Word: musicalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Born in Lyon in 1924, Jarre was no child prodigy; he was in his late teens before he decided to study music. In Paris after the war he hooked up with two exceptional impresarios of French theater: Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar. For Vilar he wrote incidental music for modern readings of classical plays. In 1951, Georges Franju, a director of spare, uncompromising documentaries, hired Jarre to score his film essay on wounded veterans, the 1951 Hôtel des Invalides. In the next dozen years they would collaborate on two more shorts and five sepulchral features, including Head...
...producer Darryl F. Zanuck had been impressed by Jarre's scores for the early Franju features. Zanuck used him for two other Fox films, The Big Gamble and his D-Day superproduction The Longest Day. But it was not this work that led Jarre to Lawrence; it was his music for Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele, the tender story of a emotionally shattered veteran and a 12-year-old girl, for which the composer created some of his swooniest, most ear-grabbing strains. (See pictures of the movies' best-loved costumes...
...heard, the movie, and thought Jarre could be helpful in finding an aural complement to Lean's sand-swept tribute to T.E. Lawrence. As Stephen M. Silverman tells it in his excellent Lean biography, Spiegel had originally wanted Lawrence to have three composers: Jarre would do the dramatic music, while Aram Khachaturian scored the Arab scenes and Benjamin Britten the English. When those two estimable gents proved unavailable, Spiegel corralled Richard Rodgers into writing an Arabian motif and a "love theme" - for an all-male movie. Sanity eventually prevailed: the not-so-well-known Frenchman composed the whole score...
...However Arabic or Russian the orchestrations, Jarre's music fit the plangent mood of French postwar pop: the mordant, worldly-wise chansons of Gilbert Bécaud, Marguerite Monnot, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour. The simple melodies follow a clear ascending or descending line, and sound either inevitable or predictable, depending on the extent of the listener's fondness for the form. Jarre didn't write pop songs, exactly; "Lara's Theme" was his one Top 40 hit. But the sound was marketable in movies, and after Lawrence, Jarre's tinny, tinkly, discordant music was in high demand by directors searching...
...lent it to William Wyler's The Collector, Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum, George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Paul Mazursky's Enemies; A Love Story and Jerry Zucker's Ghost. He could churn out military music in a minor key, like a sarcastic Sousa; that's what you hear under the espionage chicanery in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, ornamenting the anti-Nazi smuggling in John Frankenheimer's The Train and underlining the grand folly of two British soldiers' Afghanistan caper in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King. At times Jarre mocked...