Music and Film

Music and film are two art forms that have maintained a symbiotic relationship with each other since the inception of film. Did music and film develop in parallel throughout history and influence each other, or was their development rather chaotic and left to chance?

From silent film to blockbuster (Music and film in history)

From accompanying pianists during a silent film screening (often depending on the pianist's improvisational skill) to well-known film music composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer. After over 100 years of film history, countless interactions between film and music are known and researched. More generally, the portmanteau word has Synchresis naturalized, which describes the fusion process that takes place when an acoustic and a visual stimulus are presented simultaneously. 
The primary effect is the amplification of emotions. In addition, there is the possibility to create moods and transport stories to a deeper, more emotional level. In films, music can serve as a powerful tool to define characters (leitmotifs), drive the plot forward, and offer the audience a more intense experience.

However, this interplay between music and film has been treated very one-sidedly so far. In most cases, the music serves as support for the film in order to produce the aforementioned effects. The approach of reversing the roles has so far only been implemented in popular music videos. In our project Resistance – September 8 let's try to achieve the construction of a synchresis with reversed roles. In contrast to the traditional roles of music and film in history, our film is intended to give the music a concrete level that opens up the possibility for the audience to infer a concrete context (film) from an abstract emotion (music).

So the music is meant to trigger the film and not the other way around. Consequently, the symphony was created first, although an exact separation of the dramaturgy of the symphony and the film is illusory. However, a similar thing must have happened to the 19th-century composers with their demand of „Prima la musica!“.