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- Title
Voice of the Dance: J. S. Bach and Other Classics in the Maksimova-Vasiliev Film Fouetté (1986).
- Authors
HALDEY, OLGA
- Abstract
Russian cinema of the 1980s, dark, gritty, and heavily politicized, has until recently been analyzed by both scholars and critics primarily for its message. That is, it has been seen as a kind of documentary reportage, unleashing upon its Soviet viewers unvarnished truth about the horrors of their past and the challenges of their present. Yet, such a logocentric approach undervalues the films, in which elements other than the dialogue--such as the music--play a crucial role in generating meaning. This includes the late Soviet films that use compilation scores constructed as collages of excerpts from Western classical music, with the works of J. S. Bach particularly popular. The music of Bach and other classics used in these soundtracks is a carrier of a common semiotic code shared by a film's creators and its viewer. Thus, it plays a narrative function. This article addresses one late Soviet film with such a compilation soundtrack, Fouetté (1986). A "dance movie" shot at the Kirov Theater, it was created by its stars, Soviet ballet's power couple Ekaterina Maksimova and Vladimir Vasiliev. Outwardly a predictable backstage melodrama--a rebel choreographer and an aging prima ballerina infatuated with him fight to produce a radical modern ballet at a stodgy theater--Fouetté turns out to be anything but. Its plot is multilayered rather than linear, realistic yet filled with metaphor and allegory. The storyline of the protagonists' new ballet, The Master and Margarita, after Mikhail Bulgakov's cult novel, gradually invades the main plot, injecting a dose of magic into its realism. In the process, Fouettés unique blend of cinematography, gesture, sound, and silence increasingly demands to be both seen and heard. The film's polystylistic score ranges from stylized chant to Mozart and Tchaikovsky to modern electronics, but at the center of it is Bach: as one of Fouettés characters pompously puts it, "a great responsibility." Three Bach works are featured on the soundtrack: "Little" Fugue in G Minor BWV 578, Air on the G String, and Mass in B Minor, each in a distinct timbral guise. The film's composers, Oleg Karavaychuk and Anatoly Balchev, creatively engage with the two major uses of Bach's music in film: the horror trope, whose acoustic marker is the "historically informed" timbre of organ and harpsichord; and the epiphany/redemption trope, illustrated by the Romantic sound of a full chorus and large orchestra. They also experiment with the potential for defamiliarization and estrangement inherent in the electronic manipulation of live sound, as well as exploring the boundaries of diegetic, non-diegetic, and metadiegetic scoring. Bach's music in turn illustrates, complements, and interprets the complex interlocking narratives of Fouette, as the film straddles the worlds of the "real" and the "unreal" via the in-between realm of staged performance. In so doing, Bach lends a voice to a unique adaptation of the film's literary inspiration: The Master and Margarita.
- Subjects
HARPSICHORD music; FILM adaptations; MOTION pictures; FILM soundtracks; DANCE; TONE color (Music theory); MOTION picture music
- Publication
Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, 2019, Vol 50, Issue 2, p136
- ISSN
0005-3600
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.22513/bach.50.2.0136