“Take Two” Reviews Books

“Take Two”
BELOW An image from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Reviews
Film
Take 1
BELOW An image from Eyes Wide Shut

We'll Meet Again: Musi-

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01
cal Design in the Films
of Stanley Kubrick, Kate

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McQuinston, (2013)
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te t L
New York: Oxford
University Press, 256pp.,
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ISBN: 9780199767663
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.
is nte

(hbk), $99.00
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IN WE ’LL M E E T AGA IN : Musical Design

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in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, author Kate

McQuinston places a spotlight on the sound
design of the films of Stanley Kubrick with BELOW An image from Eyes Wide Shut
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special emphasis on the function of music

within them. As McQuinston emphasizes
first and foremost in the book, music choices
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in Kubrick’s films were not just decisions

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made after shooting nor were they mere

background music. Rather, the specific music
chosen for his films was always not only
deliberate, but also essential to the scenes in
which it was featured, and in many cases a
centerpiece of them.
The author spends much of the book
making note of the way music choices are
used to accentuate the rhetorical aims of
the films; for example, at the end of Dr.
Strangelove (1964) when the hopeful “We’ll
Meet Again” is played over images of an
apocalypse of detonating nuclear weapons,
turning a grim and morbid concept into a
path to be met with humble acceptance and (1971) soundtrack to drone over Alex’s Metal Jacket (1987) when the drill sergeant’s
a smile. The way the voice of characters is menacing narration as he looks directly at abusive shouting takes full reign over the
employed with the music and the methods the camera, building a sense of conspiracy scene’s soundscape, the demeaning, insulting
of interplay between the two is analyzed just between him and the audience. Oftentimes, power of his voice becoming mood-setting
as well: for example, the use of brooding McQuinston will remark on scenes in which music itself for the scene. She is meticulous
futuristic synthesizers of A Clockwork Orange’s no music plays at all, such as the scene in Full in breaking down the various sounds, both

98 Film Matters Fall 2014

“Take Two” Reviews
musical and non-musical, which are utilized
within a scene and analyzing the way they
work together to enhance Kubrick’s imagery.
McQuinston’s staggeringly painstaking
attention to detail with the Kubrickian
soundscape is without a doubt the quality
of her writing and analysis that shines most.
As she expounds upon the components of
the auditory design of The Shining (1980),
highlighting how “Characters are isolated
and paired with distinctive and evocatively
constructed sounds: Wendy’s clattering tea
trolley, Danny’s bigwheel …, Jack’s tennis ball
…, his typewriter” (36), it is clear that almost
no detail seems to go unnoticed. However,
over chapter after chapter, this commentary
on the perhaps too-specific topic can become
considerably exhausting to readers outside
the realm of Kubrick uber-enthusiasts and
fanatics. Still, her devotion does in fact pay
off, as her ambition to prove the musical
enhancements of the Kubrick film scene as
consistently intentional and absolutely crucial
is surely realized. But for McQuinston, it
does not end there. Her model for thorough
breakdowns of scene and soundscape can
very easily be viewed as a precedent by
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which the musical design of any film is just
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as ripe for such intensive discourse. While
the world might always be in shortage of
auteurs as effectively meticulous as Kubrick,
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it should never mean that musical direction,
be it a famous song or utter silence, should
be left without just as much examination and
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analysis as the filmed image.
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/END/
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MATT HERZOG is a recent graduate of the
University of North Carolina Wilmington.
He has had a lifelong passion for film and
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for years has focused on film from a writing
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angle, having worked as a scriptreader for
Voltage Pictures in Los Angeles in 2013.
99
Books
Take 2
We'll Meet Again: Musi-
cal Design in the Films
of Stanley Kubrick, Kate
McQuinston, (2013)
New York: Oxford
University Press, 256pp.,
ISBN: 9780199767663
(hbk), $99.00
5
01
KATE M C QUI S TO N’S WE’LL
.2
ME E T Again: Musical Design in the Films
of Stanley Kubrick stands as a conversation,
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informative yet melodic, stimulating and
poetic. McQuiston engages with Kubrick’s
work on multiple levels, including those of
technical production, artistic conviction,
and aesthetic experience, honoring each
film as an intricate piece of art and resisting
mundane deconstruction. Importantly,
McQuiston gives each film its own space
for analysis while also weaving a broader
picture of musical design in Kubrick’s works
as a whole and elegantly identifying musical
themes, patterns, devices, and moods across
the oeuvre.
The book is structured in three parts:
“The Anatomy of the Kubrick Landscape,”
“Music-Cinematic Topics,” and “We’ve Met
Before: Familiar Pieces and Their Histories.”
Throughout, McQuiston draws upon a
unique perspective. She is, of course, an
invested film viewer attuned to subtextual
subtleties but additionally a musicologist
who introduces rich interpretations of
the traditional musical compositions. She
demonstrates this combined expertise with
a particularly exemplarily three-page table
illustrating György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata:
Mesto, rigido e ceremoniale in Eyes Wide Shut
(1999), complete with film timecodes, scene
descriptions, musical cues, and extensive
analysis in which she discusses the role of the
alternating semitones and G2s.
This analysis is informed by firsthand
research at the Stanley Kubrick Archive,
providing new, interesting anecdotes about
the production of the films and revealing
crucial details about Kubrick’s personal
vision and his careful, nearly obsessive
Film Matters Fall 2014
attention to musical design. She discusses the
keystones of musical design, including the
diegetic/nondiegetic divide, the emergence
of musical form, and symbolism. While
McQuiston usefully incorporates film stills
and archival notes, it is her innovative
approach to drawing insights from within
the raw music itself that stands as the
central achievement of the book. She
connects thematic analysis with the very
bars of musical compositions to reveal
layered meanings in the experiences of the
characters and viewers alike. While focusing
on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), McQuiston
includes a figure of the first four and a half
measures of “Blue Danube” and digs into the
piece, comparing it with a film still, writing,
“The image of the gliding ship appears at the
top of the screen, compelling the eyes and
heads of the audience upward in a motion
that parallels Strauss’s melody” (138).
Critical knowledge of Kubrick’s work is
useful in understanding the text, and repeat
viewings of the films prove to mutually
invigorate McQuiston’s observations and
the films themselves. Highlights of the book
include a wonderful piece on Nietzschean
overtones in 2001: A Space Odyssey’s use
of Also sprach Zarathustra and a closing
chapter on Kubrick and Max Ophüls. What
McQuiston offers most, however, is an
accessible and fresh look at Kubrick’s works,
and her loyalty to source materials straight
from the Archive will satisfy avid fans and
film scholars alike. With We’ll Meet Again,
McQuiston accomplishes deeply exploratory
insights into one of cinema’s most complex
and stunning bodies of work, forges new and
important pathways in connecting musical
design technically and artistically in cinema,
and develops a useful syntax for discussing
the potent interaction of the two.
/END/
CAITLIN ZERA is a recent graduate of the film
production program at Webster University,
St. Louis. She has presented her work in film
studies at the Visions Film Conference and at
the University of Oregon. Her documentary,
End of Line (2014), was featured at several
international film festivals and curated for the
Higher Education Channel and The Journal
of Short Film.
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