The Mystery of Music: Ne change rien
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by Chris Fujiwara
(Published with the program notes for the Japanese release of the film)
What are the great films about music - not the films in which great musical performances occur, but the films that have the most to say about what it means to film them? When I try to answer this question, I think of what Wenders wrote about Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It ("the shot just shows Little Richard, and expresses no opinion about him other than that it's really good to see him standing at the piano and singing"). I think of Godard's One Plus One. I think of Hawks's Rio Bravo, To Have and Have Not, and Ball of Fire. No doubt there are other examples at least as important as these, but these films constitute my own pantheon of musical-performance films, and I'll stick with them here.
In these films there is a dialectic at work between performance for others, for an audience, and performance for the musicians, for their pleasure. Between the performance as finished and commodified and, on the other hand, making music for its own sake. In The Girl Can't Help It, the performance-as-commodity predominates, but in such an overwhelming way that the commodity overthrows itself, leaving only the performance. In the scene of the song in the jailhouse in Rio Bravo, where no audience is present, we seem to witness a performance for sheer pleasure, as we do to some degree even in the scenes of public performances in Ball of Fire and To Have and Have Not, in which Hawks shows a communication taking place among the musicians that excludes the on-screen audience. And in One Plus One, we have the most dialectical version of music on film, a push-and-pull between pure interplay and a finality never achieved.
A phrase uttered repeatedly in Ne change rien, becoming a sign between singer Jeanne Balibar and guitarist Rodolphe Burger, is "amuse-toi." It's something that Balibar has brought to the recording studio from the world of filmmaking, where the phrase is sometimes used to encourage actors before a take. (In Gus Van Sant's Elephant, before they go on their rampage, one of the killers says to the other, "Have fun"; it was only after seeing Pedro Costa's film that I understood that the killer's line could be heard as a reference to cinema.) In Ne change rien, "amuse-toi" can be heard in two ways: from the side of the musicians (and the filmmakers), for whom "amuse-toi" is a code, something shared among the insiders, among those who produce something and do not merely consume (the Hawksian elite, in other words); and from the side of the audience, the consumers, those who go to the film or the concert (or who buy the CD or DVD) for entertainment.
At the end of Balibar's opening song, "Torture," which is also the end of the opening shot of the film, we hear the applause of an off-screen audience. The applause comes as a surprise, because the shot (a low-angle shot of Balibar and several musicians on a stage) has been built so that the presence of the audience was not implicit. To put this positively, the shot makes the audience absent, letting them become present only at the end. Which means that the music is not for this audience.
From the beginning, we don't know where we are, because of the strangeness of the camera angle and the lighting. The constellation of overhead spotlights makes a statement as bold and firm as the statement the lighting makes in the first shot of Cassavetes's Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The ceiling of lights seals up the space, closes in the music, denies the outside. This closure is more decisive for our experience of the shot as an introduction to the film than whether there is an audience or not. We're not hearing music that is being offered to an audience for their imaginary immersion in an ecstatic experience. Instead, this is music that exists in a film and that, like everything in a film, is distanced from us.
The rigorousness of Ne change rien lies in preserving our distance. The film does not pretend to offer a simulated or reconstructed experience, some surrogate closeness or wholeness, something visual and active for the viewer to participate in. Instead, there is this repeated gesture of closing the space, pouring darkness and light into the space so that it appears unreal and inhospitable. There is also, as in the first shot, the peculiarity that we often don't know where we are. In the scene of the performance of an Offenbach opera buffa (in which Balibar takes part), the camera frames the threshold space of the side of the stage, in a theater whose utilitarian, somewhat decayed walls suggest an industrial building: a doorway at screen left, the piano in front of it, a short stairway to the stage. In the scenes of live rock performances, all context is deliberately excluded (with the exception, possibly, of the most oblique of allusions in the single shot of two women in a Tokyo café).
If it excludes context, the film also excludes finality. Ne change rien contains many scenes of rehearsal (of the Offenbach) and of work in a recording studio (by Balibar, Burger, and others). But it is not the kind of film that shows the gradual process by which a finished musical piece is achieved. The song which the musicians spend, perhaps, the most on-screen time working on is an interestingly syncopated piece based partly on a sample from Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly." We never hear it in anything like a final form. The last two songs heard in the film are Balibar and Burger's "Rose," and, over the end titles, an a cappella version of Chaplin's "Weeping Willows" (from A King in New York). Since we haven't heard these songs before in the film, we're unable to tell how far along the performances are on the road between germination and completion.
Instead of improvement, refinement, and a steady (or even unsteady) development in a clear direction, the film offers interruptions. Throughout the film, songs stop and then start again; recorded tracks become isolated, layered, manipulated. Balibar tries singing an aria from Offenbach, only to be repeatedly interrupted by the corrections of her offscreen voice teacher. During the on-stage performance (presumably a dress rehearsal) of the opera, in what is apparently the middle of a chorus, a performer runs down the short stairway and dashes out of the shot, to the seeming surprise of both Balibar and a pianist, who stare in the direction the man has gone. For a considerable time, there is no music; then the song starts again - after a break whose meaning has been, and remains, completely ambiguous for us.
At the end of Ne change rien, Balibar sings "Rose," without a microphone, to the accompaniment of Burger's unamplified guitar. They are in a room that is neither a space for recording nor a concert space, but an anonymous office-like space seemingly intended for waiting rather than for any particular activity. We become aware that now we're listening to the music only through the film (and no longer through the recording and amplifying equipment of the studio and of the rock concert); that is, no sound reproduction technology is being used other than that of the film equipment. In his "Remarks on Oedipus," Hölderlin writes: "In the rhythmic sequence of representations,… that which one calls the caesura in poetic meter, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, is necessary, precisely in order… that it is no longer the change of representations but representation itself which appears." Substitute "mediation" for "representation" and this text applies perfectly to Ne change rien. The various interruptions in the film make apparent the changes in the mediation of music, so that it is mediation itself that appears: the different qualities and distances that sounds assume as we listen to them being shaped, layered, arranged.
Even if the film refuses to mark any stage of this process as the final one, Ne change rien is, in part, the exploration and documentation of musical structures that exist in some form apart from the process. But the element of experience becomes more important than any structure that the film relays or represents. Here is the mystery of the film. The people on the screen are hearing the same sounds we are hearing. But the experience is different - not only because they are also, often, the producers of these sounds (and therefore the Hawksian heroes on the other side of an imaginary dividing line that makes us the gawkers, the hicks, the public), but also because the context in which the sounds emerge is different for them and for us. They experience the sounds in the environment where the sounds are produced (even if "only" by being played back). But we hear them in a film, on screen, as part of an artwork that offers not a representation of the musicians' experience, but a mediation of the sounds.
There is, to be sure, a documentary element in Ne change rien (as there is in No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude em Marcha, not to mention Où gît votre sourire enfoui?), though this becomes harder and harder to grasp as the film goes on and indeed is already slipping away from us at the start of the film (with the concert performance at which the audience is absent). It doesn't feel right to say of Ne change rien that it is a documentary about the musicians, in the way that we might say that Où gît votre sourire enfoui? is a documentary about Straub and Huillet. What does the film reveal about Jeanne Balibar? In a strange way, nothing, though also a lot. We are allowed to observe her closely for a long time. But what is revealed is always only Balibar as she is while working in the recording studio or performing on stage or rehearsing, and as she relates to people who are working with her.
What we see is always a togetherness, never an aloneness. This, too, is part of the Hawksian aspect of the film. In the scene of the rehearsal of "Cinéma" ("Peine perdue/Tu n'as rien vu"), Balibar is framed in a lunar closeup. Again and again, her eyes shift to her right (screen left) to look at her offscreen collaborator. There is a belated shot that we can read, reconstructively, as the reverse shot of the first: it shows Burger, who, to look at Balibar, looks screen left. We may feel the relation between the two shots as disconcerting (they don't at all cut together in the seamless manner of a standard shot-reverse shot, and the scene never establishes the two people's relative positions in space), but that strikes me as beside the point. Later in the sequence, Balibar takes a phone call in the studio from one Antoine, to whom she proceeds to sing part of the song, asking between lines, "Ça te plaît?" The music is a constant communication (and it is just in this sense, and for this reason, that no song in the film is ever finished).
There is no aloneness, ever. What is good, what works, what could be better - these are not decided by one person alone, but always in dialogue. (Of course the film could not directly show the former possibility, but that only means that in this world, which is a cinematic one, solitary decisions don't exist.) Even when the voice teacher keeps telling Balibar what she's doing wrong, to her evident annoyance and frustration, there lies, under the teacher's words, a fundamental agreement between the two people that is rooted partly in protocols about the right way to perform this kind of music (protocols that come from a social practice), partly in Balibar's acknowledgment of the teacher's technical competence, perhaps partly even (though this element seems very attenuated by comparison with the easy, intimate, nearly intuitive interaction between Balibar and Burger in the studio) in a personal connection that has already been established between them.
All the same, this relationship, like all the others in the film, exists only in a world that has been transformed and saved by music. I was talking earlier about interruptions: music is the interruption to end all interruptions. Much of our experience of music, in everyday life and also in cinema, comes in the form of fragments. But in Ne change rien, even though we perceive some musical objects as instrumental or vocal "parts," and hear them as more or less rich, full, and rounded-off, we don't hear them as fragments. The music presents itself in a sustained form, in its integrity ("comme un nouveau monde," Balibar sings, repeatedly), and not as disparate things torn out of some completeness that we are denied access to. Just as there is no completeness, there is also no fragment: there is only music, and when we are in it, we are in it. The way the film is shot and cut could not be better designed to demonstrate music's independence from the contingent.
What is "Ton Diable" (the title of a duet by Balibar and Burger) other than music itself? (Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, calls music "the demonic.") Music compels participation in rhythm, in physicality (Balibar's left arm undulates in several shots as if it had a life of its own) and causes the loss of distance. It has this power no matter how mediated it may be. If Ne change rien confronts us occasionally with the familiar difficulty of determining whether sounds are being produced "live" or played back as recordings, this is a problem we can dismiss; it's not the point of the film to oppose live-ness and origin to the copy. The film embraces recording as an inescapable, indispensable condition. By becoming immersed in mediation and being made so aware of its presence, we encounter (again, if we have forgotten it) the mystery of music, which the film makes visible in its opacity and its density.