The Utopian Function of Film Music

Abstract

Ernst Bloch, the utopian Marxist thinker born in 1885, before cinema existed, wrote, on and off, about film from the early years of the 20th century until the end of his life in 1977. He was concerned with the meaning of film as a new medium, its capacity for social transformation and critique, its status as an art form and its role in the process of modernisation of society. As a Marxist, Bloch was critical of a cinema which was already by his time becoming a commercial vehicle, but arguably it is his ability to see the revolutionary and utopian potential of film that is most important and that can offer us insights regarding the nature of film which are relevant today. Supportive of Lenin’s statement that film was the most important form of contemporary art because it could reach the people and directly engage with their consciousness, Bloch added, implicitly, an aesthetical understanding of cinema which emphasised the way in which cinema can take apart the integrated experience of reality and distort, fragment or transform it by virtue of its technical affordances — zooming in and out, panning, slow motion and fast forward, but also the use of music, which I will explore in this chapter. We know these ideas also from Benjamin’s remarks on film as the art form commensurate to a fragmented, shattered modernity. But for Bloch they are part of a utopian aesthetic of cinema; the parameters of montage are different for Bloch than they are for Benjamin.