Turina y Chomón juegan con el cine / Turina and Chomón play with cinema

By Carlos Colón

(Article published in the program for the premiere of Tour de manivelle. Madrid, May 2008)


Music in cinema is part of a long, albeit not always peaceful, history of friendship between music and entertainment. It all began in Greece, where music first revealed its beauty to an audience of socially aware free citizens who, through their reactions, sanctioned the success or failure of a performance; it was also in Greece that people first reflected on music's power to influence emotional states. In Politics, Book VIII, Aristotle wrote: "Rhythms and melodies can represent, with a high degree of resemblance to natural models, anger and gentleness, courage and temperance, and their opposites, and in general all other opposing poles of moral life, as shown by the fact that, when listening to music, we change our state of mind. [...] Melodies possess a natural potential to imitate behavior, evidently because of the varied nature of harmonies, so that, when listening to them in their diversity, our disposition shifts with each type: some fill us with sadness and introspection, such as the harmony called mixolydian; others, more relaxed, elicit feelings of pleasure; the dorian harmony is, however, the only one that inspires composure and moderation, while the phrygian harmony evokes enthusiasm".
Since then, until the emergence of the more elaborate forms of combining spectacle, dramatic performance, and music -the 16th-century masquerades and melodramas, 17th- and 18th-century operas and ballets- and their absolute integration in Wagnerian opera, which fused words, performance, and music into the melodic, symphonic, and dramatic continuity of a "total work of art," music has been a powerful ally of entertainment, sometimes subordinating the storyline to its autonomy and at other times subordinating itself to it. For this reason, music accompanied cinematic projections even before cinema (as a collection of production, performance, and storytelling techniques) existed: when the cinematic apparatus began filling salons with moving images in 1895, screenings were accompanied by music; even before the Lumière brothers, Émile Reynaud's Optical Theater had advertised its screenings with musical accompaniment as early as 1888.
As cinematic language developed, silent screenings were accompanied by repertory music (segments of classical works categorized by theme -love, tragedy, chase- that became popular during the silent era) or by original scores written for the film (some of the earliest documented scores include Camille Saint-Saëns' composition for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1907 or scores by Stephane Chapellier starting in 1908 for screenings at the Paris Winter Circus). "A cowboy ride across the screen never took place without musical support, and no drama drew tears without it", recalled Henri Colpi, the first historian of film music. "A silent film viewed without musical accompaniment causes unease for the viewer. Music is not only an instrument to convey emotional tone; it is the screen's third dimension. Music allows the cinematic image to be perceived as a true image of living reality. When the music stops..., everything appears flat..., shadows stripped of flesh", wrote film theory pioneer Béla Bálazs. Depending on a theater's prestige, movies were accompanied by a piano in modest venues or by orchestras in major theaters in New York, Berlin, London, or Paris. Joaquín Turina enthusiastically described the Paris premiere of Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur at the Madeleine Cinematograph in 1926: "A large orchestra, under Georges Bailly's direction, with organist Miss Viola Mayer, performs the musical adaptation, based on Herodiade by Massenet, Les Heures dolentes by Dupont, Quo Vadis? by Nouguès, and a piece by Axt written especially for the Roman chariot race" (William Axt worked for Metro during the silent era and led its music department until 1939 with the advent of sound).
The films by Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929) for which José Luis Turina has composed accompanying music belong to the very earliest period of the transition from cinematic apparatus to the set of methods, practices, discoveries, and routines we call cinema, as they were filmed between 1902 and 1906. It doesn't surprise me that J. L. Turina, endowed with both a sense of humor and a reluctance to subordinate music to image, chose Chomón's non-narrative, magical, and entertaining effects-driven cinema for his compositions. There is an early Chomón working during the pioneering years of cinematic industry and language development, filming his own fantasies (from Train Wreck in 1902 to An Incoherent Trip in 1909), farces, or historical reconstructions (The Handsome Men of the Park in 1904 or The Siege of Chile in 1905) and working as a cameraman or creating effects for other filmmakers (working at Pathé -hired to rival the triumphant Georges Méliès- on narrative films by pioneering directors Albert Capellani or Ferdinand Zecca between 1905 and 1907). There is a second Chomón working for his own brief production company, Chomón and Fuster (1910), for the Ibérico company (1911–1912), a subsidiary of Pathé, or for the famous comedian André Deed (The Lonely Worm, 1912), combining effects with increasingly complex narrative structures. And there is a third Chomón who, at the Italy Films studio in Turin, worked as a cameraman and effects specialist for the great Giovanni Pastrone from 1912, placing him at the forefront of cinematic language's definitive development, with D. W. Griffith in Hollywood (The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, 1915 and 1916) and Pastrone in Turin (Cabiria, 1914) representing the first monumental narrative models. Also in Italy, he became an associate producer at Albertini Film in 1919 before returning to Paris in 1923. Highlights from this last phase include his work on The Black Man with the White Soul by Benito Perojo (1926) and especially on the colossal Napoleon by Abel Gance (1927). Until his death in 1929, he worked on color film projects. José Luis Turina has chosen the first Chomón, less narrative, more playful, and closer to the world of magician Georges Méliès, with one of whose collaborators, variety actress and film colorist Julienne Mathieu, he married. J. L. Turina selected three tales -Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, along with the fantasies The Creation of the Serpentine and Cosmopolitan Dances in Transformation- that reflect Chomón's affinity for Calleja Publishing's fairy tales and his commercial acumen, as Méliés had popularized the filming of well-known tales that made plotlines easy to follow and enabled effect creation at a time when cinematic storytelling elements were limited. Puss in Boots (1902) is a film by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca colored by Chomón using "pochoir" (a celluloid stencil with an aniline-soaked cotton pad applied over it), which he created to assist his wife. Tom Thumb (1903) was made as part of the Calleja tales series. Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1906) is the result of his work as a cameraman and effects creator for Pathé, directed by Albert Capellani, bringing Chomón into collaboration with the three most representative Pathé directors: Zecca, who worked for the Pathé brothers from 1899 and was a key figure in the studio's success; Lucien Nonguet, Zecca's assistant; and Albert Capellani, who, rising from Zecca's orbit, became head of the Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres in 1908. Pathé created this company to produce "noble" films based on famous works or starring renowned actors to regain the bourgeois audience that had initially been intrigued by moving images but had abandoned theaters, weary of elementary films.
Finally, it's worth noting that with this score, José Luis Turina revives a family tradition: Joaquín Turina (1882–1949) composed music for Primavera sevillana and Campamentos (1941, short films), The Standard Bearer (1943, L. Fernández Ardavín), Eugenia de Montijo (1944, López Rubio), Luis Candelas, thief of Madrid (1948, Fernán), and A Sleepless Night (1950, "Fernán", completed by Leoz), some of which were incorporated into his catalog.