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prestigious A pictures such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, Michael Curtiz), Juarez (1939, William Dieterle), and The Sea Hawk (1940, Michael Curtiz). In contrast to Steiner or Waxman, whose contracts required them to work on one film after another, Korngold’s arrangement with Warner allowed him to score as few as two films per year and to have much more control over the scoring process. Although Korngold never used a “click track,” his sense of timing, of coordinating images and sounds, proved exceptional. As Jessica Duchen writes, “[Korngold’s] use of large blocks of music, complex interweaving of Leitmotivs, and sensitivity to music’s interaction with speech left an indelible impression on the future of the field. . . . Korngold showed how music could be woven integrally into the structure of a film; he not only raised the quality of the music but also its relevance to the movie as a whole.”32 Throughout his years in Hollywood, Korngold sought to refine existing techniques of pitching music just beneath an actor’s voice so as to intensify speech but not to interfere with the audience’s understanding of the words. The aesthetic program behind this scoring practice was positively Wagnerian. It aspired to weave speech and music into a dramatic syntax powerful enough, as Wagner had demanded in Opera and Drama, to emotionalize the intellect. Unlike Wagner, however, whose mature musical language was intended to unfold the primal substance of the German language, Korngold’s Wagnerianism aimed primarily at the amplification of dramatic action and speech, not at a mythic interpenetration of word and music in Wagner’s sense. That Korngold’s compositions for film clearly prioritized the intelligibility of spoken dialogue over the rhetoric of musical effects, yet at times could sound like opera without words, evidences the distance between Korngold’s Wagnerianism and Wagner’s own project of organic synthesis.
Korngold’s success in Hollywood, one might speculate, resulted largely from the fact that he had already composed film music long before he had ever entered a film studio. Trained in the late-romantic language of emotional intensity and chromatic beauty, Korngold understood intuitively how to bridge the gaps between German classical music, the lightness of turn-of-the-century operetta, and the demands of contemporary mass culture. What is more important for our purposes here, however, is that Korngold argued during his Hollywood career against any view of film music as merely incidental. Instead, he publicly promoted Hollywood Wagnerianism as an equal brother of serious concert hall expressions. In an interview with Overture toward the end of his Hollywood career Korngold did not even hesitate to present film music as a means of cultural edification and self-transcendence:
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It is not true that the cinema places a restraint on musical expression.
Music is music whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema. Form may change, the manner of writing may vary, but the composer needs to make no concessions whatever to what he conceives to be his own musical ideology. . . . Fine symphonic scores for motion pictures cannot help but influence mass acceptance for finer music. The cinema is a direct avenue to the ears and hearts of the great public and all musicians should see the screen as a musical opportunity.33
One may surely read Korngold’s credo as a naive misinterpretation of dominant Hollywood production practices, yet Korngold’s emphatic defense of film music has the virtue of clarifying what we need to conceptualize as the utopian and universalist function of Hollywood Wagnerianism: its task of providing audiences with glimpses of integrity and reconciliation and its role as a whole to promise cultural transformation and mobility. Unlike the Wagnerian ideologues of Nazi cinema, who embraced film music as a conduit to some kind of mythic past and essentialized identity, Hollywood Wagnerianism à la Korngold conceived of itself as a project, as building the road toward a better and principally open future.
Studio filmmaking was less a process of collaboration among different creative talents than of ongoing negotiation and struggle.34 Films were not simply the product of individual human expressions but rather the outcome of an always contested melding of various institutional forces. Film music occupied its own territory within this force field, and notwithstanding all attempts to understand the effects of music scores in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of nineteenth-century genius aesthetics, we do well not to evaluate Hollywood Wagnerianism simply according to one-dimensional categories such as subversive authorship or subservient assimilation. To speak of studio filmmaking as a structured process of negotiation means to draw attention to how particular forces within this process may have altered intended meanings by taking recourse to peculiar sets of signs, practices, and traditions. It enables us to see the contingency of studio operations and products, that is to say, the fact that in spite of all stylistic uniformity nothing about the making of films during the studio era was simply natural or inevitable.
It is against the background of this understanding of studio filmmaking as a delicate equilibrium of conflicting forces that we need to conceptualize what Korngold presented in his 1946 interview as the “musical opportunities” of film scoring. For in spite of dominant conceptions of music as a preconventional language of pure emotions, it was this negotiated character of classical film music that in certain cases enabled Hollywood’s exile
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Wagnerians to transcend dominant neoromantic codes and mimic aesthetic modernism. Korngold’s last Hollywood score, for Irving Rapper’s 1946 Deception, is a good example. This Warner film starred Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains in a tragic love triangle comprising unfaithful pianist, virtuoso cellist, and star composer. The Rains character, the fictional Alexander Hollenius, was designated as a moderately modern composer.
Henreid, in the role of the emigrant musician Karel Novak, identifies Hollenius as a master “who unites the rhythms of today with the melodies of yesterday” while citing Stravinsky as the unsurpassed hero of the present and Richard Strauss as his favorite composer of the past. Korngold’s one-movement Cello Concerto in C major, op. 37, was written specifically as the technically challenging work Hollenius composes in order to embarrass Novak. Parts of Korngold’s composition serve as nondiegetic film music, as well as for the climactic diegetic concert hall performance (played by Eleanor Aller). Compared to Korngold’s other compositions of the time, the Cello Concerto op. 37 is relatively discordant. Including numerous passages that violate chromatic harmonies and straightforward tonality, the cello concerto not only encodes the conflicts between the film’s main players but also signifies Novak’s experience of destruction and dislocation during World War II. In spite of its modernist stances, however, the eleven-minute concerto contains deeply melodic and emotionally intense moments as well, and it is this calibration of old and new that sheds light on Korngold’s own peculiar position in Hollywood. A stylistic conservative, the late-romantic Korngold in his last Hollywood picture masqueraded as a modernist who piped a number of postromantic sounds through the ducts of Fordist mass culture. Cello Concerto op. 37 illustrates the extent to which studio filmmaking could empower forms of popular modernism that overstepped the composer’s own aesthetic preferences.
Adorno and Eisler, in their 1947 Composing for the Films, insisted that we cannot understand Korngold’s or Steiner’s music without general references to the dynamic of commodification and rationalization in organized capitalism. Film music, for Adorno and Eisler, reproduced the grammar of contemporary advertising. “The basic structure of all advertising: the division into conspicuous pictures or words and the inarticulate background, also characterizes motion-picture music.”35 Studio film music tried to bathe listeners in affects so as to bond their desire to a unified product. This manipulation of sense perception, in Adorno’s and Eisler’s view, paralleled the overall fusion of meanings and values under the rule of organized capitalism. Commodification operates as a universal equalizer, and its logic of homogenization includes the integration of picture, word, sound, script, act-
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ing, and photography into the seemingly unified configuration of the talkie.
Although this flight from differentiation clearly already operated in Wagner’s music dramas or in the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss, it was consummated only in Hollywood “as the amalgamation of drama, psychological novel, dime novel, operetta, symphony concert, and revue.”36 Dominant film music, in its primary function of rounding off the rough edges of mechanical reproduction, embodied a primary form of ideology. It amplified the way Fordist capitalism hid its own logic of fragmentation and bestowed the isolated individual with a false sense of universality and totality.
Adorno and Eisler’s reading of dominant film music is surely helpful. It enables us to go beyond the essentializing concepts normally attributed to the work of Hollywood film scores and to understand the historical indices of film music’s utopian function. Similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s larger culture industry thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, the neo-Marxist critique of classical film music as false consciousness tends to level different formations of industrial culture. Possible differences between the Wagnerian aspirations of Nazi film practitioners and of Hollywood dream workers are therefore categorically denied. Unless we wish to subscribe to a homogenizing view of twentieth-century industrial culture ourselves, we therefore need to explore not only the fact that film music is ideological but what kinds of ideologies it proliferated and to what end. German sounds and Wagnerian ambitions, as I have argued, echoed differently in Nazi and classical Hollywood film practice, and these differences had largely to do with the different tasks performed by mass cultural expressions in Hitler’s Germany and Roosevelt’s America respectively. The final sections of this chapter therefore turn to the basic operations of the Hollywood studio system during the New Deal, to its beginning disintegration after 1939, and to the ways in which exile directors such as Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Fritz Lang, and Curtis Bernhardt wove in their own audiovisual agendas.
s t u d i o f i l m m a k i n g a n d t h e d i a l e c t i c o f e x i l e In 1939 Lewis Jacobs described the Hollywood studio system as a bureaucratic and intrinsically conservative apparatus hostile to any artistic innovation. Relying on contract stars and genre formulas, Hollywood filmmaking, according to Jacobs, destroyed all forms of individual creativity, taste, and imagination. “Production methods,” Jacobs wrote, “under this rigid system became mechanized: the ‘assembly line’ appeared in Hollywood. The resulting standardization of pictures caused the downfall of the most im-
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portant directors during the late twenties. The various branches of production were divided and specialized so specifically and minutely that directors had a lessening opportunity to contribute to the whole. Most directors became ‘glorified foremen’ under the producer-supervisor.”37 According to Jacob’s Weberian reading of classical Hollywood, studio operations transformed Hollywood into an iron cage of specialists without spirits and sen-sualists without hearts.38 Rationalization either negated individual talent from the very outset, or it caused a few charismatic geniuses to rebel against and be crushed by the studios’ front offices.39
Jacobs’s desolate account has informed several generations of film scholars in their attempts to assess the basic procedures of studio filmmaking.
Similar to Max Weber, who ended up favoring a return of personal charisma in order to halt the bureaucratization of modern life, scholarship in Jacobs’s wake has privileged the image of the creative auteur who challenges the system and leaves personal signatures against all signs of standardization.
It is only during the last two decades that scholars have moved away from the Weberian model of Hollywood filmmaking and, by and large, embraced what one might understand as a Gramscian paradigm of negotiation and hegemonization. According to this newer model classical Hollywood was engaged in a war of positions in which diverse wills were fused together with the studios’ specific production and management structures, their technical resources, their narrative repertoires, and their marketing strategies.
Classical Hollywood, as Thomas Schatz explains, was a period when various social, industrial, technological, economic, and aesthetic forces negotiated a delicate compromise: “That balance was conflicted and ever shifting but stable enough through four decades to provide a consistent system of production and consumption, a set of formalized creative practices and constraints, and thus a body of work with a uniform style—a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting to plot structure and thematics.”40 Unlike Goebbels’s German Hollywood, in which each individual aspect of filmmaking remained subject to extrinsic supervision and political control, Hollywood studios endorsed internal struggles between industrial and aesthetic imperatives as viable sources of formal quality and financial gain. Studio films became classical to the extent to which they articulated different institutional and stylistic forces into coherent conceptions.
The year 1939 has often been seen as a year of the studio system’s greatest successes, yet it also marked the beginning of a new period in which the integrated major studios started to lose some of their former control over the production, distribution, and exhibition of feature films. New tax laws caused an unforeseen surge of freelance talents and independent produc-
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