Music, Hollywood & the Avant-Garde

During Prof. Julie Hubbert's talk in class last Thursday, I was surprised to hear her say that she considered avant-garde film to be in a separate world from Hollywood film, vis-à-vis music use.  While the avant-garde clearly has a radically different history and production structures from the Hollywood mainstream, I would argue that there has been a great deal of crossover between the two worlds, and that the resurgence of compilation soundtracks may owe a great deal to avant-garde filmmakers, especially Kenneth Anger.

 

In 1964, when Scorsese and Lucas were still undergraduates, Anger made his legendary film Scorpio Rising, featuring a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop tunes from the 50s and 60s: Ricky Nelson, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Bobby Vinton, etc.  While the interview with Scorsese that Prof. Hubbert had us read makes no mention of Anger, Scorsese acknowledges the influence in another interview: "[In 1969,] Vernon Zimmerman, who later made Unholy Rollers and Fade to Black, had a loft in the Village where he showed us Scorpio Rising.  It had been banned, but the shocking thing about it wasn't the Hell's Angels stuff, it was the use of music.  This was music I knew, and we had always been told by our professors at NYU that we couldn't use it in student films because of copyright.  Now here was Kenneth Anger's film in and out of the courts on obscenity charges, but no one seemed to be complaining that he'd used all those incredible tracks by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson and The Rebels.  That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed."  (Ian Christie and David Thompson, Scorsese on Scorsese, London: Faber and Faber, 2003, 21)

 

(As a side note, while Scorsese seems to be under the impression that Anger's use of music was unlicensed, Anger had actually paid $8000 for all the music rights, at least if the IMDB trivia page is to be believed.)

 

In addition, while Prof. Hubbert spoke (rightly so, I believe) about the influence of the music video on the editing style and music usage of Hollywood films beginning in the 80s and 90s, she made no mention of the work of Bruce Conner, who was making proto-music videos like Cosmic Ray (1961) and Breakaway (1966) decades before The Buggles.  Breakaway actually features a dancing Tony Basil (she sung the music as well), later to achieve fame on MTV with "Hey Mickey."

 

-Jonah Volk