Utilisateur:Whist*/Brouillon

Traduire et incorporer dans "parcours artistique" "thème" "2= la musique"

La musique est un des facteurs les plus importants du travail de McCarey, en effet, malgré son échec en temps qu'auteur de chansons, il confessait facilement qu'il était « du fond du coeur, un musicien ».

L'univers musical est très présent dans les films de McCarey, ainsi groupes de jazz, choeurs d'enfants, cantatrices, professeurs de musique, compositeurs ratés, et spectacles de cabaret peuplent ses films. Malgré cette univers musical, McCarey ne dirigea qu'un film entièrement musical, Red Hot Rhythm (1929 ; cependant McCarey considérait La Route parsemée d'étoiles, contenant neuf références à la musique, comme une comédie dramatique. En effet le fait d'incorporer les passages musicaux à l'intrigue (à l'inverse de la plupart des comédies musicales, où l'intrigue est ralentie par une chanson) permet de servir l'action, relaxant tout en faisant avancer l'histoire.

(21) Indeed, because music emerges in realistic ways and serves dramatic functions (unlike musicals, whose plots often stop while someone performs a number), the effect, ultimately, is that the music simultaneously relaxes and advances the plot.

That the films are not musicals, but simply musical, gets at the crux of McCarey’s worldview. His comments about his films being “fairy tales” notwithstanding, music exists for him in a real world. Because McCarey’s characters do not spring into song and dance, but surround their lives with “real” music – not just with songs, but nostalgic music boxes, chiming clocks that bring lovers together, etc – the cinematic world is more convincing. The cumulative effect is that music is a cosmic principle not just of most of his films, but of his universe.

That said, music isn’t the only sonic principle to which McCarey is sensitive. Certainly, in the apprentice years, when McCarey wants to get funnier, he often takes it farther, or makes it louder, but as he matured as an artist, McCarey gets quieter and quieter. Who else would make the final scene of such a loud screwball comedy as The Awful Truth end as quietly as it does? Compare the film with Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Twentieth Century (1934) – Hawks’ strategy is to go faster, louder, zanier. McCarey, by contrast, slows down The Awful Truth at its climax, startlingly so. The ending, suddenly, is not screwball. This is something deeper, more realistically romantic, than “sophisticated comedy.”

Likewise, in Going My Way, most filmmakers would end the film at its moment of climactic melodrama (literally, melodrama – a children’s choir sings an Irish tune in the background) when Barry Fitzgerald’s priest is reunited with his mother. Not McCarey. Instead, the camera follows Crosby outside, as he leaves the reunion, and his parish for good, in the snow. As he walks alone, his back to the camera, the music can be heard only faintly. Its now diminished volume becomes a way of underscoring, with characteristic restraint, the silence that is symbolic of Crosby’s Christian selflessness and the resulting isolation that brings.

The impact of these quiet moments (and others) found in McCarey’s mature sound work stems at least in part from the fact that music is so omnipresent in his films. It makes the silence more noticeable. It reminds one of another Catholic filmmaker, Robert Bresson, who once wrote “The sound film invented silence.” (22) The comparison is not unjust. Indeed, in The Awful Truth and Going My Way, which have so many moments of music-based (but not “musical”) comedy, McCarey’s uses of near-silent endings approach the kind stasis that Paul Schrader defines as the Transcendental Style. I would not want to have to argue that McCarey is a “Transcendental Stylist,” but he is undeniably a religious filmmaker. (23)