The Perception of a Shorter Length of Time through the Use of a Rapid Tempo - Text 1
We note that the impression of “rhythm” is just as often induced by the tempo[1] as by the rhythmical values themselves, even though the diversity of the latter essentially has to do with renewal. In fact tempo, as Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer remark, “while it qualifies and modifies [pulse, meter and rhythm], is not itself a mode of organization” […] “while changes in tempo will alter the character of the music and perhaps our impression of what the basic beat is”.[2] Émile Vuillermoz’s use of the Visiophone, as described by Laurent Guido, is edifying in this respect. This “new speed regulator whose goal was to improve synchronisation” enabled him to highlight the expressivity of the tempo without interfering with the rhythmic composition of the film:
[He] set out to control the unfolding of a documentary film, L’entrée des troupes françaises à Strasbourg, by taking visible delight in the possibilities offered by manipulating the tempo: “When the march was over, I could accelerate at will the parade of cavalrymen, slow down the passing of Pétain’s car, and give dash to a particular battalion and dignity to another.” He arrived at an irrevocable verdict: “Here animated vision has become obedient, disciplined, educated.”[3]
The Perception of Faster Filmic Rhythm
Music, filling up the space offered by the image, gives the sensation of a faster rhythm. This initial postulate, widespread and deliberately simplistic, is nevertheless based on a tangible reality observed in the present study. It makes it possible to introduce the bases of the rhythm and temporality of film music and, more generally, of musical rhythm on the cinema screen.
In order to focus on the audiovisual field, we will initially draw upon William Grossin’s “detailed study of the behaviour of managing everyday temporalities according to socio-professional categories,”[4] in which he demonstrates that urban workers spend much less of their leisure time than do rural agricultural workers. Emmanuel Ethis ties this observation to the following declaration by Henri Mendras: “Units of time are not (for them) units of measure, but units of rhythm in which the alternation of diversities periodically returns to the like. In a word, the calendar is the code of the qualities of time.”[5]
It is easy to substitute music listeners for urban workers, and agricultural workers by those who practise any other activity, as the former correspond to the following observation reported by Ethis: “although they have greater familiarity with closely measured time, temporally they find their way more poorly.”[6] This corresponds on every score with what music makes possible when we listen to it, insofar as no other art striates time as much by completely blurring temporal perception of the world, from which we deliberately detach ourselves. The cinematic experience undoubtedly comes in second place.
As Ethis reports this idea is corroborated by the results of a study carried out in 1995 by M6 on the perceived duration of a fifty-two-minute episode in the television series The Avengers (Sydney Newman and Leonard White, 1961), selected at the time for its generational universality. No fewer than 60 % of the study’s subjects gave the wrong duration, and the estimate by 34 % of the subjects even exceeded the real length by more than twenty minutes (or by almost half the length of the episode). Those who gave a correct answer represented only 34 % of the study group.[7]
To corroborate the transposition we carry out from listening to a musical concert or studio recording to listening to the music in a film, we will quote Michel Chion:
What is music “for” in the sound film? First of all, it is present to loosen cinema’s realist constraints, allowing the film to prolong the emotion of a sentence beyond the necessarily brief moment of its utterance, or the impact of a look beyond the fleeting second it shines forth; or the significance of a gesture long after it has become just a memory. Music helps a word, a [tempo], or any single recurring element stand out and endure, just as in theatre a rhyme, an enjambment of one verse line to another, or the end of a monologue can isolate and heighten.[8]
Narrative music in the foreground
This “loosening of cinematic narration’s realist constraints” is never better confirmed than when music is in the foreground of the discourse and truly takes on the role of a “soloist.” Assuming every narrative function, music becomes truly omniscient and omnipresent: it thereby necessarily becomes the driving force of the scene on the rhythmic level. As an example, we could not imagine the space waltz in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) without The Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau, op. 314, 1866) by Johann Strauss II. Similarly, the monks’ last meal in Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, 2010) draws its entire emotional and narrative dimension from the diegetic sounds of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (Лебеди́ное о́зеро, 1876), leaving each character silent and communicating only through glances.
