Film Music Critique Dziga Vertov\'s

Film Music Critique

Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm

The film opens with the image of a woman listening to the radio on a pair of headphones. She is instructed to listen to a composition by Nikolai Timofeyev from the movie the Donbass Symphony, "The Last Sunday." We hear this music, and then the director cuts to the image of Timofeyev conducting an orchestra that is playing this very same piece.

In a subsequent sequence, a band of young pioneers is seen marching. Although the shot is from a distance, we are able to hear the music in "close-up." This is one of the numerous examples one finds in the film of Vertov's interpretation of cinema verite, in which sound and image are distorted in order to transform reality.

Throughout the film, we hear instances of "metal machine music," including the sound of machinery, tones, and percussion manipulated for transformation into a sort of symphony. Verta's intention in doing this was to glorify the sounds of the factory -- typically the realm of the proletarian working-class -- as a means of showing his sympathy with this group of people and showcasing the potential for revolutionary change. As such, the innovative use of music one finds in Vertov's film is not meant to merely accompany the images -- it plays a key role in the film as a whole.

Woody Allen's Annie Hall

Music is hardly used at all throughout the course of Woody Allen's classic comedy film Annie Hall. Like the great Ingmar Bergman, a director that Allen has idolized throughout the course of his career, Allen chose to leave a music score out of the film altogether.

Allen has always been known for his unconventional use of music in his films. He has never commissioned an original score for any of his movies; rather, he prefers to use established jazz and classical music recordings. But in a lot of his films, these jazz scores can be heard constantly in the background. Not so in Annie Hall.