Leitmotif Technique Revisited

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates film music made up of the same short musical fragment repeated several times throughout a film. As a self-reflexive device, these identical fragments attract the attention of the spectator, for they are identically repeated multiple times, and they often begin and end in the middle of a musical phrase, harshly disrupting the cinematic flow. These succinct musical cues, often mixed unusually loudly into the soundtrack, break with the tradition of classical Hollywood and conventional European mainstream film music and challenge the dramaturgical function of music in cinema altogether. Godard critically questions one of the core concepts of film music: the leitmotif technique. In his early 1960s films, the identical musical fragment correlates the same narrowly defined signified with each repetition. Godard limits the interpretation of the music’s function by having the same musical fragment adhering to one specific visual or aural component. The fragments represent in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou mnemonic signs that are indices—in Charles Sanders Pierce’s sense—for, respectively, love or death. The fact that these themes appear multiple times unchanged in the course of the same film and that they explicitly correlate to always the same extra-musical trope signals that Godard not only questions the usefulness of the leitmotif technique but altogether denounces it as a viable approach to film scoring. Since he thinks with the leitmotif technique about the function of film music, the scores in Pierrot le fou and Vivre sa vie can thus be interpreted as metafilm music.