Background music is a moral affair

The studio looks huge and equipped with cameras that include one mounted on a crane. Yet almost all of the shots are close-ups. The camera fixes on her face, breaking down at the questions, yet still looking pretty as ever. It was grace under pressure.

It’s a bit disorienting and we almost forget that this is no longer a movie when the actress Heart Evangelista sobs before the camera as she defends her boyfriend, Sen. Chiz Escudero, from her parents’s accusations.

It was the usual tale of forbidden love, the daughter going against her  parents who dislike her sweetheart. Yet Heart looks earnest in her testimonies and I’m even tempted to say that she has not been truer to her name that in that moment on television. One could see it in the many pauses as she wiped the tears from her eyes. There was no need for background music.

But that wasn’t the case when the interview was replayed in the morning news the next day. Soft instrumental music, the kind we often hear in radio dramas, was added as background for the series of close-ups.

Heart’s interview reminds me of French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who  once said that “the tracking shot is a moral affair,” referring to how this technique of moving the camera while it keeps its focus on an object, is often used to add melodrama to what is already a grave human condition tackled in given film.

In those years, when French media seemed to have found convenient ways in film technique to omit or undercut the inconvenient truths of collaboration during the Second World War, the war in Algeria, and the May 1968 uprising in Paris, Godard is actually referring to how film form in general often betrays content.

In a review, another French filmmaker/critic, Jacques Rivette, alludes to Godard when he attacked the use of tracking shots in Kapo, the 1960 film of Gillo Pontecorvo about the Jewish collaborators in the Nazi concentration camps.

Rivette centered his criticism on only one part of the film, the particular tracking shot that focused on Riva when she finally decides to hit the electric fence. Rivette writes: “Just look at the shot in Kapo where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbed wire: the man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final frame – deserves only the most profound contempt.”

With this single statement on a single shot in a film, Rivette’s review became an iconic piece of film criticism. It brought forward the issue of form and content in art or how each should be appropriate for the other.

What makes the tracking shot in Kapo appalling is the way Pontecarvo preferred to stay within the framework of mainstream narrative cinema, with its usual strategy of “glamorizing” a scene through artificial lighting, camera composition, and “invisible” continuity editing.

The Nazis used such “classical” techniques in their own propaganda films like the documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl who insisted that it was all beauty that she sought in her work and never politics. The shot in Kapo not only undercuts the film’s serious content, the whole aesthetic behind it negates its intentions.

This brings us to reflect on how form and content are played up in today’s cinema and television.

In the recent controversies over the private lives of two celebrities, Kris Aquino and Heart Evangelista, the television interviews were supposed to give the public a more honest, up-close and personal exchange of facts. Yet there is something too familiar in the way the scene turns into  melodrama not too  unlike a soap opera.

It brings to mind Kris’s previous interviews in another “falling apart” issue, where in between crying spells, she would stare at different cameras with perfect timing as she would address her erring man. Then, of course, it comes with  carefully chosen music.

As if the issue is not morally complicated enough, how TV producers cleverly turn it into another scene of drama starred by these actresses, adds another moral dimension to this whole affair.