Chart Tunes, Ski Slopes and Savannah: Notes on Music in the CINEPANETTONE
This entry is on some of the uses made of pop songs in the cinepanettone. I’m not well qualified to discuss this theme but have been prompted to do so by a workshop in Leeds later this month, the Leeds Popular Culture Research Network (PCRN) First Symposium on European Popular Musics, organized by Isabelle Marc. The clips below and my comments on them will form the basis of my presentation at the workshop. It’s a first step for me in the thinking about the use of music in the films, though Luca Peretti and myself did interview composer Bruno Zambrini, who does all the composed music for Neri Parenti’s films (more on Zambrini below). I’ve been fortunate to read two PhD dissertations in the last two years on popular/rock music in films, both of which were highly theoretically informed. This post is not highly theoretically informed, nor does it deal with questions of identity (national, generational, gender, or otherwise) that might be relevant when discussing the use of popular music, Italian and foreign, in Italian films. What I am not going to do (much), here or in the presentation, is ‘interpret’ the meanings of the music in the films - instead I want to describe how the music is employed. However, I hope the post points to some avenues of investigation as well as a reason or two for why the films have changed, over the years, in terms of the use in them of pre-existing songs.
As readers of this blog are well aware, the first ‘film di Natale’, Vacanze di Natale (Carlo Vanzina, 1983), was a ‘winter’ and updated (i.e., contemporary) version of Sapore di mare by the same writer-director team (Enrico with Carlo) from earlier the same year. Sapore di mare isa beach film set in the pre-Beatles Sixties – it is a tribute to Italian beach films of the 50s and 60s even as it adapts the model of American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), famously a ‘jukebox’ film with a compiled soundtrack of period songs. ‘Sapore di mare’ is, of course, the title of a famous sensual beach song by Gino Paoli from 1963 (not in the film!), and in the use of period songs, as well as in other ways, Sapore di Mare is a nostalgic piece. In the brief clip below, the song may or may not be considered diegetic (there is a slightly transistor radio quality to the sound).
Sapore di mare with 'Senza fine’ - Ornella Vanoni (1961)
Vacanze di Natale itself was undisguisedly based on the 1958 film Vacanze d’inverno but its music is right up to date: it features seventeen songs (Italian and otherwise) played in their original radio versions, several of which were chart hits from the year of the film’s release, employed often independently of the film content or even (apparently) in defiance of it, as with the lyrically (deeply) inappropriate piece played over the titles:
Vacanze di Natale (1983) with 'Moonlight Shadow’ - Mike Oldfield (1983)
I asked Carlo Vanzina about this use of the song when I met him: he confirmed it was employed because of its ‘spacious’ sound. I imagine he assumed that most Italians were not familiar enough with English then to notice the incongruity. Such incongruity notwithstanding, the Vanzinas and Filmauro tried to reuse the song for the titles of Vacanze di Natale 2000, but the rights were too expensive (more on this theme later), so they got the song re-recorded by a different singer.
Their desire to reuse the song suggests how it had come to be strongly associated with the film and with the series of Vacanze di Natale, and it suggests to me how the nostalgia native to a period piece like Sapore di mare had been transferred to a contemporary context in Vacanze di Natale (1983): the songs from the previous year or two included in the film came to connote and recall the period; the nostalgia, like karma for John Lennon, was instant. (Of course the same ‘instant’ aspect also leads to contempt, and this is part of why the films have been perceived as ‘fast food’ and ‘trash’.) The nostalgia has also proved to be of impressive longevity, as evidenced by the pages devoted to the songs from Vacanze di Natale (1983) on the fan website devoted to the film (currently unavailable).
Most of the songs in the film are used to accompany purely ‘visible’ activity, and are often employed as sound bridges (as at the end of the film’s title sequence, above). The volume tends to be dropped, or the song is faded out, when characters speak, especially if the dialogue is funny, as it mostly is. (Christian De Sica’s blissful ‘frocio’ scene has no music.)
The songs, as in the title sequence, seem chosen for reasons of sonic quality or recognition value rather than for reasons of lyrical content (though see/hear the partial exception, second below, of the Vasco Rossi song). The title sequence offers a paradigm for subsequent films, which – as is typical in genre films and in ‘franchise’ series – take the model and inflate its spectacularity. Consider this example from Vacanze di Natale 91, which confirms the cinema-of-attractions-style big+wide-screen spectacle of the location (here St Moritz to the original’s Cortina D’Ampezzo) and (off‑)piste stunts, with its essential, purely sensory (?), aural accompaniment.
Vacanze di Natale 91 with 'Your Love is Crazy’ - Albertino featuring David Syon (1991)
Of course, title sequences obey different rules to the rest of a film, and the use of songs over such a sequence is hardly unique (James Bond anyone? – though the songs in that case are specially written; American Graffiti itself has ‘Rock Around the Clock’ over a mostly static opening), but it is interesting to note that purely spectacular segments within the film – again accompanied by chart songs – are also found in the original Vacanze di Natale, and like the title sequences become an essential topos in subsequent films. This clip is from Vacanze di Natale (1983), and has barely any narrative relevance in the film. It is used to reintroduce some of the ensemble cast in a different context (see the end of the clip with Mario Amendola et al.), but we know nothing of the skiing championship pictured, nor of its competitors or results. On the other hand, the music in this case is Italian, and strangely melancholy given the images, and the lyrics (‘voglio una vita spericolata’) can be read as referring to the daredevilry of the skiers, or perhaps to the desire of one or more of the characters – or even to the desire of a possible spectator? (There is obviously an aspirational aspect to these films, showing as they do a life style and location barred to most of us.)
Vacanze di Natale (1983) with 'Vita spericolata’ - Vasco Rossi (1983)
The following clips from Vacanze di Natale 90 and 95 show the reprisal of the topos of the spectacular interlude. Again, note how the content must be inflated (more spectacular stunts, new extreme sports etc.) in the subsequent films, and the music itself is also to some degree subject to this inflation (faster tempo in the second case anyway, greater degree of synesthetic coordination in the editing, etc.). In the first clip we again get the reintroduction of two characters (the two women seated) at the end of the scene, while in the second the function of the clip is most immediately to signal the film’s arrival at its main location (Aspen, Colorado).
Vacanze di Natale 90 with 'Hold On’ - Wilson Phillips
Vacanze di Natale 95 with 'Stayin Alive’ - N. Trance featuring Ricardo Da Force (1995)
Perhaps the song in the second clip is meant in a generic way to signal ‘America’: the sample from the Bee Gees will have been familiar to many from Saturday Night Fever, and would in any case have had connotations of acrobatic disco dancing apt for the visual content of the clip. But what I find very interesting is the fact that the sequence recycles at least two segments of footage from the title sequence of Vacanze di Natale 91 (one pair of comparative frame grabs below to illustrate the point).
Vacanze di Natale 91
Vacanze di Natale 95
So, the montage sequence in the later film indicates the location, but it also demonstrates how the spectacularity of the images is more or less interchangeable: what is conspicuously different, updated and possessed of/subject to an instant nostalgia is the music: the chart song employed.
A mad scene from the same film shows how the commonplace of spectacularity accompanied by a song of the moment (or at least of last week) can be elaborated for other ends, in this case for surreal comedy, with Massimo Boldi riding the skiing contraption most congenial to his unruly body.
Vacanze di Natale 95 with 'Scatman’s World’ - Scatman John (1995)
Topoi of spectacle survive into the more recent films. Filmauro have renounced the ski slope for other exotic locations in the films of the new millennium (though wait for December this year…), but Boldi and Mari Film returned to St Moritz in 2010. Their A Natale mi sposo opens, however, in Rome, pictured below in the title montage in its most familiar postcard vistas (the beautiful and unusual colour quality of the film, may be hard to appreciate at this scale of digital reproduction).
A Natale mi sposo with 'California Gurls’ - Katy Perry (2010)
If the song here has any relevant connotations, they are probably ideological, and can be identified in a nexus of leisure, labeled consumption, frank sexuality, youth. But paradoxical toponymic specificity over the images (‘California gurls’) helps to make an exotic location of Rome itself, a city necessarily familiar to many viewers. (I watched it with Catherine O’Rawe and Giancarlo Lombardi in a multiplex in Piazza Cavour, the other side of the imposing rusticated façade of the Italian Supreme Court, seen 55 seconds into the clip; the bass heavy amplification emphasized the beat and made me perceive and remember the montage as faster paced than it is.) The presumed familiarity with Rome may motivate the unusual coherence (so different from the version of Aspen, Colorado) of the drive around the city, which is plausible in terms of urban layout and traffic routes, even as it is clear that the visit is a tourist one for some of the cars’ occupants.
Vacanze di Natale 91
A Natale mi sposo
The earlier films make use of very many songs (the 1983 Vacanze di Natale lists twenty-one in the credits), but that was the golden age of jukebox movies. The price of rights has risen, and the hits are more spartanly employed these days. A Natale mi sposo has its moments of pop-accompanied snowy and aspirational spectacle, as in the image above (and a still from the model sequence in Vacanze di Natale 91), but it reuses its title-sequence track, with diegetic motivation, in the scene of a Christmas ‘beach’ party for the young at their St Moritz hotel. The beautiful bodies described in Katy Perry’s song are visualized for us, clad (or not) in the bikinis she sings about.
A Natale mi sposo with 'California Gurls’ - Katy Perry (2010)
Prohibitive cost was the reason given to me by Luigi De Laurentiis for the use of fewer songs in the recent Filmauro films. On the other hand, both Neri Parenti and Bruno Zambrini explained to me that it is part of Parenti’s directorial style to avoid music. I think Vacanze di Natale 95, slotted as it was into a given paradigm set by Carlo Vanzina and continued by Enrico Oldoini, is a partial exception (again, it will be interesting to see if the probable return to snowy Cortina this year will also signal a stylistic return to the Carlo Vanzina model, musically and in other ways). But Parenti’s Natale in… films can be considered much more ‘his own’, inasmuch as an auteurist comment can be meaningful in this context, and have severely limited use of song and music in general (my cinema experience of Natale in Sud Africa in December 2010 suggested that the film suffered from the lack of music). Any analysis of the use of popular song in the films needs to place such a use in the context of the musical character of each film as a whole. For example, the original Vacanze di Natale also has three or four familiar pop songs sung by Jerry Calá in his guise of nightclub pianist, a choral song sung in a restaurant, as well as some composed music by Giorgio Calabrese; Vacanze di Natale 91 has pastiche horror music; Vacanze di Natale 2000 features Neapolitan song. In terms of the Nari Parenti films of the 2000s, consider the couple of examples below, very different scenes that employ composed music by Bruno Zambrini.
The first, with Michelle Hunziker and Fabio De Luigi in Natale a Rio, was chosen by Zambrini himself when Luca and I asked him to select a scene to represent his approach to composition. He was very proud of the music’s response to the facial expressions of the actors, though seemed oblivious to the way in which the romantic effect aided by the piano melody is immediately displaced and undercut by the cartoon-style humour of the coda.
Natale a Rio with music by Bruno Zambrini
Zambrini’s music is not in itself comic (no Morricone irony here) – and as far as I can discern (though I may change my mind with further study), never is; instead, like the pop songs employed, it is part of the context in which comedy happens. It is different, of course, in that it is a deliberate and specially composed layer of commentary or narration on a scene, even as it is much less likely to be noticed because not already recognizable. It is also different in that it may be part of the set of social expectations that are challenged by the low comedy in the Parenti films, one of the elements which can lead to accusations of ‘cynicism’ and can make grown-ups, at least, uncomfortable with them.
The next scene, from last year’s Natale in Sud Africa, can be compared to the spectacular interludes in the Vacanze di Natale films, but the chart songs have disappeared. Instead we have Zambrini’s instrumental music composed, as he explained, with some 'local flavour’, and in the awareness of the tradition of film music (the music for Natale sul Nilo has something of Laurence of Arabia about it). Again the spectacular vista places the characters and reintroduces them in the new location.
Natale in Sud Africa with music by Bruno Zambrini
I’ll finish with some mention of songs in the advertising for the films. The use of popular songs has to be effective given their expense. The Filmauro approach for the Neri Parenti films has been to extablish an association between the upcoming film di Natale and the song of the moment (or a classic like George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’, used for the 2004 Christmas in Love). This is done through teaser trailers which feature the stars singing or dancing in the location for the film accompanied by a popular tune, a scene which will not feature in the film itself (the strategy seems to date from 2002 and Natale sul Nilo). For Natale in Sud Africa, the song chosen was Shakira’s ‘Waka Waka’, the 2010 World Cup song (as such an unwise though understandable choice, and certainly chosen before the World Cup, staged in South Africa of course – unfortunately the Italian national team did abysmally, something that may have contributed to the relatively poor box office of Natale in Sud Africa). The main cast dances to the song in the teaser below, along with some digital elephants, who also feature in the film’s opening titles, second below, again serenaded by Shakira. ‘Wka Waka’ is not otherwise used in the film, though Shakira herself is mentioned – something written into the contract?
Teaser trailer for Natale in Sud Africa with 'Waka Waka’ - Shakira (2010)
Natale in Sud Africa with 'Waka Waka’ - Shakira (2010)