wise or in the performance of the actors--if music establishes the mood then we don't have a very good scene on our hands. What we have is a bad or poorly constructed portion of video or film that has been dressed up with music to look better.

Watch the following, first without sound then with, and judge for yourself whether what you see is emotionally effective. (Full disclaimer: I think this clip is bullshit.)