Lately I went to see the movie “Sandra” by
Visconti. In most movies that I see, I can see how the director uses the music
for a greater impact on our emotions. In the case of “Sandra,” it actually
works both ways and this I have never experienced before. What I mean is that
it works like all movies, using the music to hold us in an emotional suspense
inside the story but what is most unusual is that it works also the other way; it
uses the movie and its story in order to explain the music to us. Throughout the
movie, Visconti uses the Prelude Choral and Fugue by Cesar Franck, and for me
it was a real interpretation of what Franck is doing in his writing.
Franck
lived in the second half of 19th century, just after all the great
romantics and before the impressionistic of the 20th century (he was
the composition teacher of Debussy). His music is extremely romantic, a sort of
exacerbated romanticism that is probably connected with the fact that it comes
at the end of the romantic period. The very beginning of a current and the very
end of it is always giving us strange composers and pieces like CPE Bach, Carl
Maria von Weber, or John Field. The romantics like Mendelssohn or Schumann, have
their own identity that is directly connected to their musical current and at
the same time they are still very close both in years and in feelings to their
great predecessors, their “classical father” Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart.
Back to Visconti, I think that he
is giving us an interpretation of Franck’s music through Sandra’s story. The
forbidden relationship with her brother that she is trying to avoid is for me a
parallel to Franck’s writing. His constant modulations make me think of fleeing
(he cannot stay in one tonality), add to that his tormented harmony, with all
the augmented and diminished chords, it is just like Sandra’s tormented
relationship to her family and past. I thought that everything was used as a
mirror to show another perspective on the same matter (music, story and
photography) which made the movie very deep and layered. I think it’s the great
artistic power of the cinema, in some ways very close to opera in the ambition to
reunite on one stage the different arts and let each one have impact on the
other and therefore on the piece as a whole.
