Gabriel Yared's The English Patient : A Film Score Guide, and: Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978 (review)

Abstract

Gabriel Yared's The English Patient: A Film Score Guide. By Heather Laing. (Scarecrow Film Score Guides, no. 1.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004. [xix, 195 p. ISBN 0-8108-4965-8. $34.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978. Sherman Oaks, CA: The Film Music Society, 2004. [xi, 579 p. ISBN 1-892050-01-3. $40.00.] Index. How good it is to see these two volumes, a positive sign of the state of film music studies. With the Laing volume, Scarecrow Press has taken up where Greenwood Press left off-by continuing this important series on film music monographs, still under the leadership of Kate Daubney. In her admirable series preface, she elucidates the wide-angle vision of the series, to draw together a variety of different analytical practices and ideological approaches in film musicology for the study of individual scores (p. xiii). The English Patient (1996), winner of 9 Academy Awards, is a worthy candidate for study. Its recent vintage allowed author Heather Laing to consult with Gabriel Yared, the film's composer, in order to view the score, and obtain intimate knowledge of his musical credo and working methods. Her resulting examination provides an example of contemporary practices in film scoring. Additionally, given the composer's nationality (Lebanese), training and place of dwelling (Paris), we are afforded an opportunity to view the working methods of someone who is not a product of American training and whose livelihood has been chiefly outside the Hollywood environment. Laing attempts a dual track for approaching the work at hand, first dealing with preliminary musical issues, followed by a discussion of the film's narrative, and concluding with a synthesis of the two as embodied in the film's score. The first chapter provides a brief biography of Yared, emphasizing his musical and philosophical beliefs. These beliefs provide explanations for some of his career choices. Born in Beirut in 1949 and having received his early musical education there, Yared arrived in Paris at age 20 and studied with Maurice Ghana and Henri Dutilleux. Though the latter urged him to learn traditional music theory and composition, Yared chose instead to become involved in the more lucrative popular music field, eventually becoming a record producer. After almost ten years in the pop music field, he received his first film assignment in 1980 (for Jean Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut [la vie]), and has been working in the field ever since. Laing goes on to discuss Yared's film scoring technique in the following chapter, citing films such as Jean-Jacques Beineix's 37.2 Ie matin (1986; known as Betty Blue in the U.S.), as well as his IP5, l'ile aux pachydermes (1992), and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). For the third chapter, Laing leaves off musical discussion to focus on the narrative structure of The English Patient, often referring to the issues that faced Michael Ondaatje in transforming his novel into a screenplay. While the novel chose to interweave several narrative threads by avoiding emphasis on particular characters, director Anthony Minghella (in conjunction with Ondaatje), chose to elevate the romance between Count Laszlo de Almasy and the married Katherine Clifton, making it serve as the film's principal story. With subplots involving other who occasionally view events differently from the protagonists, as well as continuous narratives running in at least two different time periods, the movie presents its audience with an extremely complex mise-en-scene that offers many, often contradictory angles on its central story and several different interpretations of the actions and reactions of its characters (p. 57). Laing deftly summarizes the bibliography of the film, and incorporates her own nuanced view of the intricately constructed narrative structure. (I was fascinated by her description of unusual plot anomalies, a result of vestigial situations from the novel that had not been entirely expurgated in the screenplay. …