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Posted: |
Feb 24, 2020 - 2:39 PM
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By: |
afn
(Member)
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Doing a little Deborah Kerr retrospective, I just rewatched one of my all time favorite movies, QUO VADIS (1951), and during the Exit Music a thought came to my mind:
Isn't it quite paradoxical that these three or so minutes of music wonderfully wrap up and give some closure to the incredible and emotionally exhausting three hour experience before... - while at the same time this music is first and foremost supposed to just "exit" you out of the cinema, with hundreds of people pushing to the doors like in burning Rome?!
This means you were very much NOT supposed to keep sitting there and appreciate this final stroke of the cinematic masterpiece that had just been painted before your eyes and ears, no, get up, show's over, please leave the theater now!, and after maybe 45 seconds you stand outside the door and can still hear the wonderful music playing inside...
I wonder if anyone back then actually kept sitting there and listened to the very end...?
I actually had this very paradoxical experience already as a kid in a rerun of GONE WITH THE WIND in the early 80s when I was the last person inside the huge theater and an usher wanted me to leave, while Max Steiner was still mixing old tunes from the South with Tara's Theme. Sadly, I obeyed. Those were the days...
(In a way, the lengthy end title suites of especially 80s and 90s films took on the role of the old exit music, don't you think?)
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I often stay for the end credits...especially if the music was particularly good...it's often the best statement of all the themes! I did laugh, like the poster above, I just saw 1917 and sat through the credits just to enjoy the score on those big theatre speakers one last time :-)
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Posted: |
Feb 25, 2020 - 4:41 AM
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By: |
Doug Raynes
(Member)
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Doing a little Deborah Kerr retrospective, I just rewatched one of my all time favorite movies, QUO VADIS (1951), and during the Exit Music a thought came to my mind:
Isn't it quite paradoxical that these three or so minutes of music wonderfully wrap up and give some closure to the incredible and emotionally exhausting three hour experience before... - while at the same time this music is first and foremost supposed to just "exit" you out of the cinema, with hundreds of people pushing to the doors like in burning Rome?!
This means you were very much NOT supposed to keep sitting there and appreciate this final stroke of the cinematic masterpiece that had just been painted before your eyes and ears, no, get up, show's over, please leave the theater now!, and after maybe 45 seconds you stand outside the door and can still hear the wonderful music playing inside...
Yes, composing Exit Music was very much a case of Love’s Labour’s Lost. I went to many roadshow presentations in the 1960s and never gave any thought to the fact that there was any music playing while we all got up from our seats and chatted about the film. In the general hubbub the music was heard more on a subliminal level than anything else. Those hard-tickets presentations usually had full attendance and it took all of the three minutes or so of music to play out before everyone had left. Certainly it would have seemed very odd to see someone still in their seat looking at the closed curtains, listening to the music. It was only on recordings that I was later able to fully appreciate some of that splendid Exit Music.
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For a long time, into the 70’s and 80’s, essentially before the advent of video, the existence of overture/entr’acte/exit music cues was a topic among film music collectors. There was an ongoing letter discussion in Pro Musica Sana, the printed journal of the Miklos Rozsa Society, sometimes with members with conflicting memories of what they had heard in theaters.
Eventually, in a later issue, someone presented a list they’d compiled of as many of these cues as had been agreed upon. But, even then, there were still only private recordings filtering around, and just about no commercial releases of them.
Curiously, BEN-HUR has always had overture/entr’acte, but has NEVER had any exit music, the intention being that nothing could top the epiphany at the end of the film.
Nowadays, just about the only time a composer gets to present their themes is during the final credit crawl. But, even then, their music is hemmed in by mostly unrelated pop songs, which I can live without.
(And, on the released CD, presuming there is one, there may not even be much music by the composer, but rather more “inspired by” pop songs. Yuck...)
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