The beginning of the twenty-first century saw, thanks to the joint efforts of European and US archives and restoration labs, the emergence of finely restored versions with newly recorded musical scores for Feyder’s three late silent films, Visages d’enfants ( Faces of Children, 1925), Gribiche (1926) and Les Nouveaux Messieurs (The New Gentlemen, 1928), two of which were produced by the Franco-Russian company Albatros (Albera 1995: 144). Following my sustained interest in the uses of music as emotional catalyst in both silent and sound films, in this chapter, I consider Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder’s extremely original handling of the musical component as an intra-filmic narrative marker at work in some of his silent films. KeywordsĪs many studies have shown, the link between cinema, psychology and music played an important role both theoretically and practically during the French avant-garde of the 1920s.
This chapter elucidates these musical moments using theories related to subliminal auditory perception, deferred time intervals and baseline affective charges: the latter occur in Feyder’s silent films for which no original pre-existing accompaniment is known.
Feyder’s mise en scène and spectacular crosscutting techniques crystallise them, yoking the musical moment to a dream, or a mental image, or a simple celebration in a realist pseudo-documentary décor. Jacques Feyder’s three films for the Franco-Russian production company Albatros- Visages d’ enfants (1925), Gribiche (1926) and Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1928)-demonstrate his unprecedented mastery of the ‘musical moment’ both in its relationship to stories involving painful situations experienced by young children and in the way it rhythms emotion and affect. As many studies have shown, the link between cinema, psychology and music played an important role both theoretically and practically during the French avant-garde of the 1920s in the work of Delluc, Epstein, Gance, Grémillon or L’Herbier.
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