Film, Music, Memory , by Berthold Hoeckner

The idea of a “mind’s eye,” of externalizing internal thoughts and memories, has been a preoccupation of writers throughout literature. From Chaucer and Shakespeare to Philip K. Dick and Greg Daniels, who recently penned the 2019 hit Amazon series Upload, writers have long been interested in examining how and why the brain remembers. With the introduction of mechanical remembering devices—photographs, sound recordings, film, television, and streaming media—a parallel “culture of memory” has blossomed. Berthold Hoeckner’s book Film, Music, Memory considers the privileged place cinema has had in this culture. Because of its ability to see and hear, unconsciously record and be consciously edited, film has changed not only the way we dream, but also how we remember and visualize the working of the mind’s eye.Like most film music scholarship, Hoeckner’s study is fundamentally a restoration project. It works to counter film scholarship’s persistent visual bias by reminding critics that film has a soundtrack. The depiction of memory in cinema, too, it turns out, is especially dependent on the intricate interplay of both audio and visual information. If the mind has an “eye,” Hoeckner illustrates over the course of seven carefully organized chapters, then it most certainly also has an “ear.”In his study of the early film soundtrack, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, film scholar James Lastra considered the extent to which the construction of the film soundtrack was guided by cultures of hearing—that is, by strategies designed to restage the act of listening.2 Hoeckner’s examination of the “culture of memory” is equally essential and draws on similar comparisons between human and mechanical processes. He reflects on how cinema has shaped our understanding of memory and vice versa, how our understanding of memory, artistic and scientific, has shaped the grammar of cinema. To describe this book broadly as a study of the “flashback,” cinema’s most ubiquitous mnemonic strategy, would not be wrong. But Hoeckner's imaginative scope also embraces a host of reflective narrative strategies where filmmakers have employed the soundtrack to restage acts of memory. The book highlights the deep interconnectedness between human and mechanical processes by parsing the topic into three recent, digital concepts: storage, retrieval, and affect. This allows Hoeckner to consider a wide variety of examples from classical-era directors George Stevens, Max Ophüls, Compton Bennett, and Robert Mulligan to contemporary filmmakers Nora Ephron, Woody Allen, Cameron Crowe, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Omar Naïm, as well as more experimental work from Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, and Federico Fellini. He cuts across national styles, industrial processes, and personal tastes in ways that highlight not only the persistence of memory but also the central role music has played in shaping, triggering, and representing it.Much of the critical framework for Film, Music, Memory is rooted in familiar territory. Hoeckner revisits seminal works from the earliest generation of film criticism—essays by Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno—finding latent references not only to the centrality of sound but also to concrete connections between film and memory. He starts, for instance, with Benjamin’s consideration of memory as a “darkroom of the lived moment” and of film, likewise, as a kind of “optical unconscious” (p. 4), a mechanical art capable of recreating and recording experience, but also imposing narrative meaning on it. Hoeckner elides Benjamin’s observations with Robert Ryder’s more recent description of recorded music’s “acoustic unconscious” to form a new and more comprehensive understanding of film and memory, something Hoeckner calls an “optical-acoustic unconscious” (p. 5). Just as it is impossible to separate sound from memory, it is equally impossible, he demonstrates, to separate soundtrack from film, and music from instances of cinematic memory: “In a nutshell, I propose that the addition of sound has enabled film to capture, store, and release aspects of reality previously inaccessible to our audiovisual sensorium. Music, especially, can make us conscious of something in the cinematic experience that—to vary Benjamin’s formulation—we seem to have never experienced before we remember” (ibid.). Because of its ability to participate in both unconscious and conscious experiences, music, Hoeckner asserts, is an essential part of the cinematic culture of memory.Throughout the book, Hoeckner draws consistently on the work of the Frankfurt School, but in his discussion of “storage” he also considers the work of several philosophy of mind pioneers. Implicit in Bergson’s image of a memory cone, he points out, is an understanding of music’s inherently temporal qualities and its ability to animate cinematic experience. Musical recordings can act as a synecdoche for real, lived, audiovisual experience by literally inscribing both sound and images into instances of cinematic memory. Hoeckner draws on George Stevens’s Penny Serenade (1941) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900 (1998) in considering how filmmakers have used music recordings as a conceit for representing onscreen remembering. “As sound film recognized the evocative power of music to record visual memories,” he observes with a nod to both Benjamin and Proust, “the phono-photograph became the new mémoire involuntaire where musical madeleines made of shellac could not only tell but also show. Once music was mechanically reproduced, it begins to operate the shutter on the inner eye” (pp. 39–40).Hoeckner also recruits Husserl’s distinction between retention and recollection, perception and cognition, or more specifically Bernard Stiegler’s application of it, to dissect examples of cinematic remembering. Mechanized memories have become a ubiquitous part of contemporary human experience, Stiegler suggests, to the degree that they now access not secondary but primary mnemonic functions—recollection and cognition. As a result, cinema has become such an integral part of our cognitive experience, he continues, that “life is always cinema. ... We go to the cinema in order to find life again” (quoted p. 42, Stiegler’s emphasis). This conceptual collapse between human and mechanical memory, Hoeckner argues, is on full display in Omar Naïm’s The Final Cut (2004), where memory is literally represented as film, as a film within a film. “If exteriorized memory holds out the promise that cinema is life,” Hoeckner extrapolates, then “it falls to music’s temporality to fulfill that promise” (p. 2). Film theorists as far back as Sabaneev and Eisenstein have noted music’s ability to control film rhythm and tempo and to shape narrative structure. Hoeckner’s focus on temporality, however, not only draws new voices into this discussion, Stiegler specifically, but significantly expands the parameters of it. This examination of temporality is among the most important revisions to film theory the book has to offer, and the comparison between memory and rememory in Naïm’s film, as Hoeckner adroitly remarks, is the perfect conceit for isolating and observing new aspects of this critical film music function.The discussion of “retrieval” and “affect” doubles the book’s recovery project by restoring the consideration of music not just to the study of film but also to the foundational texts of film theory. In chapter 5, for instance, Hoeckner expertly applies Freud to the analysis of Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil (1945) and Mark Herman’s Little Voice (1998). As both films are awash in aberrant, repressed behavior, the use of psychoanalysis is effective. The Freudian concepts of transference and fetishism are particularly well suited to understanding how music and music performance can be intimately and unconsciously connected to trauma. Hoeckner also manages to wring something new and wonderful from Benjamin’s well-worn concept of “aura,” mostly by way of Miriam Hansen’s reappraisal of it. As Hansen points out, “aura” is deeply connected to another Benjamin concept, that of “mimetic innervation,” a “neurophysical process that mediates between internal and external, psychic or motoric, human and machine registers.”3 Hoeckner builds on Hansen’s discussion, theorizing for film a similar process of “mnemonic innervation,” where music plays an important role in “linking cultural and individual memory by blurring the boundary between the soundtracks of films and the soundtracks of life” (p. 94). For Hoeckner, music’s innervating abilities are made most obvious in that special subset of contemporary films that reflexively feature cinema itself as their subject matter.Chapter 4 focuses on “movies about movies,” or what Hoeckner calls “auratic replay” in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam (1972) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993). The analysis of each film’s dialogue with the cinematic past is careful and detailed, yet it misses a small but significant observation about New Hollywood’s and even post–New Hollywood’s pervasive self-consciousness. In his evaluation of the same paradigmatic shift, Fredric Jameson called this preoccupation with the cinematic past “pastiche,” a term that seems to capture the ease and comfort with which filmmakers in the 1970s began to overtly reuse, revise, and reinhabit the past.4 Music certainly innervates and authenticates each film’s film memory, but circumscribing that discussion within the concept of “aura” does not always capture the joy or love of movie-making and movie-going that Allen’s and Ephron’s films express.“Aura” does point effectively, however, to the equally compelling questions of access and repeatability that cinematic intertextuality depends on. Scholars have tied New Hollywood intertextuality to the advent of university film schools and to the rise of television, which allowed a new generation of directors to consume films easily and repeatedly. Allen’s films additionally point to the importance of the movie palaces of the 1930s and the art house theaters of the 1970s in the process of cinematic memory formation, but Ephron squarely places film literacy, love, and aura on the shoulders of television. In Sleepless in Seattle we watch Annie (Meg Ryan) and Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) watch the 1957 film An Affair to Remember on television. They inhabit that film just as viewers today inhabit Sleepless in Seattle through its continual rotation on cable TV (TBS’s “New Modern Classics”) and streaming platforms. Hoeckner’s work here stands out not only because it tackles examples of popular cinema with the same care it devotes to dense, intellectual films like Godard’s monumental memory palace Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–89), the subject of chapter 3, but also because it explores the underexamined topic of Allen as a film composer. The construction of soundtracks has helped to define directors like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick as auteurs, but Allen has yet to be similarly recognized despite the fact that he has composed the soundtracks to over fifty feature films. My enthusiasm to see this neglect corrected has waned, however, in the wake of recent revelations about Allen’s personal life and the credible allegations of sexual abuse brought forward by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s documentary Allen vs. Farrow (2021).Another strength of Film, Music, Memory is that it contributes significantly to the understanding of postwar filmmaking. Over the course of the book, Hoeckner considers three films by George Stevens, a director inexorably altered by his wartime experiences. As a documentary filmmaker for the US Army, Stevens witnessed the atrocities of the war firsthand when he helped to liberate the concentration camps at Dachau and Auschwitz. Hoeckner is deeply respectful of Stevens’s experiences, especially when analyzing the first film Stevens made after the war, I Remember Mama (1948), a beautiful and poignant film about an immigrant family from Norway living in San Francisco in the 1910s and ’20s. His essay observes Stevens’s careful framing and camera work, and composer Roy Webb’s wonderful score. Webb is almost never mentioned in any parade of great composers, but chapter 7 promises to change that. Stevens uses Webb’s score, together with narrational voice-over and ingenious mirror shots, to emphasize Katrin’s trustworthiness as the film’s narrator. Just as trust is an essential element in the film’s world, binding the children to their mother, music helps us trust Katrin’s remembrance of “Mama.”Music similarly authenticates Scout’s narration in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), acting in this instance as a proxy for the adult Scout who, unlike Katrin in I Remember Mama, is heard but not seen. Elmer Bernstein’s sensitive score works in tandem with voice-over’s remembering to establish a connection between the children and their absent mother, and later with Boo, their surrogate protector. Hoeckner describes the soundtrack’s ability to evoke innocence and protection, but also how the music works to establish a different kind of trust, racial trust, as he calls it, with viewers. The score navigates the complicated issue of race by avoiding overt musical stereotypes, suggesting instead a sense of racial ambivalence by repurposing the sounds of Copland’s “wide open spaces” (p. 214). Bernstein’s score, Hoeckner points out, presciently aligns with Go Set a Watchmen, Harper Lee’s sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, and with the ambivalence Lee seems to create in reversing Atticus’s advocacy for racial justice. Given the comparatively little scholarship produced to date on the score to this famous film, this chapter is also a pressing reminder of the need to include film scores in the discussion of race in the Civil Rights era.Hoeckner’s decision to use the term “trust” to describe the complex bond between parent and child that is explored in both films, however, is unusual and thought-provoking. Whether this “trust” can also be extended to the institutions that each parent could be said to metonymically represent—the banking system in I Remember Mama or the legal system in To Kill a Mockingbird—is an argument I find less persuasive, especially from the perspective of music. The musical score may authenticate the viewers’ belief in the economic and legal institutions at the heart of our modern society, but perhaps only first by way of trust in another equally important social institution: the cinema itself. Perhaps the more important institutional work done by music in these films is that of establishing trust in the cinema, in film’s ability to tell some kind of truth.For all its engagement with classical film theory, Film, Music, Memory is also in hidden dialogue with key contemporary lines of inquiry. On several occasions, I found Hoeckner’s discussion of memory gesturing directly at Miguel Mera’s article on sound in surveillance.5 The indiscriminate work of CCTV and surveillance cameras is also prevalent in film and similarly relies on sound and music to create its representations of unconscious remembering. In a similar way, Hoeckner’s observations also point to the recent application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to the study of film music. Psychologists Annabel J. Cohen and Siu-Lan Tan have scrutinized music’s mnemonic power or “stickiness” from the perspective of human cognition, as have film scholars like Jeff Smith, whose article on popular song in film makes a compelling argument for considering what cognitive scientists call “processing fluency” in understanding music’s affective abilities.6 Like all important critical works, Hoeckner’s book is both reflective and forward-looking. Identifying a discussion of music latent in the foundational texts of film theory gives film music criticism a new foothold. But its exploration of the mnemonic capabilities of music also holds the promise of taking the whole field of film music studies in new and compelling directions

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