D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

“God had to create disco music so I could be born and be successful” – Donna Summer.

“From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.”― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by  Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

Stepping away from suffocation: a short discussion of the French film Tralala 2021. Disco! Disco in Lourdes, France. 

First the music was intriguing as well as different: not quite a musical and more like a Hymn or meditation through music through life it breathes another dimension into the ordinary, a homeless man’s day and those he meets. 

Tralala is a musical that is like clapping a beat, or adding boots and cats to rhyme and he takes this as his name. He, homeless. He lost. He like a dice roll drifts and finds something in the small and unseen in our lives we might usually overlook. Like vertigo, or a feeling of dizziness and disorientation. A song in the film D’entre les mort or often the English translation The Living and the Dead, a 1954 novel re-named Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adapted from the French novel) directs me to this. Lourdes, the setting in France, is a place that orients pilgrims and disorients the disbelievers: can miracles happen? Have they happened? Why is the belief so strong and the community stands stable and solid in these beliefs. Tralala turns up in the town and disorients people. His appearance, like vertigo and like the song’s English title a life returned from the dead as well as breathing new life into the dead or forgotten relationships in the town. Who is Tralala?

Another dimension and I have the feeling of uncertainty with breathing and letting go. As an audience member I wasn’t prepared to take another’s perspective that like a bomb Tralala is the devils advocate. I didn’t want to determine my meaning, my attempt to connect with the film through with their stable stance. To suffocate; to accept their choices and their approach as the only way to feel this film wasn’t going to stop me breathing or giving it an organic life that evolved or appeared seen through different scenes something different and new.

In a way, borrowing from Dice Man, I questioned their habitual repetition to compete and interpret the whole before my own exploration or discussion. Determined to determine the spectator instead of accepting their perspective was unsure how to receive the film. I walked away from their perspective just like Tralala.. It felt right to let the film have an organic, fecund and less organized moment in my life. To breathe and not judge was what I was taking from Tralala. To feel less suffocated by the other’s perspective. Less dualist and less determined to simply place it in between a miracle and the devil I let go and breathed. 

Uncertainty added dimension and took from the one who tried to destroy the film experience for me. Was this also part of Lourdes miracle or pilgrimage? I breathed and then submitted to the music. Woven through Tralala’s narrative was his perspective: song and music simply walked in him and exchanged with others as part of his day, his ontology. He connected through music and lived as his music. Homeless and facing problems as they unfolded. Disco erupted into this unfolding. Lourdes missed their disco and the family that ran it missed their son, Pat, 20 years gone and now Tralala walks in and they need to fill that gap, their loss with the appearance of who they believed was their lost son and brother, lover and father. Who was Tralala? He had no story in this film. He was presence. His history unknown.


Disco! SO many moments in this film was like vertigo without the anxiety – if possible. The extraordinary in the ordinary – the music we play as we walk around, listen to when we shop and share together as we love, laugh or leave plays a role more significant for the sensitive or interested than those deaf to the rhythms around us. The next generation, the sons who wanted to leave for Australia were still caught in their father’s loss or mourning his brother and his musical connection.

 The loss and the new, rap or hip hop for another generation, was still mourned. The dance music and shared moves as well as light and pleasure was mourned. Where had disco gone for this generation and should older people feel shamed of their age and needs to express themselves through their generation, disco and dance? Unashamedly, I enjoyed the final scenes: dance and then songs sang by the “brother” Seb “D’entre les mort” is sang by the actor Bertand Belin. With Le mot juste, the hypnotic rhythms – percussion created a space to forget and to enjoy performing and the performance. The narrative again lost or wandered and music plays a role in the pilgrimage out of grief and into life.

I found in the film an encouragement, or going against the tide, for older people to dance for therapy, memory and improve quality of life. The intergenerational trauma that disrupted and disoriented the extended family from Pat’s disappearance to the sudden appearance of Tralala was like the lights on the disco ball in town, a removing of dust and spinning with the earth again. Without one meaning many worlds could world without holding onto an other through grief, dishonesty and regret. Tralala is not a musical and is not not one. The meaning for me is to sit again and listen to Bertrand Belin’s voice transport me somewhere else, unknown and unfamiliar with familiarity. Uncertainty unfolds for me as flexibility and opening to the voices of others: their daily hymns or values and meanings intertwining with my own.

(5) D’entre les morts – YouTube

Le mot juste (youtube.com)

 Not the waltz, this is Disco!

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Guilty Men, 2016. A conversation between 3 friends. Friendship and betrayal in the Mexican music in Columbia.

“We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will”- Schopenhauer 

Guilty Men, 2016. Directed by Ivan Gaona, Columbia, Spanish language film: A conversation between 3 friends. Friendship and betrayal in the Mexican music in Columbia.

Three men in a truck casually discussing whether they would be different if they listened to other music growing up in Columbia. This scene represented the film  and, for me as an outsider a way into listening to and feeling the culture in front of me, the different music styles and their place: wedding invitations and the joyful sounds of the brass instruments and then the more romantic, dulcet tones of the ranchera in the truck.

El Mariarchi music introduces the scene in the truck with three adult men squashed across the front seat. Over every bump and rotation of the wheels the men swayed and bounced in the old truck cabin. Not noticing this they discussed their music, their culture. They grew up listening to Ranchera and Norteña songs, developed as a style in Mexico blending Mexican and SPanish oral traditions. This conversation does the same: blending oral storytelling and friendship (between men) with music talking about the motivations for betrayal, jealousy and hatred in the songs: women, love and murder. One states, “ If we had listened to different music

We would be different.”

Another casually laughs and suggests ”More gay maybe!” The other goes on to tell stories of murder and jealousy: 

“ They all listened to Ranchera…

That’s why they ended up killing each other.

If we were taught to listen to another kind of music

We would be different…”

What does he mean? Different? Less violent? Less vengeful and murderous for revenge and justice? The film offers this culture as a way of life, a village and a culture that accepts the music and the songs as their story repeated in everyday life: betrayal. One man in the truck represents betrayal or, from another perspective, peace. 

The other suggests that he doesn’t think listening to different music would make them different.

“I don’t think so

We would be the same

But we would listen to different music.”

I am told that Mariachi songs and music speak of machismo, love, betrayal, politics, revolutionary heroes and ordinary events, such as animals in life (https://worldmusiccentral.org/world-music-resources/musician-biographies/mexican-music/)

Peter Kalkavage, in his discussion of Schopenhauer, suggests that music is the symbol of the “whole of all things”. Where the will in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, signifies everything in us born of passion and feeling” (https://www.futuresymphony.org/music-and-the-idea-of-a-world-part-ii/). 

Our world, natural, inner and outer life is constituted through rhythms and melodies and music symbolises our will in the word – our emotional connections – as well as our desires – our future, motivations and culture.  The world is music, tones and rhythms and in this truck, the three Colombian men express the music, the will embodied by them through lived experiences as well as the music embodying them: their machismo, their expression and their betrayal or inability to hear a music different to their own. Should one man die because he wants to live differently to others and, should a community suffer because of politics and control? Through Schopenhauer, I have listened to this conversation and the soundscape – the music of the film – to hear both the conscious, ordered machismo expression of their world, culture as well as the unconscious the unstable and the potential uncertainty in the violence that lurks in the village and politics of the people, their history and the rhythms in the music that pull them along. 

Schopenhauer also speaks of the betrayal and hatred the men speak of, the music’s melody “weal and woe” and whereas Schopenhauer speaks of music as unique, representing the inner world of care, the passionate world heart, these men reveal the passion and the heart of their men, their culture is quite murderous and intuitively proud seeking revenge and integrity. 

This film reveals the universal, everyday connection to music beyond elitism. The universal language offers some relief from individual, self-centred motivation. Kalkavage acknowledges Plato and Aristotle’s assertions that music is imitation: the soul is the muse or the embodiment of music and music played imitates the dispositions of the soul.  Schopenhauer, suggests Kalkavage, adds another dimension that connects music and soul to the world. The music in this film does just this: plants, animals, inorganic or spiritual and celebration, to the people and their culture.

Peter Kalkavage. St. John’s College. Music and the Idea of a World. https://www.futuresymphony.org/music-and-the-idea-of-a-world-part-ii/

https://worldmusiccentral.org/world-music-resources/musician-biographies/mexican-music/

© Catherine Andrews, 2023.

Tenderness, La Tendresse 2013

Transgressive elements of music: Tenderness, 2013 Belgium Film La Tendresse directed by: Marion Hänsel

When not much happens and a divorced couple need to collect their injured adult son from a skiing accident, what did I notice about this film?

The music and the drive through unknown landscapes to reach the ski slopes and Mountain region foreign to my knowledge. Music gifted me with questions about tenderness. Not often heard in my everyday, I have recently watched two films questioning and challenging “the journey” that’s not tourism. Classical harmonies, discrete and in proportion are replaced with a soundtrack that de-constructs experience and offers a transgressive relation that becomes “tenderness”.A movement between construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction: active, listening, dialogue and subtly changing to include the landscape, the people and the past. Tenderness transgresses any thoughts of resentment or dissatisfaction left over from past issues and conflicts.

 Tenderness: gently, loving, kind, sensitive to pain. The older couple, thrown into an intimate car drive – a close space – that offered them conversation and friendship. They had a past. Most would feel uncomfortable with their ex-spouse. Instead, we the spectator are taken on a journey with the mother/ex-wife for a discovery, re-covery, and awakening of her senses. Not a bitter nor angry character I did sense that she needed some play time to let go and simply enjoy the mountain, the late night and her uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.

What made the whole experience I am attempting to describe is my later re-thinking and foregrounding the concept “tenderness” and what it means to me, to hear parents praise and adore an adult son’s new girlfriend is quite foreign and with high self-esteem no criticism or shame nor judgement and decision making imposed upon the child. 

The sentiment unfolds. Tenderness interested me because the concept unfolded or warmed itself inside me. I was warmed to feelings I hadn’t thought of recently. That interested me. The film’s relation to music and landscape and how the simplicity transgressed my everyday relations. How could I re-think my own relations, my own revealing of tenderness?

As the work of art, the film-with-music unfolded, I listened to my own needs in my own time. Like music – classical music resonates this passing over time or through time to unfold as a sentiment and memory – the musical score and choices aren’t readily recalled for enjoyment on their own.

Listening is a skill that I have noticed not many enjoy nor have to include the sounds and needs of others as well as themselves. Invalidating others’ needs is an expression of the inability to listen with tenderness and the sensitive capacity to let go, allow, and enjoy others’ happiness, and questions without critical judgement.

Edward Said offered me a phrase (discussing Brahms) “the music of his music”…and the way “music carries within oneself” (1991, p93) and I hear this as the way tenderness can be offered to listen to oneself and others, their music their unusual, unique and different compositions that can brighten a day when offered a light through listening carefully with sensitivity and knowledge how to let another reveal themselves and hear their music.

Edward Said. (1991). Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press.

© Catherine Andrews 2022

The shipwreck: a short discussion of masculinity in the film The Man in the Hat (2020).

The shipwreck: a short discussion of masculinity in the film The Man in the Hat (2020).

The man in the hat, English and French Film, 2020, Directed by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck (co-writer) and original soundtrack by Stephen Warbeck.

…”All you gotta do is try a little tenderness…” – Nadine Lee, try a Little Tenderness

Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.”

 — Michel Serres

Masculinity.

Discussing modern music, Adorno states: “The alienation present in the consistency of artistic technique forms the very substance of the work of art. The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world” (Said, 1991, p13).

The Man in the Hat was a pleasure for me to listen to, watch, and experience stillness and silence as well as a journey exploring tenderness, vulnerability and masculinity. The silence, for me, was the music and the music was the film and the journey squashed in a tiny Fiat.

The journey: clearly a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of a drama: anxiety associated with stereotypes. Some men, wearing “shadey” or sinister Mafia-looking style clothes – or simply Jazz musicians (?), dumped a large plastic wrapped object into the harbour. The incomprehensible led the Man in the Hat on a journey attempting to escape and finding tenderness and depth within and on his journey initially begun through anxiety and fear for his safety.

The very substance of this work of art, masculinity and journey, was the music and the limited dialogue. I felt the natter and chatter and constant demands of everyday urban life around me fade. The coldness of depthless complaints disappeared into the warmth and journey of tenderness.

Alienation.

Alone the man travelled and passed and met locals struggling and attempting to understand their lives. Alone, a solitary photograph of a woman sat next to him on the passenger’s seat. Man, alienated from urban landscape admitting his anxiety and feelings of vulnerability – age, social status – becomes part of the musical score. Set at a distance from everyday relations and usual assumptions that, in my culture, masculinity denies vulnerability and tenderness the landscape and its openness and questioning presence: Where is he? Where is he going? He assumes he is being followed by angry mafia men seen in the lamplight dumping a large plastic wrapped object. He assumes their aggression and finds, towards the end, their tenderness. They are jazz musicians on their way to a performance. “They illuminate the meaningless world”. They illuminate our own alienation from connections: landscape, intimacy and conversation. Their music opens beyond the meaning-giving of our everyday and beyond the stereotype of masculinity and aggression: pleasure and enjoyment. They have brought a smile, an adventure and depth to a man uncertain about his existence.

I knew of a quote by Adorno in Edward Said’s Musical Elaborations long before watching this film. I like it. I read it and felt incomprehension and loss as well as a journey, finding and accepting meaninglessness. I thought of Michel Serres, from a shipwreck adventures begin. Masculinity in this film embodies this quote – at least for me and my own existential personality viewing the art object, the world of music and narrative.

Modern music, Adorno writes, “It’s fortune lies in the perception of misfortune…” and even though the unthinking, mechanical production of music might not appeal, the words suggest the age of the man, his journey and the music that embodies him and vice versa, suggests I can borrow from Adorno’s writings…”Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked” (Said, 1991, p14). 

Despair.

The journey out and inwards involved anxiety and some despair, some unchallenged and no risk flee from a scene not seen. The Man in the Hat’s perspective, to flee and not question nor stand his solid ground was for survival and also absurd. What meaning did he give? This absurd fleeing offered an opportunity to meet himself again, made undone and renewed through adventure, through the shipwreck he felt as anxiety and survival. I appropriated Adorno’s critique simply because it reminded me of masculinity and also the hope that tenderness is explored by those who dare: dare to question and dare to reveal their vulnerability. The music took me through the art object and I lost awareness of time as well as narrative: I was journeying as music and noticing changes in the Man through the music. 

Like silence and a journey from my urbanscape, the music transformed as well as left me alone. The sounds didn’t aggressively insult me like a Mafia gang would. This masculinity, this acceptance of the journey and of his past and lived experience didn’t become an exoticised object: I felt reflected and content. Whatever the Man had done in his past was of no concern to me. I didn’t hold him responsible for every error of Man, nor every issue of Woman. I had no desire to, and this the paradox of reflection and contentment, to lose myself and daydream of the character, his life and feeling the need to be satisfied by him.

Music has a social context and the meaningless world that attempts to deny it, or put the more creative and sensitive or tender touch in the shadows (and unfortunately in mainstream love songs – not my forte nor my interest) to eradicate it, like a Mafia gang and the empty rubbishing bodies in their path to wealth and control (or anxious attempts to control perspective and living). Unthinking, the Man unwillingly participates in a journey he initiates. A woman catches his eye. Simply dressed riding a bicycle she becomes a focus (and part of the scene, the absurd twists and turns on a narrow road in country France – Marseille?) and then part of the journey, the seen within the scene: the landscape. Unknowingly we become lured into warmth and feeling tenderness: the older intimate couple experience heartache and this experience invites us to make a choice: we have a choice – just as the Man does- and he chooses to show a little tenderness….

The shipwreck? Masculinity left unquestioned. Without tenderness and without feeling alienated. The journey? An adventure that rediscovers and alters (my perspective as spectator and viewer and this character’s) masculinity in and through music to feel, tenderness…

Edward W. Said. (1991). Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press.

 © Catherine Andrews 2022.