"A native of the United States clings to the world's goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty at grasping at all within his reach, that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications."
One of my favorite composers of the seventies is David Shire, specifically for three films, "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3", "All the President's Men", and "The Conversation". One of the more intriguing stylistic features of the so called "cinema of paranoia" era was a minimal soundtrack. Rather than creating tension through music the way old Hollywood films always had, many directors in the seventies chose to create tension by lack of music. I think of it as akin to taking a laugh track away from a comedy. It's treating your audience with more intelligence, allowing them to be guided by their own feelings pertaining to the action onscreen, rather than having to be forced into a certain mood due to the music in the background. Anyone doubting the effectiveness of this tactic should go back and watch recent flicks like "No Country For Old Men" or "Children of Men". As Kubrick figured out pretty early on, probably with "Strangelove", the strategic use of music rather than the constant need for it in a soundtrack elevates films above the fairly lazy studio templates employed for so long. It had been done in Europe for some time but its appearance in American cinema was one of the aspects of the late sixties sea change. Think about it: for all of the fame attached to the soundtrack in "Easy Rider", how much of the film's duration is occupied by music? Or "Five Easy Pieces"? "The Conversation", documenting the activities of a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman, used a fairly avant garde piano score to mirror the insular paranoia of the lead character. Strange sound effects drift in and out, and the mood reminds me a bit of the work Oskar Sala did on "The Birds". "All the President's Men" is supremely minimal, with only a couple of somber themes that reoccur with hypnotic familiarity. Then of course, the soundtrack for "Taking of Pelham 1-2-3" has received a lot of attention. It's denser, with the gritty mid seventies edge; symphonic jazz with a nod to funk, the kind of thing Lalo Schifrin had perfected. I also have to remember to mention "Taxi Driver" and its magnificent, supremely creepy jazz score by Bernard Hermann, his last. It's the aural equivalent of an expressionist painting, with tones and textures gathering strength deep underground, bursting forth suddenly with atonal violence, and retreating into dark, sullen beauty again.
Vienna is the city of a thousand cafes and coffee houses. It is a city where the exchange of new ideas seem as native to the atmosphere as the overpowering waft of the spice market is to Bangkok. Perhaps not surprisingly, this city became an early hotbed of Esperanto enthusiasts. There was a sense in the waning days of the Hapsburg empire that nothing about what made Austria-Hungary an empire was logical, at least in the more modern nationalist sense. It was a polygot incorporation of Hungarians, Germans, Slavs, and Romanians, all clamoring for regional sovereignty; the ornate architecture that seemed to unite Zagreb, Lubijana, Vienna, Prague,and Sibiu was an esthetically pleasing facade for an archaic regime. Maybe it's just me but it seems like more than chance that such an interest in a planned, utopian tongue like Esperanto should find root in a multi-national capital like Vienna. Esperanto was an attempt to crawl from under the Babel and speak on equal terms. Perhaps it wasn't multinational, it was anti-national. Regardless, there is today a Department of Planned Languages in Vienna, founded in 1927 as part of the National Library and with a huge collection of Esperanto documents and literature. The Department was shut down in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. (Hitler was not surprisingly opposed to Esperanto and outlawed it.) In addition to a small but fascinating Esperanto museum, the Department has done work on over 500 planned or constructed languages, Ido, Volapuk, and even Klingon among them. I am not sure that I will ever hunker down and learn Esperanto but I am continually amazed and beautifully amused by its endurance, appeal, and its serious academic history.
