Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is one of the films in competition for CIFF's $25,000 Mavericks award.
There has never been a silent film. Before talkies, organists enthralled audiences with elaborate scores that included sound effects and adept musical flourishes. Before films had soundtracks, audiences provided their own. In the silence of the Lumiere Brothers’ original screenings, there were breaths, whispers and gasps.
Music, or music of a kind, has always been the pulse beating beneath the images on screen. At an event like the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF), those pulses beat in syncopation with films as varied as documentaries (Art and Copy), dramas (I Killed My Mother) and science fiction (Daybreakers).
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, one of the 10 films in competition for CIFF’s $25,000 Mavericks award, is a film intimately concerned with music. As directed by New Jersey filmmaker Damien Chazelle, musical conventions meet mumblecore in a (mostly) quiet love story.
In Chazelle’s film, which premièred at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Guy (jazz trumpeter Jason Palmer) and Madeline (Desiree Garcia) are a pair of lovers limping away from one another. Wandering away from a breakup expressed without so much as a line of dialogue, their malaise is contrasted against the backdrop of Guy’s jazz, the black-and-white imperfection of 16mm film and the occasional show-stopping musical number. It’s in that music that Chazelle saw a potent, and easily abused, potential.
“Music can tell an audience how to feel about a scene,” he says. “It can be a little dictatorial, a little tyrannical.”
The film is a grainy homage to the Hollywood musicals of the ’30s and ’40s, a period whose rough edges attracted Chazelle. Their influence contrasts the film’s mostly improvised dialogue with the set choreography of bona fide musical numbers, a contrast Chazelle saw as a useful way of talking about the difficulties of saying anything meaningful about love.
“I tried to use music in a kind of playful way, a sort of counterpoint to this story that’s close to a kind of life that I’m familiar with,” he says. “[I know] young musicians in Boston who are much more adept at communicating through their instruments than they are at communicating with their mouths, who fumble through various romantic affairs. Their music has an agency that they don’t, so I was interested in that tension between their fuzzy trajectories and the orchestral emphasis on emotional clarity.”
That sense of fumbling through conversations about love also comes through strongly in Argentinean ex-pat Alexis Dos Santos’s Unmade Beds, another Mavericks contender.
Where Chazelle’s palette is drawn entirely from black and white, Dos Santos’s is a vibrantly colourful story of twentysomethings searching for love of various descriptions in London’s East End. From the flashing strobe lights of a dance club to the hodgepodge interior of a warehouse squat, Dos Santos’s wandering characters — a boy-faced, sexually ambivalent partier named Axl (Fernando Tielve) and a French bookseller (Déborah François) who hides her name from prospective lovers — live in a world as bright as it is loud. Bands from the U.K. and around the world, including (We Are) Performance, Connan Mockasin and Plaster of Paris, provide the film’s soundscape both as live acts and ambient noise.
Like Chazelle, Dos Santos believes there is more to be said in the spaces between a script’s words than in characters monologuing their deepest emotions. In fact, he has some difficulty with expressing the words himself.
“I made a very romantic film, but I hate talking about those things,” he says. “I know it’s romantic, it’s kind of cheesy in the end, but love — it’s a word that makes me cringe.”
For Dos Santos, the problem with making the essential explicit is that it loses an important connection with the audience. “You don’t want your characters to say what’s happening or put it in words, but to go through situations and to go through experiences that would make [an audience] think ‘I can relate to that,’” he says.
In trying to find an unaffected acting style that depicted that level of empathy, improvisation was an important part of both films’ productions. It would hardly be stretching the metaphor, for example, to imagine Guy and Madeline as an exercise in jazz. With its explicit connections to the genre through the music of Palmer and his real-life Boston-based collaborators, its creation also hinged on improvised scenes being grafted back into the shape of Chazelle’s original script in editing. Even having already begun work with composer Justin Hurwitz on the anchoring themes and musical numbers, Chazelle emphasized improvisation with his mostly non-professional cast.
“All that musical work we had done before we started shooting was definitely in my head,” he says. “At the same time, whenever I went into a scene with the actors, I tried to momentarily forget and cast that away to be in the present with the actors. If the actors took [the scene] in a different direction, if a phone rang or someone knocked on the door, we were going to use every action and see where it took us.”
Similarly, Unmade Beds carried over Dos Santos’s lessons from his previous feature film, Glue, a story of struggling for meaning as an adolescent whose performances were entirely improvised. While his sophomore effort was more rigidly scripted, taking almost six years to write, Dos Santos still encouraged actors to continue past scenes’ written end points and substitute dialogue.
“It was more controlled [than Glue], there were more parameters, but at the same time we would let the camera roll for a long time and let the actors see what happens with a scene,” he says. “So [Glue] sort of changed the way I approached filmmaking, having had that experience of working with improvisation and being sort of braver, knowing that everything would turn out right in the end.”
At least one scene’s dialogue was entirely replaced by improvised banter that fit seamlessly, a happy accident that even the film’s director has trouble spotting. “You get used to seeing [improvised scenes] and then you forget you hadn’t scripted them,” adds Dos Santos.
But if improv provides an ephemeral life to a film, the music that underpins it with a similarly organic feel still requires advanced planning. Both films incorporate music that flows naturally from a scene’s environment — Guy and Madeline in a handful of jazz performances and Unmade Beds in the ambient soundtracks of parties and bars. But their scores depend on more than just finding ways of amplifying the action onscreen. Both filmmakers agree that music works best when used to complement the film’s emotional notes.
“What I tried to do in this film is always treat it as an important component and try to use it for counterpoint and for saying things that the scene itself wasn’t saying,” explains Chazelle. “It was undercutting things the movie was saying, so that the music is a character in its own right, which is how I think music should always be used.”
Dos Santos agrees. “Each [song has] a quality that I thought would relate at some point to the character or a sort of melancholy,” he says. “It’s to do with emotions, and [sometimes] you want the music to work with the emotion and sometimes you want to work against it.”
“Most times,” he adds, “you want to work against it.”
Where Guy and Madeline juxtaposes its characters’ unarticulated melancholy with the twinkling sound of its French New Wave-inspired exterior scores, Unmade Beds features an almost wistful brightness as Axl runs through a brilliant city park, tears streaming down his face. Contrast heightens the effect of the films’ music and brings what is often an invisible but essential component into sharp focus. Music provides an essential dimension to both films, and as CIFF rolls out a program that includes a slate of approaches to that dimension, audiences will arrive to provide the last, murmuring addition. There are no silent films.
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