Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 15, Week 3

Though a lousy beer, the Pabst responsible for last week's screen capture was the groundbreaking director that brought us this 1931 version of Brecht & Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper, or The Threepenny Opera. Though Brecht himself had problems with the filmed version (as documented in a bonus feature on the recent Criterion DVD), the film is still a masterpiece of German cinema. Congrats to all who guessed it! A quick digression about the Oscar nominations: A crime even bigger than the Juno nom for best picture is the ruling that Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood is ineligible for a nomination owing to its use of pre-existing music. According to the Academy, "Greenwood's score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work." I've seen the film four times now, and I refuse to believe there is anywhere near 46 minutes of non-Greenwood music. Arvo Part's Fratres is heard after H.W.'s accident, though not in its entirety. The Brahms concerto is played during the end credits, and briefly during the blessing of the well scene. Other than a hymn sung at the church, that's it for pre-existing work. How they claim this equals 46 minutes is a mystery. Can anyone enlighten me on this? This week: another black and white masterpiece. This is a hard one, I have to admit, but watching the film again recently, I was completely taken by the composition of this shot. Name the film. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!

Comments

[Karsten]

It seems that among the 46 minutes is also counted Greenwood's own previously published work "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" from 2005. (Source: Jim Emerson).

[mwparker2]

you'll have to check out this out further, but i think the issue with the Greenwood score is that part of his music was pre-existing before it was put into the score. i believe i had read that it was the piece that recently debuted in New York. not for sure though...

[mike]

if that was the case, how could Bill Conti win an oscar for The Right Stuff. I mean half of the music is Gustav Holst's The Planets, then there is clair de Lune and many more of your favorite classics.

[Blake Leyh]

The 46 minutes is not only pre-existing works by other composers. It's also pre-existing material by Greenwood himself. A huge chunk of the score is just Greenwood's previous string pieces laid over scenes.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the score (see my post about it here: http://www.tenthousand.org/?p=194 ) and think it's rather petty of the academy to do him like this, especially at the last minute. But it must be said that large portions of the music were pre-existing stuff. I think the truly extraordinary event here is *the combination* of these images and this music. On further listening, I realized that the music itself is actually quite derivative of Penderecki and Ligeti, among others. But the use of those textures in 2007 over grand Western landscapes? That was truly startling, brilliant even.

I'm sure by 2009 we will all be sick of hearing dissonant string music in film scores, because when Hwood stumbles onto something like this, they beat it to death.

[Marty Lederman]

They don't have a hell of a lot in common (except for dissonance and the fact that they're both attached to great films), but for some reason the use of the Greenwood score in TWBB reminded me an awful lot of Jim Jarmusch's use of the Neil Young score in Dead Man.

[v yapp]

Yeah, the Greenwood thing is ridiculous, as is the exclusion of Nick Cave's score for The Assassination of Jesse James (...as is the general lack of love for that film in general). Also, I was going to say that the whole thing about the TWBB score is that Greenwood already released some of the stuff on another album, but I see that several people beat me to it.

[Susan]

The rule is just dumb. You could have a film with a marvelous original score that uses up less of the time limit, and the rest of the film might not have any other music at all.