Amadeus Blogathon - Seeing Music and Haunting Themes: Diegetic and Non-Diegetic Strategies

This is my entry for this week’s critics blogathon on Milos Forman’s Amadeus.You can read about the project by the blogathon's leader, Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri. As the Oscars approach, it was decided by us that Amadeus is one of the great films that deserved the critical praise the film received, as well as its eight Academy Awards. At the end of this blog, you’ll find links to the other pieces in the series.

            There is certainly something sublime about the music of Mozart, even if we can’t understand why it arouses such feelings. Even those of us who have taken a music class at college perhaps don’t truly understand the genius that has made Mozart better known than any other composer in the world. But what if we could understand it from the mind of a great composer? And what if that understanding could be translated cinematically?

            That’s part of the conceit that makes Amadeus, the 1984 Oscar winner from playwright Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman, a fascinating film, and perhaps one of the best examples in how directors can use music in film. It would have certainly been easy enough for Forman to simply populate the soundtrack of Amadeus­—a quasi-biopic of Mozart as told through the eyes of a jealous rival named Salieri—with the music of Mozart without much thought in why they chose any particularly piece except the emotions felt. However, Shaffer and Forman use the music as specifically a subjective experience and commentary by Salieri. The music cues, both diegetic music (where the spectator can see where the source of the music is originating) and non-diegetic (music that overlay the soundtrack), offer insight both into how the spectator can understand the genius of Mozart and how the film uses Salieri’s knowledge of Mozart to comment and create a narrative of a man haunted by another. 

Bernard Hermann: Trivia for A Century Old Music Master

Bernard Hermann with Alfred Hitchcock

          Today launches the Bernard Herrmann centennial at Film Forum in New York City, a retrospective of the famed composer. Herrmann’s influence on film score is undoubtedly obvious. Before him, the idea of music was to never be more memorable than the film itself. Now just listening to his music conjures up the images of the films he composed for. And the list of auteurs he worked with: Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, Brian De Palma, is like looking at a timeline of American cinema. 

            Of course, none was greater than his collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of going on and on about the greatness of this collaboration, which has been written by others with a lot of zest and enthusiasm, I’m instead going to share a really cool bit of trivia I learned. All credit for this connection goes to David Sterritt, Chairman for the National Society of Film Critics, author of numerous publications on cinema, and my former thesis advisor.

            This relates to one of Hermann’s most famous scores, Psycho. Now when we think of Psycho and the music, we of course think about the shrieking violins that accompany the shower sequence, or the opening titles score that creates fear through such an innocent set of instruments that are known for their beauty (this is where the film academic points to the obvious connection).