sounds of brass and percussion instruments and
songs by the Propellerheads and Rage against the
Machine to match the world of the story’s synthetic
technological environment. Davis also scored the
music for the two sequels (The Matrix Reloadedand
The Matrix Revolutions, both 2003).
Irony often results from the juxtaposition of
music and image because the associations we bring
when we hear a piece of music greatly affect our
interpretation of a scene. Take, for example, com-
poser Ennio Morricone’s juxtaposition of “Ave
Maria” with shots of Brazilian natives and mission-
ary priests being slaughtered by Portuguese slave
traders in Roland Joffé’s The Mission(1986), Quentin
Tarantino’s use of Stealers Wheel’s carefree, groovy
“Stuck in the Middle with You” to choreograph the
violent cop-torture scene in Reservoir Dogs(1992),
or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone(1961), where
the director contrasts urban gang violence with
themes from the St. Matthew Passionby Johann
Sebastian Bach.Perhaps the boldest experiment in
juxtaposing music and image occurs in Sergei
Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky(1938), which depicts
the thirteenth-century conflict between Crusader
knights and the Russian people. Here, using a com-
plex graph, the director integrated Sergei Prokofiev’s
original musical score, note by note, with the visual
composition, shot by shot. This mathematical and
theoretically rigorous experiment results, at its
best, in a sublime marriage of aural and visual
imagery, which has been influential, particularly on
such epic movies as Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus
(1960) and Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes
Back(1980).
Neil Jordan makes a more sustained use of such
juxtaposition in The Crying Game(1992), a political
and psychological thriller that is also a frank,
revealing movie about loneliness, desire, and love.
Its music helps underscore the surprises in its story.
Fergus (Stephen Rea) is interested in Dil (Jaye
Davidson), who appears to be an attractive black
woman until Dil reveals that he is a transvestite.
The personal and political plot twists are too com-
plicated to discuss in this context, but Fergus falls
in love with Dil and, because of his love, takes a
prison rap for him. At the end of the movie, Dil is
visiting Fergus in prison, and as the camera pulls
back to the final fade-out and closing credits, we
hear Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill’s country-
Western classic “Stand by Your Man,” sung by Lyle
Lovett. (This irony would be missed if the viewer
did not stay for the credits, which today increasingly
include music or other information vital to under-
standing the overall movie.) It’s funny and touching
at the same time, but especially ironic in light of the
music under the opening credits: Percy Sledge
singing the African American classic “When a Man
Loves a Woman” (by Cameron Lewis and Andrew
Wright), the perfectly ironic introduction—although
we do not know it at the time—to this story of des-
perate love.
Among directors, Tom Tykwer is notable for his
use of music to enhance the pace, or tempo, of Run
Lola Run(1998; music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny
Klimek, and Tykwer), in which the relentless
rhythm of the techno-music matches the sped-up,
almost surreal pace of the action. Significantly, this
music does not change with developments in the
action, so it takes on a life of its own. Indeed, any
action movie with many exciting chase sequences,Music and ideasIn the funeral procession that opens
Orson Welles’s The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice
(1952), the composers, Alberto Barberis and Angelo
Francesco Lavagnino, use heavy piano chords, insistent
drums, and a chorus to underscore the director’s
interpretation that fate was the cause of the deaths of
Othello (Welles) and Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier).
TYPES OF FILM SOUND 405