Eisler's Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935-42

Abstract

In 1947, Hanns Eisler in collaboration with Theodor Adorno published a small but important book entitled Composing for the Films. The book represents a significant contribution to film studies, cultural criticism, and the discipline of twentieth-century musical practice. It also provides one of the few extended historical texts from the 1940s that deconstructs Hollywood musical practice while probing the wider theoretical implications of motion picture music. The gestation of Composing for the Films, however, remains controversial. (1) Although I shall treat this and the book's politically tangled publication history elsewhere, this article seeks to address one aspect of the book's intellectual foundation--that is, Eisler's theoretical and aesthetic notions about film music in relation to Hollywood's film industry. Eisler's direct exposure and reaction to Hollywood musical practices began in 1935 during his first trip to the United States, and continued in 1938 when he returned as an emigre and embarked on the Film Music Project (1940-42, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). Since 1927, Eisler had been deeply interested in film music. As a committed Marxist, he saw film as a powerful political device to educate the proletariat and serve the revolutionary cause. In contrast to the modernist bourgeois ideals of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler believed that music should be democratized and provide social meaning to a mass public. (2) Film music offered an outlet for the practical realization of these ideals, and Eisler quickly established himself as a critic and composer in the field from the earliest development of sound film onward, and brought a specialized knowledge and commitment to its practice. He involved himself intensively as a film composer, exploiting a wide range of musical approaches and applying many of the theoretical and aesthetic concepts that he, as a politically motivated musician, cultivated within an array of genres from documentary to commercial productions. Consequently, by the time he arrived in the United States in 1938, he was already considered a European expert and had accumulated a great deal of experience as a critic on the subject. "Hollywood Seen from the Left" In May 1935, Eisler was invited by the English parliamentarian Lord Marley to present a series of lectures in the United States in support of the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. (3) Organized in 1933 under the direction of Willi Munzenberg as a response to the burning of "objectionable" books in Germany and the suppression of intellectual activities by the Nazis, the Committee launched a propaganda campaign to appeal to a new constituency of socialist sympathizers worldwide. Munzenberg's control over this organization derived from his position as head of the Soviet Union's cultural propaganda apparatus abroad. His network of Communist Front organizations, including charities, publishing houses, newspapers, theaters, film studios, and cinema houses, attracted the participation of many illustrious intellectuals and artists like Eisler. For example, in 1934, Eisler and the playwright Bertolt Brecht published their Lieder, Gedichte, Chore with Editions du Carrefour, which had been a subsidiary of the Munzenberg Press since 1933. Eisler also wrote the score for Kuhle Wampe, a production of Munzenberg's Prometheus Films (McMeekin 2003:262-63; Betz 1982:121; Schoots 2000:79, 88). Munzenberg used popular media such as those described above to create bridges between the Soviet "proletarian" government and less doctrinaire Western socialists (McMeekin 2003:1). And by 1935, when the Soviet Union officially shifted its policy from a United to a more inclusive Popular Front agenda that would have wider appeal to socialist intellectuals and artists, anti-fascism became the common political concern, a shared rallying call. (4) Consequently, the activities of the World Committee and in particular Eisler's tour mustered international support for Communism by exposing the terrors of Fascism. …