Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices
of the Early Silent Cinema
Rebecca Leydon
introduction
Mosaic-like designs characterize musical form in Debussy’s
late style, exempliŽ ed in the twelve piano etudes, written in 1915,
and the contemporaneous chamber music. Like their orchestral
precursor Jeux, these works exhibit fragmented arrangements of
heterogeneous motivic materials and free juxtaposition of tonal
and nontonal pitch resources. Such moments are peculiar to and
pervasive within the composer’s late style. But above all, it is the
fascinating methods of “enchainment” in these works—their enig-
matic transitions, their disjunctive reiterations and duplications—
that has puzzled and intrigued listeners and performers. This paper
proposes a model for the continuity and succession of ideas in
Debussy’s late style by situating his late works within the context
of the technologies used in the early silent cinema—speciŽ cally,
the repertory of cinematic editing techniques that are contempora-
neous with this music.
In positing a cinematic model for Debussy’s music, I am imag-
ining something like Anthony Newcomb’s narratological concept
of “modes of continuation.”1 Modeling his approach to musical
form on the narratology of the Russian Formalist Vladmir Propp,
Newcomb views narrative as an ordered series of “functions” and
characterizes the structural analysis of narrative as a process by
1 Newcomb 1987.
which a paradigmatic plot—a typical series of events in a pre-
scribed order—is deduced from a repertoire of texts. Newcomb
stresses that this paradigmatic plot
. . . is not the same thing as a quasi-architectural formal schema, such as
ABA, with its patterns of repetition and complementarities. The paradig-
matic plot may be a unidirectional unfolding of events, without overt rep-
etition. Nor is it the same as a series of musical sections deŽ ned by spe-
ciŽ c thematic content. The surface content of each individual instance of
the series may differ widely. The paradigmatic plot is a series of func-
tions, not necessarily deŽ ned by patterns of sectional recurrences or by
the speciŽ c characters fulŽ lling the functions. 2
Newcomb’s approach, then, does not rely solely upon the
schematic conventions peculiar to musical forms. Instead, New-
comb asks, What are the codes according to which we isolate dis-
crete musical events, and what are the codes we invoke to locate
these events within a paradigmatic series? The patterns that char-
acterize musical continuity and succession (as opposed to speciŽ c
motivic content) are perceived according to patterns that are stored
in memory, patterns that are generalizable enough to govern event
successions in more than one medium:
Inasmuch as music may be (and is by many listeners) heard as a mimetic
and referential metaphor, the mimesis involved is of modes of continuation,
2 Newcomb 1987, 165.
218 Music Theory Spectrum
of change and potential. And modes of continuation lie at the very heart of
narrativity, whether verbal or musical. 3
Because so much of Debussy’s music essentially preserves the
recognizable shapes of familiar tonal objects (triads and seventh
chords, for example), our attention is drawn more directly to their
curious linkages. While the pitch-collectional basis of Debussy’s
music (its pervasive octatonicism and hexatonicism, for example,
as elucidated by Allen Forte and Richard Parks 4) is responsible for
many unusual new sonorities, Debussy’s originality so often lies
in the new orderings and contexts for familiar sonorities. In the re-
mainder of this paper I shall demonstrate how, upon the develop-
ment of a new popular narrative medium around 1900—the silent
cinema—new paradigmatic modes of continuation emerge, ones
that modify the classical narrative syntax of traditional story-
telling media. Just as Newcomb imagines a kind of a cross-
domain mapping among music and the nineteenth-century novel, I
claim that the repertoire of cinematic editing devices can serve as
a key interpretant for a set of homologous musical structures. In
positing cinematic devices as cognates for musical ones, my goal
is to foster discussion about musical signiŽ cation, which may in
turn provide a basis for more effective pedagogy and performance
of this music. Finally, cinematic models offer an attractive alterna-
tive to rigidly hierarchical accounts of Debussy’s musical syntax.
Although very few of the Ž lms from the early 1900s have sur-
vived, extant Ž lm reviews and contemporary criticism evoke a
vivid sense of the early cinema, how it was received and what its
most salient devices were. For modern cinema audiences, these
devices have been largely internalized as part of a “Ž lm-reading”
competence, but early Ž lm reviews by Emile Vuillermoz, Louis
Delluc, Louis Aragon, and others, as well as remarks made by
3Newcomb 1987, 167.
4Forte 1991 (developing work begun in Forte 1988), and Parks 1989.
Parks’s comprehensive theory of Debussy’s pitch language expands and encom-
passes Forte’s octatonic angle, and explores the role of hexatonicism, diatoni-
cism, pentatonicism, and other referential collections in the music.
Debussy himself, reveal the extent to which early cinema im-
pressed its spectators. I begin with a discussion of early Ž lm criti-
cism that refers to cinematic techniques and Ž lm-editing practices
made possible by and peculiar to the motion-picture camera,
which techniques and practices give expression to a new kind of
visual logic. They include the “fade,” in which the screen gradu-
ally turns black; the “dissolve,” in which one image gradually dis-
appears while another emerges; the “cut-in,” an instantaneous cut
to a close shot; the juxtaposition of different camera angles; and
the varieties of special effects involving stop-motion tricks, ad-
justment of Ž lm speed and direction, double-exposure of the Ž lm,
and matted images. The accounts of early Ž lm reviewers make
clear that such devices represented a radical departure from the
temporal and spatial orientations to which traditional theater-goers
were accustomed. In the second part of the paper, I consider a
number of musical situations as cognates for cinematic ones, and
I illustrate how the particular narrative situations that give rise to
these devices in Ž lms can suggest speciŽ c formal functions for the
musical passages in which analogous devices occur in Debussy’s
late works. In the Ž nal section of the paper, I discuss how De-
bussy’s cultivation of a “cinematic” style may be understood in re-
lation to French nationalism in the years surrounding the Ž rst
world war.
the early cinema
It is a matter of some debate exactly who should be considered
the original inventor of cinema, since a number of moving-picture
technologies were developed independently at around the same
time in Europe and America. Certainly ideas about motion pictures
were circulating in France from an early date. In the 1880s, for ex-
ample, the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge had orga-
nized lectures in the Parisian salons to show his “motion studies,”
sequences of photographs taken in quick succession and then pro-
jected onto a screen using a device called a “Zoopraxiscope.” A
related form of entertainment, popular in the Montmartre cabarets
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 219
of the 1890s, was the ombres chinoises; Richard Langam Smith
has written of the “shadow plays” performed by Henri Riviere in
the Chat Noir to piano accompaniment by Eric Satie, Charles de
Sivry, and other musicians in regular attendance at the popular
club. Smith speculates that Debussy himself attended these proto-
cinematic spectacles, and may well have provided musical accom-
paniments on occasion. Indeed, Smith argues that these music-hall
spectacles likely played a signiŽ cant role in the genesis of De-
bussy’s Iberia and other works.5
Louis Lumière is usually credited with the invention of cin-
ema. With his brother Auguste in their Lyons factory, Lumière
manufactured photography equipment and in the 1890s designed
the Ž rst “cinematographe,” a machine that combined the functions
of a moving-picture camera and a projector. On December 28,
1895—the date usually considered the birth of cinema—Lumière
screened a number of short Ž lms before a paying audience.6 One
of these Ž lms, entitled La Sortie des usines Lumière, is typical
of these Ž rst works by Lumière: a single shot of the outside of the
factory shows the doors swinging open and workers emerging
from inside. Lumière went on to make hundreds of these short
single-shot Ž lms. Perhaps the most famous of these is L’Arrivee
d’un train a la Ciotat, which shows a steam train moving towards
the camera at an oblique angle; it is anecdotally reported that the
members of the audience frantically took cover under their chairs,
so unprepared were they for the realism of this cinematic image.
The Ž rst cinema audiences were fascinated by the simple de-
piction of motion itself, as they experienced a sort of defamiliar-
5 Smith 1973.
6Although Lumière is usually credited with developing the combined cam-
era and projector, two Americans, Thomas Armat and C. Frances Jenkens, had
independently come up with a similar invention, the “Phantoscope,” some
months earlier. They had used this device to project moving pictures for an au-
dience at an exhibition in Atlanta in 1895, but they did not meet with any com-
mercial success at that time. By this date, Thomas Edison had already patented
his “kinetoscope,” a contraption that allowed a single spectator to view tiny pro-
jected moving images.
ization of ordinary objects and events, like the movement of the
train or the factory workers. Anything that moved could supply
the subject for a Ž lm. Soon, however, the moving-picture tech-
nology was put to the more specialized use of bringing unusual
scenes and images of remote places into the local theatre. Many
of the Ž rst popular cinema productions were of scenic points of
interest, like Niagara Falls, the American West, views from the
bridge of a ship on the high seas or through the window of a mov-
ing train. These kinds of “nature Ž lms” were enormously popular
at the 1900 Paris Exposition. A technically spectacular example is
Raoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama, in which ten projectors were
arranged in the middle of a spherical auditorium, offering the
viewers the experience of the Sahara desert as seen from a bal-
loon. 7
The Ž lm theorist Noël Burch has remarked on the unique sense
of motion and space that is represented in these Ž rst cinematic
events; the experience for the spectator is quite different from any-
thing associated either with the traditional theatre or with an ordi-
nary lived experience of space. Burch points out that the work of
early Ž lm-makers antedates what he calls the “Institutional Mode
of Representation” [IMR] in cinema.8 The IMR is the repertoire
of Ž lmic devices that would eventually become a fully developed
visual language of cinema, a language to which all present-day
spectators have been thoroughly exposed through movies and
television. It is a language that is in no way “natural,” Burch em-
phasizes, but is rather a product of a particular history. While a
7 Also shown at the Exposition was the Lumière Brothers’ Maréorama,
which simulated the view from the bridge of a ship on the high seas. Similar
Ž lms were popular across the Atlantic: in 1904 the American Ž lm-maker
George C. Hale presented his Tours and Scenes of the World, which simulated
the view one would have from the window of a train. Other notable examples
of these early “interest Ž lms” are those of James Freer, a Canadian farmer
from Brandon, who captured scenes of the wilds of Manitoba. Freer’s Ž lms
were shown throughout Europe during the late 1890s in a tour organized by the
Canadian PaciŽ c Railway Company.
8Burch 1990.
220 Music Theory Spectrum
modern Ž lm-maker can rely on spectators’ ability to understand,
for instance, that a juxtaposition of two views of a single object
shot from two different angles represents the same object, the Ž rst
Ž lm-makers had no such common visual code: an instantaneous
shift in perspective was not something with which spectators had
had any prior experience. Similarly, a modern Ž lm-maker can
rely on certain visual conventions to convey temporal ideas, like
“later” or “meanwhile,” but these codes were unavailable to the
Ž rst people working within the medium. To grasp the impact of
early Ž lm, the modern spectator must try to imagine the silent cin-
ema as seen through the eyes of an audience unstudied in the vari-
ous conventions that modern cinema audiences have internalized
as a Ž lm-reading competence.
The unique experience of space that Burch describes is a result
of a variety of cinema-speciŽ c devices made possible by the  exi-
bility of the camera’s eye. A camera may record moving objects
from a Ž xed position; it may pan across a static scene from a Ž xed
point; it may also shift instantaneously to a new view or angle;
and the camera may be mounted on a conveyance which itself
moves through space. In this last case, the “tracking shot,” the cin-
ematic spectator experiences a curious kind of motionless voyage.
It is as though the camera has a bodily agency, serving as a site of
subjectivity which the viewer is invited to occupy. On the other
hand, the camera’s eye may also represent something seen by a
particular subject within the diegetic world of the Ž lm. Or the
camera may function like an unmarked omnipresent narrator in a
novel, seeing everything from all points of view. The silent cin-
ema, lacking overt narration, creates a unique situation in which
the spectator’s position with respect to the imaginary space of the
Ž lm is ambiguous. Vivian Sobchack has explored the  uctuating
subjective position of the cinematic spectator, the different possi-
bilities for what she calls the “site of sight” or the “viewing view”:
. . . we know from our own lived experience what our bodily orientation,
attention, and visual investment in the world ‘look like’ as they inform
and play across our objectively visible bodily presence to others. We can
see the visible and objective body of another who is looking at the world
or ourselves, and understand that objective body is also a body-subject
whose sight is as intentional and meaningful as our own. What is so
unique about the cinema’s ‘viewing view’, however, is that it presents and
represents the activity of vision not merely as it is objectively seen by us,
but also as it is introceptively lived by another. Thus the cinema’s ‘view-
ing view’ is a model of vision as it is lived as ‘my own’ by a body-subject,
and its uniqueness is that this ‘viewing view’ is objectively visible for us
in the same form as it is subjectively visual for itself. . . . The structure
and activity of the cinema’s ‘viewing view’ are isomorphic with our own
bodily experience of vision as we dynamically live it as ‘mine.’9
What was so unusual about the early silent cinema, then, was
the mobility and  exibility of the camera’s eye and the radically
new representations of space made possible by the multiplicity of
shots and perspectives.10 While some of these cinematic devices
can be understood as extensions of the lighting and staging tech-
niques already available in live theatre or opera, other devices rep-
resent a radical departure from traditional stage presentation. The
Ž rst spectators’ inexperience with these devices is brought into re-
lief when we consider the utter transparency of the same devices
for modern viewers. For instance, a 1906 Ž lm called La Danse du
Diable, produced by the Pathé-Frères Ž lm company, presents an
elaborately costumed character who appears to be rolling around
on the  oor. The scene is Ž lmed with the camera oriented in a
9 Sobchack 1991.
10 Early Ž lm-makers frequently treated the cinematic frame itself as a  exi-
ble form by employing irises and masks (adjustable apertures of different
shapes and sizes), which provided alternatives to the normal rectangular form
of the cinematic frame. Examples can be found throughout D. W. GrifŽ th’s
Intolerance of 1916. Multiple-frame imagery was also sometimes employed, in
which the screen was divided into separate segments containing different im-
ages. This technique reached its zenith with the Ž lms of Abel Gance in the
1920s, but it already occurred in Phillips Smalley’s Suspense of 1913. It is also
important to remember that the aspect ratio of the frame in the early cinema—
the ratio of the frame’s width to its height—was not standardized. Unlike the
later “talkies,” no space was required along the side of the Ž lm strip for the
band of sound. Consequently, silent cinema’s screen was generally wider than
the one we are accustomed to seeing today.
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 221
downward vertical tilt. It is difŽ cult for modern spectators to grasp
the point of this peculiar Ž lm unless we realize that we are not
supposed to recognize the downward tilt of the camera. Rather we
are meant to perceive the actor performing his acrobatics within
the traditional proscenium frame and thus witness a “magical,”
gravity-defying dance. Noël Burch remarks:
The effectiveness of this trick at the time undoubtedly lay in the fact that
the clues to downward verticality were absolutely unrecognizable— it was
an unthinkable angle never seen in a system whose basic reference point
was a  at screen unfailingly perpendicular to the gaze of a spectator
seated in a theatre. 11
These rather simplistic examples aside, the technical sophisti-
cation of many early Ž lms was often quite remarkable, as Ž lm-
makers rapidly began to take advantage of a host of new tech-
niques and special effects, many of them developed by the cinema
pioneer George Méliès. Between 1895 and 1914, Méliès made
over a thousand fantasy Ž lms that exploit all types of cinematic
devices. As the director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, Paris’s
foremost magic theatre, Méliès treated the cinema essentially as a
sort of magic show, and his work explores an array of cinematic
illusions. For example, it was Méliès who Ž rst used the uniquely
cinematic technique of the dissolve, in which one image is seen to
gradually fade away at the same time as a second image gradually
emerges. Adjustment of the Ž lm speed and direction, double expo-
sures and superimpositions, stop-motion tricks, glass shots (in which
the camera shoots through glass on which a scene has been
painted) and model animation were all used extensively by Méliès.12
Many examples of these camera tricks are found throughout his
11 Burch 1990, 228. Another Ž lm of this type is The Ingenious Soubrette,
produced by Pathé Frères in 1902, which shows a woman apparently walking
straight up the side of a wall in order to hang a picture.
12 Variable Ž lm speed appears very early in cinema history, as represented by
time-lapse experiments such as Muybridge’s motion studies. The “normal”
speed of early silent Ž lm is in the range of 16–20 frames per second, consider-
ably slower than that of modern Ž lm. Because this rate is below the fusion
well-known Ž lm La voyage dans la lune of 1902, based on Jules
Verne’s novel of the same name. A notable instance is when the
explorers Ž rst arrive at their destination (in a rocket shot from a
cannon): as the characters lie down to sleep on the moon’s sur-
face, Méliès has the actors occupy the bottom part of the frame
while the upper portion remains completely black. Into this black
area, Méliès inserts a second image—a process called “matting,”
in which an additional image is produced either through re-
exposure of a selected portion of the Ž lm or by actually Ž tting a
second piece of Ž lm into the space. At this point in the Ž lm, a series
of magical dissolves now begins, with images of stars, celestial
bodies, and actors dressed as various mythological personae fad-
ing in and out of view in the space above the sleeping explorers.
Other French Ž lm-makers began to make use of multiple cam-
era set-ups, Ž lming the actors from various angles and continu-
ously changing the perspective in the editing. They also began to
incorporate the “cut-in” (or “close-up”), an instantaneous shift
from a distant framing to a closer view of the same space.13
Naturally such devices have been internalized as part of a modern
Ž lm-reading competence, but early Ž lm reviews reveal the extent
to which cinema’s Ž rst viewers were impressed by the shifting
perspectives of the camera. Contemporary accounts indicate that
the shifting spatial orientation was so strongly marked in relation
threshold of about 24 frames per second, these early Ž lms had a pronounced
 icker when projected—hence the term “ icker” or “ ick” used to refer to
movies. Today, in order to eliminate the  icker, silent Ž lms are sometimes pro-
jected at sound-Ž lm speed which accounts for the fast motion that is erro-
neously associated with cinema of this period.
13 While it is sometimes reported that early French Ž lmmakers used the long
shot almost exclusively, Burch has shown that this is not the case.
Contrary to a highly tenacious myth, the medium close-up and even the
true close-up are found in the very earliest stages of the cinema, in
Europe and in the USA. They rapidly became an established presence in
the Ž rst decade, so that it can be stated, with no wish to cultivate para-
dox, that the development of institutional editing among the Americans,
the Danes, and so on, was to reduce the proportion of medium close-ups
and close-ups in the cinema. (Burch 1990, 24.)
222 Music Theory Spectrum
to normative proscenium staging that it could signiŽ cantly impair
the audience’s ability to comprehend a narrative. For example, as
late as 1912, a Ž lm critic known as Yhcam complained of the dis-
rupting effect produced by the close-up:
In order that their [the actors] facial expressions could be seen clearly by
the spectators (in all corners of the hall), the director has had to project the
actors in close-shots as often as possible. This method, which gives good
results, has quickly degenerated into an excessive practice. . . . Naturally,
little by little, this misuse has been pursued conscientiously by the direc-
tors of other companies. Now we have reached what could be called the
age of the legless cripple. For three quarters of the time, the actors in a
scene are projected in close shot, cut off at the knees; from an artistic
point of view the effect produced is highly disagreeable and shocking . . .
the impression [is] of characters of unnatural grandeur. And when the ag-
grandizement diminishes and they return to normal, the same character
seems too small; the eye takes a certain time to get used to this. . . . The
director should always begin by projecting the subject with a clear refer-
ence point, for example a dog with a man. If later he wants to increase the
size of one or the other, in order to better capture details, he should an-
nounce to the audience that the subject is being projected in an enlarge-
ment of two, three, or four times. 14
While these instantaneous changes in the camera’s view were
sometimes experienced as disruptive, other critics were delighted
by the same effect. One was Emile Vuillermoz, the student and bi-
ographer of Gabriel Fauré, who was well-known as a critic of both
music and Ž lm. In his review of a 1915 Ž lm, The Battle Cry of
Peace, he writes:
Here I touch on one of the most marvelous technical possibilities of the
cinema art. This ability to juxtapose, within several seconds, on the same
luminous screen, images which generally are isolated in time or space,
14 Yhcam 1912. Quoted in Abel 1988, 72–3. Well after the technique had be-
come widespread, complaints about the close-up continued to be voiced: the
Ž lm-maker and writer Henri Diamant-Berger felt it was much overused, and the
celebrated writer Colette objected to “the technique that separates two speakers
of a dialogue, that projects them in turn in huge close-ups, just when it is impor-
tant to compare their faces together.”
this power (hitherto reserved to the human imagination) to leap from one
end of the universe to another, to draw together antipoles, to interweave
thoughts far removed from one another, to compose, as one fancies, a
ceaselessly changing mosaic out of millions of scattered facets of the tan-
gible world . . . all this could permit a poet to realize his most ambitious
dreams—if poets would become interested in the cinema and the cinema
would interest itself in poets! . . . More fortunate than painting and sculp-
ture, the cinema, like music, possesses all the riches, all the in ections,
and all the nuances of beauty in movement: cinema produces counterpoint
and harmony . . . but still awaits its Debussy.15
This account is striking since it links Debussy’s name with cin-
ematic techniques; it also emphasizes the conspicuousness of Ž lm
editing for this viewer (who barely even mentions the Ž lm’s “con-
tent” in the complete review). Whether viewers found these cine-
matic devices attractive or disruptive, it is certain that such tech-
niques represented a radical departure from the temporal and
spatial orientations to which traditional theater-goers were accus-
tomed.
Above all, the Ž rst proponents of the cinema valued it most for
its verisimilitude, its ability to depict “things as they really are,”
particularly things in the natural world. And many critics were
quick to see the poetic possibilities in cinema, a potential for a
kind of psychological verisimilitude. Writers like Vuillermoz were
interested in the way that devices such as the dissolve could evoke
dreams, hallucinations, or imitate real human perception. It was
claimed that cinema could achieve this representation in a manner
more compelling than could traditional painting or poetry. This
opinion enjoyed the support of contemporary psychoanalysis: In
1914, the German psychoanalyst Otto Rank wrote that
Representation in the movies, which is suggestive of dream technique in
more than one respect, expresses in clear and sensual picture-language
certain conditions and connections that the Poet cannot always express
with words.16
15 Vuillermoz 1916. Quoted in Abel 1988, 131.
16 Rank 1971, 7. Originally published as Der Doppelgänger (Leipzig: 1914).
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 223
But while cinema’s verisimilitude was praised by writers like
Vuillermoz, the realism of the camera could sometimes contradict
traditional codes of representation. Film legend has it that when
Muybridge’s Ž rst stop-motion analyses of race horses revealed
that the positioning of the horse’s legs did not correspond to the
standard way of depicting this motion in painting, some people
had difŽ culty believing that the photographs were real.17 This sort
of contradiction would have delighted Debussy and other artists of
the day who felt that real, “natural” representation had been hin-
dered by academic formulae. The desire to bring the full supple-
ness of the natural world into the theatre, re ected so clearly in
events like the Cineorama of 1900, is equally evident in Debussy’s
desire to cultivate in music “an art of the open air, an art compara-
ble to the elements—the wind, the sea, and the sky!”—a kind of
randomness, “subject to laws of beauty inscribed in the move-
ments of nature herself.”18 Debussy argues that music is better
equipped than the other arts to depict the suppleness of nature, by
virtue of its temporal dimension:
Despite their claims to be representationalists, the painters and sculptors
can only present us with the beauty of the universe in their own free,
somewhat fragmentary, interpretation. They can capture only one of its as-
pects at a time, preserve only one moment. It is the musicians alone who
have the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of night and day,
of earth and sky. Only they can recreate nature’s atmosphere and give
rhythm to her heaving breast. 19
What many artists found attractive in the cinema was precisely
its spatial and temporal  exibility, something which gave it the
power to counteract the stiffness of rigid academic representa-
tional codes. It is not surprising, therefore, that Debussy consid-
ered the cinema as a promising model for music. In a 1913 SIM
bulletin Debussy writes:
17 Burch 1990, 11.
18 Smith 1977, 245 and 84.
19 Smith 1977, 295.
There remains but one way of reviving the taste for symphonic music
among our contemporaries: to apply to pure music the techniques of cine-
matography. It is the Ž lm—the Ariadne’s thread—that will show us the
way out of this disquieting labyrinth. 20
musical counterparts to cinematic devices
In his late works, Debussy employed a variety of unusual pro-
cessive strategies, and a model for his “modes of continuation”—
those characteristic means of following one musical event with
another—can be found in the cinematic devices I have been de-
scribing: the dissolve, the juxtaposition of different camera angles,
the direct cut, the close-up, as well as adjustments of Ž lm speed
and direction, superimpositions and matted images, and double-
exposure of the Ž lm. Given how conspicuous these techniques
were for the Ž rst cinema audiences, could the formal disruptions
represented by these Ž lmic devices have suggested solutions for
the problem of continuity and succession with which Debussy was
faced in his modiŽ ed tonal idiom? Cinematic devices, in other
words, may have served as a source of new formal options that
became available with the advent of a new narrative medium.
Certain punctuation shots, for examples, like the dissolve and the
direct cut, have musical counterparts in Debussy’s techniques of
transition and enchainment. Moreover, the particular narrative sit-
uations that give rise to these devices in Ž lms suggest the possibil-
ity of signifying relationships with the musical passages in which
cognate devices occur.
The dissolve is one of the most salient devices speciŽ c to the
cinematic medium. It allows the Ž lm-maker to link any two shots
with a perfectly smooth transition. A comparable musical tech-
nique would link two musical events in a similarly seamless man-
ner. A technique closely analogous to the dissolve is illustrated by
the passage in Example 1. In the third measure, the  ute sustains
the note E, effecting a diminuendo, while the viola emerges on the
20 SIM bulletin, November 1, 1913. Quoted in Smith 1977, 298.
224 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 1. Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, “Pastorale,” mm. 1–4: A Dissolve-like transition
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Ï Ï
Harp

? 9 b Ïú . Ï. b ú- . Ï- . -
ä bÏ
-
ä Ï Î ä ·
b 8

same pitch. When performed skillfully this passage creates the im-
pression of a smooth dissolve from the timbre of the  ute to that
of the viola. 21
This timbral effect is not common in Debussy’s music, but the
cinematic dissolve does suggest a way that we might think about a
more general feature of Debussy’s language, what Richard Parks
calls the “kinesthetic shift.”22 Parks identiŽ es the pitch resources
of Debussy’s music according to their membership in representa-
tive super-sets or “referential collections”: the pentatonic, dia-
tonic, hexatonic, octatonic, and dodecaphonic collections (plus an
additional collection that Parks calls the “8-17/18/19 complex”).
He then demonstrates the linking action of subsets that are shared
between two referential collections. These are pivots for “modula-
tions” between different referential collections, or for “mutations”
(in a Guidonian sense) between different transpositions of the
21 The popular 1969 recording of this work by Rogér Bourdin, Colette
Lequin, and Anne Challan achieves this effect perfectly.
22 Parks 1989.
same genus. A half-diminished seventh chord, for instance, which
belongs to both the diatonic and octatonic genera, may be used to
effect a shift from one collection to the other. In this way Parks
elucidates a background of  uctuating referential collections
throughout a piece, connected via these kinesthetic pivots.
These linking events function similarly to the cinematic dis-
solve, where one image disappears as another emerges. For a brief
moment, the cinematic spectator sees two images at the same
time; likewise, the “pivot” sonority that links two referential col-
lections momentarily implies two musical spaces for the listener.
Example 2 shows some instances of this type of transition in the
etude “Pour les agréments”: X marks a transition from one dia-
tonic referential collection to another, and Y marks a transition
from a diatonic collection to a whole-tone environment.
Certainly this device is not without precedents in Debussy’s
earlier “pre-cinematic” style—indeed, similar dissolve-like mo-
ments may be identiŽ ed in much earlier tonal music. But this tech-
nique acquires a new mimetic signiŽ cance once the cinema be-
comes available as an interpretant. Even in the early example of
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 225

Example 2. “Pour les agréments,” mm. 32–5: Dissolves

"
gg ÏÏÏ
X
####
rit.
? ^- Ï
32

& Ï Ï Ï Ï- # nÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï #Ï nÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ
¨ ÏÏ ¨ ÏÏ
¨ ÏÏ ¨ Ï ¨ ÏÏ ¨ ÏÏ
p 3 più p p
molto
leggiero

? ? ? #### Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï & g ÏÏÏ Ï. & gg ÏÏ.Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
ÏÏ . g. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
. . . .
¹
sim.

j ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï
#### Ï
Y
Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï
3 3

n ÏÏ
34 3

& # n ÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ ..Ï Ï
Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ n ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï
Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ
¨ ÏÏ ¨ ÏÏ
Ï
¨ ÏnÏ ¨ #Ï Ï
Ï
¨ ÏÏ
Ï
¨ ÏÏ Ï Ï nÏ n Ï Ï nÏ Ï
J
3
3 >
F p ma sonoro
- - -
? #### ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï nÏ nÏ Ï Ï #Ï #Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï n Ï Ï
# Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏ
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ .
Ï Ï Ï Ï

Méliès’ La voyage dans la lune, the dissolve was employed to nary  ow of narrative time. The rich network of temporal associa-
convey a quite speciŽ c meaning: Méliès’ way of using the dis- tions that the dissolve invokes is brought into play when Debussy
solve in La voyage in connection with the sleeping explorers sets employs kinesthetic shifts to serve as a possible musical cognate,
the stage for its subsequent use as a signiŽ er for a time lapse—a suggesting that successively linked referential collections need not
means of linking consecutive shots that are temporally distant in a necessarily be understood as unfolding on the same temporal
narrative. The dissolve eventually came to be used in order to ini- plane, or as hierarchically interrelated in the manner of a tonal
tiate an interior monologue, and especially to represent a past prolongation. The type of smoothly graduated transition associ-
memory (as in the opening scene of Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940]: ated with the dissolve contrasts with the “direct cut,” which in-
“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley . . .”), as well as to volves an instantaneous shift to a new shot. Likewise, the smooth
punctuate moments that are understood to stand outside the ordi- modulations in Examples 1 and 2 contrast with the abrupt changes
226 Music Theory Spectrum
of material shown in Example 3, another passage from “Pour les
agréments.” The segments marked W, X, Y, and Z are linked by
recurring motives, but these connections are overridden by the
marked discontinuities in register, dynamics, and referential col-
lection. These kinds of rapid changes between sharply contrasting
images are precisely what Vuillermoz found so appealing and
Yhcam so frustrating about early cinema. We might think of this
passage as representing a series of direct cuts among a variety of
different views of some object whose unity is preserved in the
motivic aspects of the example: the recurring 3-9[027] trichords,
whole-tone segments, the transpositions and expansions of the
4-4[0125] motive, and so on, set against the backdrop of the dia-
tonic, hexatonic, chromatic, and pentatonic collections.
Many of the abrupt transitions in the second movement of the
Cello Sonata, some of which are marked with asterisks in Ex-
ample 4, recall the cinematic effects of direct cutting and close-up.
The example traces the path of the tritone motive that Ž rst appears
at the end of m. 3: the tritone dyad creeps upward by half-step—
G–D , A –D, A–E . The next expected dyad, B –E, arrives in m.
5 but is inverted around its E axis: the cello’s B –E appears as the
top two notes of a rolled chord, and this gesture initiates the intro-
duction of the higher range, more volatile rhythmic values, and
hair-pin dynamics. Like the inversion of the tritone in m. 5, the
subsequent alternations between pizzicato and arco, the abrupt
harmonic contrasts, and the sudden shifts in register in mm. 7–9
are reminiscent of a cinematic “shot/reverse-shot” technique, a de-
vice in which the camera shoots from two angles 180 degrees
apart in order to capture the facial expressions of two actors facing
one another in a scene. Indeed, in the case of the cello sonata, this
notion of an interaction among different “characters” seems espe-
cially relevant: conceived as a portrait of Pierrot (Pierrot faché
avec la lune was Debussy’s working title)—a character prone to
drastic mood swings, and, at least in his early 20th-century mani-
festations, one exhibiting a kind of multiple-personality disorder
—the Serenade draws upon a highly appropriate set of cinemati-
cally inspired devices in order to characterize Pierrot’s uninte-
grated personae.23 Debussy’s intention here, I believe, is to depict
Pierrot in fragments—perhaps as a kind of Chaplinesque clown—
via a series of rapid direct cuts and continuous changes in per-
spective.
In his late works, Debussy often eschewed smoothness of for-
mal continuity. Transition through graduated transformation is a
characteristic associated more with his earlier, so-called Impres-
sionistic style, and his later reliance on sudden musical contrasts
might be understood as a rejection of those Impressionistic
ideals.24 It is interesting to note that cinema underwent a similar
change in editing style during its early history: the earliest Ž lms of
Georges Méliès in France and those of Edwin Porter in America
regularly use dissolves to connect shots instead of having direct
cuts.25 After around 1903, however, direct cutting became standard
practice, although some Ž lm-makers and critics continued to Ž nd
this practice visually jarring. 26 For example, as late as 1914 the
British Ž lm-maker Cecil Hepworth regularly inserted short pieces
of blank Ž lm in between cuts in order to temper what he saw as a
disruptive break.27 Nevertheless, the wide acceptance of the direct
cut as a viable and comprehensible means of linking different
shots preŽ gures the kinds of abrupt formal divisions we Ž nd in
Debussy’s music. The dissolve, on the other hand, begins to be
used for the more specialized purpose of conveying a time lapse
or to demarcate an event from the diegetic past. Debussy’s more
sparing use of impressionistic shifts in his late works could be un-
derstood as recognition of this more specialized function of the
dissolve in Ž lm and its more speciŽ c connotations.
23 See Watkins 1994, 277 ff.
24 Lawrence Berman takes this view in his comparison of Jeux and Prélude à
l’après-midi d’un faune. See Berman 1980, 225.
25 Salt 1990, 32. Another way in which the early Ž lmmakers connected shots
was to insert an appropriate intertitle, a bit of dialogue or text explaining the
scene.
26 Naturally, a direct cut is less costly and time-consuming to produce than a
dissolve, and this is likely an important reason for the change in editing style.
27 Bottomore 1990, 105.
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 227

Example 3. “Pour les agréments,” mm. 27–32: Direct Cutting

W-diatonic

# #
Å Ïr g n ÏÏ g ÏÏ g ÏÏ g ÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏ nnn
27

& #
?
g ÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ g ÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏÏ gg ÏÏÏÏ Ï- gg Ï. Ï Ï- ggg Ï.Ï Ï- ggg Ï.Ï Ï ggg Ï.Ï g Ï gg .
Ï- gg Ï. Ï- g. Ï
-
g. Ï
-
g. Ï
-
g. Ï
-
g. Ï
-
g. Ï
-
g. Ï
- g. Ï- gg# Ï. Ï- g. g - - g.
Ï
>-
Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï F f
? ### ä Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Å ? nnn
Ï Ï Ï
3

Ï. Ï & Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ. Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ
>
027 027 0246

X-hexatonic
0246 0246
0125
#Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï
b Ï. b Ï n Ï b Ï b Ïr Ï.
nÏ Ï Ï nÏ Ï Ï
? nnn Å bÏ bÏ
30
bÏ Ï bÏbÏ
¨ ¨ Å . ¨ ¨
R &
¹ subito . . ¹ .
ør ø Ï ø Ï ør ø Ï ø Ï.
? nnn Å Ï Ï Å Ï Ï.
bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ &
Ï. Ï.
-

Y-chromatic Z-pentatonic

" rit.
0125 0125
un poco stretto
Ï Ï "
bÏ Ï bÏ nÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï gg ÏÏÏ
31 quasi cadenza
bÏ Ï bÏ nÏ #Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï nÏ bÏ Ï bÏ ÏÏ
& bÏ nÏ #Ï bÏ Ï nÏ nÏ Ï Ï nÏ ¨Ï ?
ÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ &Ï Ï ÏÏ
Ï ÏÏ Ï
ÏÏ p
F sonoro p p
gg ÏÏÏ Ï
più
ÏÏ
3

ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ? ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ?
& Ï Ï Ï & g ÏÏÏ Ï. & gg ÏÏ.Ï
. . . . Ï ÏÏ . g.
S
027 lower staff only 027
228 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 4. Cello Sonata, second movement, “Serenade,” mm. 1–9. Shot/reverse-shot?

Modérément animé
Ï Ï- . Ï. # Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï.
T1 T1 T1
g ÏÏ
fantasque et léger Tritone
? c ä b Ï- ä b Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï # Ï. Ï. b Ï. ä ggg Ï J
pizz.
b b Ï. n Ï. Ï. # Ï. Ï. Ï
Î b Ï. Î n Ï. b Ï
¹ Ï- Ï b Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. n Ï. Ï. . b Ï. n Ï. . p
J
p p
? c j
b · · · gg ÏÏ< ä · Î î
¹ p ¹
? c î Î ä j b Ïj ä Î î
b bÏ jä jä jä jä jä jä jä jä j ä Î Å
b Ï. Ï. b Ï. Ï. Ï
b Ï. b Ï. Ï. n Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. # Ï. Ï. Ï. .

Ï Ï Ï. b Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï.
*
n Ï. Ï. n Ï. .
* * * *
? ä gggg ÏÏ #Ï Ï. gg ÏÏ
pizz. pizz.
Ï Ï. . . ? ú. Ï Ï Ï ú. Ï Ï
6

Å gg Ï
arco arco
B
b Ï Ï Ï. . . Ï . Ï. Ï
J Ï. Ï . p
p p p .
# Ï. # Ï.
j j ä j ä ÏÏ. .
? ÏÏ
?
b ÏÏ ä Î î j ä j ä ÏÏ Î # ÏÏ ä ? Î ä Î # ÏÏ ä Î ä
<
&
ÏÏ gg ÏÏ.Ï gg Ï.Ï
Ï gg Ïè J J & J J
gg Ï.
p S p ¹ p ¹
¹ ¬Ï j
?
b j ä Î Å î Î Ï ä Î # Ïj ä ? Î nÏ ä Î # Ïj ä ? Î Ï. Ï.
#Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï &
# Ï. Ï. &
# Ï.
Ï. Ï. # Ï. Ï. . . . . J

The cut-in, shot/reverse-shot, and dissolve represent simple “switch-back editing.”28 In this editing technique, several shots are
kinds of editing schema, recurring patterns that become increas- arranged repeatedly in alternation with one another, and their
ingly familiar to Ž lm-makers and spectators through continued repetition is meant to imply a relationship of simultaneity between
use and exposure. These are modes of continuation against which 28 Most Ž lm histories identify this device as an American invention, Ž rst de-

musical patterns might be matched. A more complex schematic veloped around 1905, although it also appears in French Ž lms around the same
editing pattern is the procedure known as “cross-cutting,” or time. It was subsequently popularized by D. W. GrifŽ th, who used it extensively
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 229
the scenes. A stereotypical example is a scene in which images of
a villain tying his victim to the railroad tracks are intercut with
shots of a speeding train. The device is often used to generate sus-
pense in “last-minute rescue” situations and usually involves an
acceleration in the editing rhythm. Noël Burch refers to the device
as the “alternating syntagm,” to emphasize that it is a pattern sig-
nifying “meanwhile” rather than “next.” As he explains:
A threshold was crossed when it became possible to ‘deduce’ from the re-
lationship of succession between two tableaux in the time of the Ž lm (of
its reading) the idea that they were diegetically simultaneous. . . . A dis-
tinction began to be made between two meanings attributable to the tran-
sition between two biunivocally concatenated shots: in the Ž rst case . . .
what is signiŽ ed is that the time of the second shot is linked to that of
the Ž rst by a relation of posterity; in the second, that a series of shots seen
repeatedly in alternation with another series implies a relationship of si-
multaneity with the latter. 29
This Ž lmic situation can inform our understanding of the pas-
sage shown in Example 5, in which the alternating syntagm is in-
voked. In this case, the editing process eventually settles on one
“image,” the viola’s tritone motive. This passage is a good exam-
ple of Debussy’s more generalized technique of “duplication”—
the repetition of short fragments with a disjunctive interface be-
tween the statement and its repetition. John Clevenger prefers the
term “reiteration” for this technique, which is found throughout
Debussy’s oeuvre but that saturates the musical surface of his late
works. In Example 5, the clock-work rhythm of the viola at the un
poco più mosso, poco a poco at m. 48 creates the impression that
ordinary time is resuming following the switch-backs of the previ-
ous measures. Such moments of duplication frequently seem to
disrupt an ordinary processive sense of time: in Example 6, from
the Etude “Pour les arpèges composés,” the idea in the Ž rst mea-
in his Ž lms, including Intolerance and Birth of a Nation. Barry Salt notes that
the device is already fully developed in the 1906 Vitagraph Ž lm The Hundred-
to-One Shot.
29 Burch 1990, 157–8.
sure seems to begin over again in m. 3 following a kind of digres-
sion in m. 2. The sense of temporal disjunction in these examples
distinguishes these and similar instances of duplication from the
straightforward repetition of an idea in classic sentential phrases.
Like Ž lm-makers who wished to show two things happening at
once, Debussy intended duplications to suggest a kind of narrative
simultaneity in these moments utterly unlike the process of a clas-
sical presentation-phrase.
Sometimes, early Ž lm-makers were confronted with the in-
verse problem of representing two distinct spaces within a single
shot. A favorite solution was the superimposition, in which a sec-
ond image is inserted into a portion of the frame through a matting
process or through double exposure of the Ž lm. In the silent era,
this second image was often called a “dream balloon,” since its
most common function was to represent a character’s dreams or
hallucinations. The convention Ž rst appears in Méliès’ Ž lms like
La voyage dans la lune. Another well-known early example of
matting occurs in the 1902 Edwin Porter Ž lm, Uncle Josh at the
Moving Picture Show. The Ž lm tells a story about a man’s Ž rst
visit to the movies; “Josh” is seen watching a Ž lm, which appears
to him so realistic and engrossing that he cannot distinguish be-
tween the Ž lm and reality. At one point, Josh becomes so involved
with the scene he is watching—a woman in distress—that he actu-
ally lunges at the screen to intervene. When he attempts to duke it
out with the image of the villain, he has to be restrained by the
projectionist. Throughout Porter’s Ž lm, a matted image is used to
represent the movie within the movie. The function of the matted
image here is to set off a Ž ctional space within the diegetic space
of the Ž lm. The same device is applied in more sophisticated ways
in the Ž lms of D. W. GrifŽ th. The last several minutes of GrifŽ th’s
Intolerance, for example, contain a series of double-exposures,
with the frame divided into separate segments representing illu-
sion and reality. In one scene, the sky above a battleŽ eld is trans-
formed into a choir of angels, signifying a utopian vision of
heaven that contrasts with the con ict below. Ethereal images—
Ž elds of  owers bathed in light and playing children—hover over
230 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 5. Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, “Finale,” mm. 43–50: Cross-cutting and Duplication

lointain lointain
b b nnnn
43 Un poco più mosso
&b b · Å r Ï · Å r Ï nÏÏ jä · · · ä j Ï ÏÏ
3 3 3

n Ï n Ï Ïú . n Ï. Ï Ï Ï . . Ï. Ï . Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï. . . Ï.
p p p
(sul tasto) (sul tasto)

B bbbb Î Ï Î Ï Î ä Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï rä . Î Ï Î Ï Î ä Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï rä . Î Ï Î Ï n n n n b Ï Ï b Ï Ï b Ï
(du talon) 3 3 3 (du talon) 3 3 3

. . . . . . . . Ï. . . . . . . . . Ï. >nÏ > Ï -Ï - Ï . Ï . Ï . Ï Ï.
ènÏ è Ï ènÏ è Ï > > - - . . . Ï.
è è p è è p più f p p
più f più f
dim.

? b b bÏ Î
b b Ï Î · bÏ Î Ï Î · · nnnn · · ·
è Ïè è Ïè è Ïè è Ïè
più f ¹ subito più f ¹ f F
? b b Î Î bÏ Ï Î Î bÏ Ï b Ï Î Ï. Î n n n n · · ·
b b Ï Ï Ï Ï
bÏ Ï b Ï. Ï. bÏ Ï b Ï. Ï. > >Ï Ï.
èÏ èÏ Ï. Ï. èÏ èÏ Ï. Ï.
è è è è

Example 6. “Pour les arpèges composés,” mm. 40–3: Duplication

Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï . . n Ï. . - Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï j >-
40
#### ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ n ÏÏ. n ÏÏ b n b ÏÏÏ # n ÏÏ. b n ÏÏ n # # ÏÏÏ n ÏÏ Ï
Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ ÏÏ. ÏÏ n ÏÏ. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï ÏÏ
# ä Ï Ï Ï nÏ Å #Ï J ä ä Ï Ï Ï nÏ ä ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï
&
p p p
. . più
j § §
pincé

? #### ä Ï Ï Ï Ï Å nÏ bÏ nÏ nÏ #Ï nÏ Ï ä ä Ï. Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ä
# Ï. Ï. . . Ï n Ï. n Ï. b Ï. n Ï. n Ï. # Ï. n Ï- Ï . Ï Ï. . Ï. Ï n Ï. j Ï. Ï. Ï. j
Ï ä Ï Ï . Ï.
. J< Ï.
J
è
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 231
scenes of chain-gangs, signifying a utopian future beyond the mis-
erable present. Again, these examples use superimposition to set
off a Ž ctional, illusory, or “wishful” realm within the Ž lm.
This cinematic device suggests a way of thinking about certain
musical devices co-emergent with the cinema, such as situations
in which contrasting musical environments are presented simulta-
neously, most notably in polytonality. In Debussy’s late works
several examples of “superimposing” materials connote contrast-
ing musical spaces. One is shown in Example 7, a passage from
the Etude “Pour les sonorités opposées.” Here, even the notation
Debussy uses recalls the look of a cinematic “dream balloon” set
off to one side of the frame. This passage can be viewed as repre-
senting two “opposed” tonal spaces that correspond to two diegetic
spaces in a Ž lm, one “real” (the notes which accord with the no-
tated key signature) and one “imagined” (the chords written in
small notes on the upper staff). Such an analytical perspective has
ramiŽ cations for how one might think about the resolution of
“tonal problems” and “goals” later in the piece. For instance,
Example 8 shows a passage from the end of this piece in which a
series of chords sounds in the same register as the earlier F-major
chord. If these chords recall the “dream-world” represented by the
earlier chords, they may point toward an unattainable tonal goal
that remains unrealized at the end of the piece. This might explain
why the D -major chord in m. 73 seems somehow unresolved—
perhaps even implying an impossible resolution.
The curious disembodied chords at the end of “Pour les
sonorités opposées” recall another early cinematic device. Edwin
Porter’s popular 1903 Ž lm, The Great Train Robbery, employs a
device known as the “emblematic shot,” which was copied in
many subsequent Ž lms.30 The Ž lm is about the exploits of a band
of violent robbers, and it concludes with a shoot-out in which the
crooks make off with the spoils. Following the conclusion of the
narrative, the terminal image in the Ž lm shows a medium close-up
shot of a cowboy who points and shoots a gun straight into the
30 Salt 1990, 32.
camera. This “coda” image does not represent any particular ac-
tion in the Ž lm—the story has already ended; it does suggest a
general mood of balefulness. Considering certain musical events
as analogs for emblematic shots offers the analyst a useful alterna-
tive to a notion of “coherence” that compels us to account for the
structural function of each event in a piece of music. A model that
incorporates the structural “functionlessness” of the emblematic
shot allows some musical events to have a role beyond that in a
strictly hierarchical or goal-directed design. This is especially cru-
cial for post-tonal works in which the relations between musical
events within the work may be metaphorical and associative rather
than causal or hierarchical.
Perhaps the most signiŽ cant way in which the silent cinema
could serve as a compositional model and as a key interpretant for
listeners was this: Ž lm editing suggested a reconŽ guration of con-
ventional narrative syntax in which events needed not always to
act as “cardinal functions,” moving the plot inexorably forward.
Indeed, a narrative might be structured more as a collection of
indices, with a global form emerging from the purely rhythmic
aspects of a succession of images. Likewise, musical forms might
cohere not on the basis of an over-arching Ursatz or other central-
izing and coordinating feature, but rather as a montage of ideas.
Debussy’s preoccupation with these cinematic modes is clearly
most pronounced in his late works. Understanding of formal syn-
tax in a late work like Jeux, for example, might be considerably
enriched if musical counterparts to cinematic devices are consid-
ered in analysis. Lawrence Berman has written persuasively about
Jeux, claiming that this work can be understood as a reworking of
both the poetic and musical premises of the earlier Prélude à
l’après-midi d’un faune. 31 Berman views Jeux as a second, more
successful rendering of the Mallarmè poem upon which Faune is
based. The two works share common narrative elements in their
scenarios: the theme of pursuit, and the ménage à trois. The roles
of the faun and the two nymphs depicted musically in the Prelude
31 Berman 1980, 225.
232 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 7. “Pour les sonorités opposées,” mm. 54–6: Dream Balloons

Ã
Calmato
Ã
# Ï # ÏÏ ..
. nÏ nÏ Ï Ï j j # Ï # Ï # ÏÏ .. ggg n nn Ïúú ...
nÏ nÏ Ï Ï j
# ## # gg n nn Ïúú .. Ï Ï
54
#Ï
& # # # Îä gggg nn n úúú. .
gg n ú .
ä ä # Ï # Ï # JÏ - Î ä ggg nn n úúú. .
gg n ú .
g J - gg n ú .
¸ g n ú .. .
- -
úú .. ÏÏ .. úú .. ÏÏ .. ú. ÏÏ ..
? # # # # # Ü úú .. ÏÏ .. úú .. ÏÏ .. Ü úúú ... ÏÏ ..
# # ú. ÏÏ . úú . ÏÏ . úú . ÏÏ .
ú.
ú. Ï .. ú .. Ï .. ú .. Ï ..

Example 8. “Pour les sonorités opposées,” mm. 70–5, recalling the “dream-world” of the calmato section
-j
Ã Ï ú Ï
n úú- # ú-
(de plus loin. . .)

. . n ÏÏ. ä Ï ú Ï
#
## # . Ï Ï. n n ÏÏÏ n ÏÏÏÏ
. ÏÏ n úú Ü # # úúú
70 3

Ï Ï Ï Î Î
& Ï. . Ï. . Ï. nÏ . Ï ú ú Î
gg úú . Ï ú úú
gg
¹ gg f pJ
3

smorzando
- - gg ¹
gg
? #### n Ï. n ÏÏÏ. n ÏÏ. Î úú
n úú Î Ü # # úúú gg úú .. úú
j ä Î & n ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ú ? gg ú . ú Î
Ï Ï gg ú . ú
gg ú . ú
. . . .
Ï Ï

map onto those of the man and the two women playing tennis in
the later work. In light of these correspondences, we might imag-
ine Jeux as a kind of Modernist version of Mallarmè’s pastoral
scene, with the mythological characters transformed into modern-
day counterparts—athletes in tennis clothes carrying rackets. I
suggest that Jeux might be understood more speciŽ cally as a cine-
matic rendering of the Prelude, for what Jeux retains and greatly
ampliŽ es from the earlier Prelude is its qualities of formal discon-
tinuity and its disorienting, over-abundance of motivic material—
precisely the kinds of narrative modes that become possible and
credible in the age of cinema.
A formal analysis of Jeux is well beyond the scope of the pre-
sent paper, but a more modest work, the piano Etude “Pour les
‘cinq doigts’—d’après Monsieur Czerny,” can illustrate how
Debussy’s cinematic mode transformed aspects of his earlier style
by comparing the 1915 Etude with a well-known earlier work:
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 233

the opening movement of the Children’s Corner Suite, “Doctor

Gradus ad Parnassum,” published in 1908. Clearly, both of these
works are intended to be humorous, and both vividly evoke the
image of a distracted piano student practicing tedious technical
exercises. Each work concludes with an accelerando and Ž nal
presto
234 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 10(a). Children’s Corner Suite, “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” mm. 1–5

,j j j j
&c Å Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï äÏ Ï Ï äÏ Ï Ï äÏ Ï Ï äÏ Ï Ïj äÏ Ï Ïj ä Ï j ä Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ
ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï
p
Ïú . Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
?c w w Ï Ï Ï
j-
Ï

Example 10(b). Children’s Corner Suite, “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” mm. 30–40: the “dream-world”
Retenu "
. . .
. . . Ï bÏ Ï Ï bÏ Ï
Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Î Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï
bb
30

& bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ? Î
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï
Ïw
dim.

? w Ï Ï Ï Ï
bÏ Ï Ï Ï bb
Ï Ï Ï

ä www www
Tempo
Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï
? b ä Ï Ï Ï Î w w
bbbbb
33

b &Ï Ï ?
Î
p expressif p
Ï
più

? b Ï Ï
b ä bbbbb
w w ú Ï Ï Ï ú Ï

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Animé un peu
? b b ä
37
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï
Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
b b b ä
¹ - -
-
expressif expressif
? b b Î ú ÏÏ ? î ? Î ú ÏÏ
b b b &ú & úú &ú
w w w w
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 235
piece, as Debussy sustains a cinematic portrayal of the ongoing
tension between tedious technical labor and the play of the imagi-
nation. Debussy’s superimpositions encourage us to consider the
Ž ve-Ž nger white-note exercises and the A within the black-note
world as starting points for two parallel, ongoing processes that
we can continue to trace throughout the piece.
As the piece proceeds, Debussy turns to techniques of “direct
cutting” between the two musical worlds juxtaposed in the open-
ing measures. Example 11 shows a passage from the middle of the
Etude in which occurs a sudden change of register, pitch collec-
tion, texture, and dynamics. In the segment marked X, the left
hand isolates motive M from within the previous gesture, marked
as Y. The way in which X is framed here by Y recalls a cinematic
“cut-in”—a close-up view, usually of a character’s face, interpo-
lated between two shots taken from a greater distance. Example
11 presents a musical device whose cinematic counterpart in-
volves a sudden focus on a detail within the cinematic space. In
the Etude, the equivalent of a cinematic background is suddenly
removed at X, and the motive M occupies the resultant musical
vacuum. This detail is subsequently taken up as the generative
motive of the passage beginning at m. 48. In silent Ž lms, the
close-up frequently reveals a character’s subjective reaction to a
situation; the audience is given an opportunity to read the charac-
ter’s face, and to identify with that character’s subjective position
in the narrative. Debussy’s closing in on motive M and the subse-
quent development of that idea express a similar sense of marked
interiority, recalling the intimacy of the cinematic closeup.
The Ž lmic situation of switch-back editing can inform our un-
derstanding of a passage shown in Example 12, where the alter-
nating segments A, B, and C recall the alternation of images in a
Ž lm. As would be the case in a “rescue” or “chase” Ž lm, this pas-
sage occurs towards the end of the work. The duration of each of
the separate “images”  uctuates in interesting ways in this pas-
sage; the “editing rhythm” accelerates as the music progresses,
much the way it would in a D. W. GrifŽ th Ž lm. Beginning in m.
91, the size of the grouping units reduces to one beat, with beats 1
and 3 representing one tonal space (six  ats) and beats 2 and 4
representing another (white notes). At the same time there is a
more literal acceleration—poco a poco accelerando e cresc.—and
the passage culminates in a reprise of the etude’s original tonality,
C major, in m. 97. The analogy with cinematic cross-cutting sug-
gests an analytical approach in which we could identify several
different processes going on at the same time, all converging to-
wards the same goal. For example, we catch intermittent glimpses
of an ongoing process in the events (labeled B in the example) at
mm. 72, 79, 83, and 85. This process may be further extended, via
the T5 relation that obtains between mm. 79 (an A harmony)
and 83 (D ), to the downbeats of m. 91 and following (G ). At the
same time, a second simultaneous process is represented by the
intervening measures. It is, in part, the association between cine-
matic cross-cutting and the last-minute rescue that imbues the
Etude’s conclusion with its sense of urgency.
cinema and debussy’s nationalism
The emblematic shot, the dream balloon, the dissolve, direct
cutting, and switchback editing are a repertoire of compositional
techniques that early Ž lm-makers developed for connecting differ-
ent kinds of shots. These devices could be employed to convey
temporality and spatiality in unique ways. Consequently, the cin-
ema, with its ability to juxtapose disparate images in this fashion,
was frequently seen as an exemplary medium for artists at the turn
of the century, particularly those active in France, who were at-
tempting new types of temporal and spatial representation. The
enthusiastic Emile Vuillermoz, who urged poets to take an interest
in the cinema, claimed that Ž lm could express a uniquely modern
conception of space and time, comparable with and even surpass-
ing the latest trends in painting and in poetry:
The cinema’s miraculous gift of ubiquity, its power of immediate evoca-
tion, its wealth of interchangeable images are all needed to execute this
tour de force. Thousands of tiny frames in a moving Ž lmstrip act like the
cells of the human brain: the same overwhelming rapidity of perception,
the same multiplicity of many-faceted mirrors which effortlessly juxtapose
the farthest horizons, suppress distances, abolish the bondage of time and
236 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 11. “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’—d’après Monsieur Czerny,” mm. 43–50: The Cut-in, which focuses on a detail within the frame

Y Y
M

Ï " Mouvement
Ï Ï Ï b b ÏÏÏ b Ï Ï b ÏÏ Ï Ï
rit.
# Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï Ï
43
j ä
& Ï-
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï # # ÏÏÏ Ï
> Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï Ï Ï
f f S f
- j
dim.

Ï Ï nÏ nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï
n Ï
?ä ä Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b b ÏÏ b b ÏÏ ? ä ä Ï
Ï Ï Ï &
Ï Ï #Ï Ï bÏ bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï
X

bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï rit. "
47
Ï # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b ÏÏ b Ï b ÏÏ b b b
Mouvement
Å Ï Ï Ï Å j ä b · ·
& Ï #Ï Ï Ï b b b ÏÏÏ
b b b
¹ leggierissimo
f j
dim.
Ï Ï bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ b Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
? Å Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Å & # Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï b b ÏÏ b b ÏÏ ? b b b Ïú Ï
Ï bÏ bÏ b b b b - -
X

space, embrace all the cardinal points [of the compass] simultaneously,
and transport us in a fraction of a second from one extreme point in the
universe to another! . . . Here there are subtleties and ingenuities of edit-
ing that conŽ rm the inŽ nite suppleness of cinematographic technique and
its astonishing attribute— which one could call “symphonic”—of combin-
ing chords of impressions and writing a kind of visual counterpoint for
several instruments. 32
32 Vuillermoz 1917. Quoted in Abel 1988, 133– 4.
These remarks indicate how easy it would have been at this
time for an artist to consider Ž lm, painting, and music as capable
of expressing the same essential formal qualities. Indeed, the idea
that a composer could translate cinematic devices into musical
ones, or vice versa, is similar to the Symbolist poets’ idea of
mysterious correspondences among objects and images and
musical sounds found in the writings of Mallarmé and Poe. The
Symbolists, with whom Debussy was involved, tended to ascribe a
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 237

Example 12. “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’—d’après Monsieur Czerny,” mm. 70–98: Switchback editing

A B A

Ï Ï Ï Rubato Mouvt Rubato

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ïj Ï Ï j r Ïj . r j r j
Ï ä Ïr ÏÏ . ä ä ä
70
?
& Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏ . Ï Ï ÏÏ . Ï
# Ï n Ï #Ï Ï. Ï. Ï Ï
Å Ï Ï Ï Å Ï Ï Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. . Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. . . Å Ï # Ï Ï Å Ï n Ï Ï
p ¹ p
ä. Ï. ÏÏ .. Ï. r r r r
? ÏÏ .. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
ú. J J Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
ú. #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï #Ï Ï Ï

C
Cédez
Ï. nÏ
bbbb
Ï
? Î. bÏ Ï Ï
Mouvt Poco meno mosso
#Ï nÏ
ä. ä. ä.
74
nÏ Ï
& nÏ nÏ Ï Ï #Ï nÏÏ ÏR ä n Ï. . Ï nÏ . #Ï #Ï . nÏ
Ï. . Ï Ï
Ï. . Ï Ï . Ï
Ï
?
. . . Ï. .
¹ sempre p scherz.
più p
?
& bÏ Ï Ï bbbb ?
bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏÏ ÏÏÏ Ï Ï ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï

B C
Tempo (meno mosso)
. . . . . . Ï.
Cédez
? b b Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï. ä .
nÏ bÏ bÏ Ï Ï
ä. ä.
79
ÏR ä nÏ bÏ Ï
b b n Ï Ï n Ï nÏ . bÏ . bÏ . Ï
Ï . Ï Ï.Ï bÏ
& n Ï. . Ï. . # Ï. . Ï
Ï.
ÏÏ
Ï.
p ¹
.j .j .j
più

? b b ä. Ï. Ï. ?
b b nÏ . &
Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï. . Ï. . Ï. .
Ï Ï Ï
238 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 12. [continued]

B C B
>. >.
Tempo (meno mosso)
j ä. j ä.
b b ä. Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
83

&b b Ï Ï n Ï. n Ï. Ï. J .
Å nÏ #Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. . Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. Ï. . Ï. Ï. Ï.
più p >
.j . .j ÏÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï n ÏÏ .sempre ¹ Ï
j
? b b ä.
b b
Ï .
Ï.
nÏ .
Ï.
Ï
Ï.
.
Ï Å gg Ï .
gJ ä. gg ÏÏ .. ä.
Ï. Ï. Ï. gJ &
Ï . .
J
>

. .
n ÏÏ .. Ï. . ÏÏ. .. >. ä.
>. n ÏÏ .. Ï. . ÏÏ. ..
b b Ï . nÏ . § j j ä. Ï . nÏ . §
Ï. Ï j Ï Ï Ï. Ï j
& b b ä. J. ä. J.
86

Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
Ï
b Ï. Ï .. b Ï. Ï ..

n ÏÏ .¹ Ï
b b ? gg gg ÏÏ ..
& b b nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï g JÏ . ä. gJ ä. & Ï Ï
nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
. .

n ÏÏ. .. . n Ï. .
b b Ï . n ÏÏ .. n ÏÏ . § bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï poco a poco accelerando

& b b ä. Ï. . j nnnn Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï
89
?
5
5

J n n ÏÏ Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï nÏ nÏ Ï nÏ
nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ
nÏ
p ¹ ¸ poco a poco crescendo

b b
& b b n Ï Ï Ï n Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï RÏ Å . nnnn bÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï
?
5
5

bÏ
ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï bÏ Ï Ï
Ï Ï bÏ bÏ bÏ Ï Ï bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 239

Example 12. [continued]

Ï nÏ Ï nÏ nÏ nÏ Ï nÏ
5

? nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ
92 5 5

nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ Ï nÏ
5

nÏ &
nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ
5
nÏ 5
5 molto cresc. 5

bÏ
5

bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ
bÏ
5

bÏ nÏ
? bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ
5

bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ
5

bÏ bÏbÏbÏbÏ & bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ
bÏ

>
Mouvt .j
nÏ nÏ Ï nÏ nÏ nÏ Ï nÏ Ï Ï Ï j
95
nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ nÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ?Ï j
& nÏ nÏ J Ï Ï
. è Ï
è
5 5
5
f 5 5
Ä
bÏ bÏ > >
bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ bÏ bÏ Ï bÏ
5

bÏ bÏ j
& bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ bÏ ÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏÏ Ï
Ï Ï Ï
5 5
J

musical value to poetic images, and they deliberately cultivated a
confusion among the perceptions of the various senses.33
33 One artist who actively sought to combine Symbolist ideals with cinema
was Léopold Survage, a Russian-born painter who came to Paris in 1908. In
1913 and 1914, Survage exhibited his work with the Cubists at the Salon des
Indépendents. His 1914 article “Le Rythme coloré” outlines a project for a Ž lm
based on animated abstract images. “The fundamental element in my dynamic
art is colored visual form, which plays a part analogous to that of sound in
music.” Like many of his contemporaries, Survage conceives of image, sound,
and motion as inextricably linked with one another and with the psychological
states of the artist. He goes on to say that these non-representational moving
images, by virtue of the fact that they are moving, would somehow evoke the
changing emotional state of the artist. For Survage, Vuillermoz, and others,
music and cinema are distinguished by being temporal phenomena, and, as
such, both cinema and music are thought to be “life-like,” expressing a kind of
mutability comparable to the workings of real human perception and intra-
psychic experience. Survage 1914 is quoted in Abel 1988, 90.
It is clear from the attention that prominent music critics like
Vuillermoz were giving cinema that it represented something
much more than a fad or novelty, and that Ž lm was acquiring con-
siderable cultural importance in France. Certainly, the cinema en-
joyed a high public proŽ le, not only as a fascinating new popular
entertainment, but also as particularly French technology, one
which occupied a signiŽ cant position within the national econ-
omy. In the Ž rst decade of the twentieth century, several large Ž lm
companies with control over all levels of production, distribution,
and exhibition began to replace the early artisan-based outŽ ts like
those of Lumière and Méliès. In the years before the outbreak of
the First World War, accepted statistics of the time claimed that
ninety percent of the Ž lms seen around the world were produced
in France. Between 1905 and 1914, the two largest French Ž lm
companies, Pathé-Frères and Établissements Gaumont, produced
240 Music Theory Spectrum
Ž lms and Ž lm-making equipment on a vast scale, and even con-
ducted experiments with color processing and sound synchroniza-
tion. 34
Cinema thus came to serve as a locus for nationalistic pride,
providing manifest evidence of French ingenuity and creativity.
Because the cinema was perceived as something particularly
French, as a medium in which the French had a superior expertise,
it was often invoked by artists and critics with nationalistic lean-
ings. Modelling one’s art or poetry on the devices of the cinema
represented a way in which artists could be modern and, at the
same time, uniquely and essentially French. To these artists, there-
fore, it was a matter of national disgrace when, with the declara-
tion of war in August of 1914, the lucrative French Ž lm industry
immediately collapsed. As Ž lm historian Richard Abel reports:
All branches of the industry immediately closed down. The general mobi-
lization emptied the studios of directors, actors, and technicians. Even
the French Ž lm star, Max Linder, although rejected by the army, left for
the front to deliver military dispatches before going off to make Ž lms in
the United States. The deserted spaces of the studios were requisitioned
for military stores and horse barns, and Pathé’s Ž lm-stock factory at Vin-
cennes was transformed into a war plant. The cinemas, along with all
other shows, closed their doors in the national interest. 35
34 These companies employed thousands of people in their studios and distri-
bution centers throughout Europe and North America. At its height, Pathé-
Frères employed around 5,000 people in France, while Gaumont, its largest
competitor, had over 2,000 employees around the world. Chains of cinemas
sprang up; Gaumont’s chain included the grand Gaumont-Palace in Paris with
seating for 3,400 spectators. At the same time, many smaller companies were
able to specialize within particular areas of the industry, like the production of
newsreels. A small but prestigious company, Film d’Art, produced Ž lms featur-
ing Comédie Française actors and directors in original scenarios written by
Comédie Française dramatists. A subsidiary company of Pathé-Frères called
the “Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens des lettres” (S.C.A.G.L.)
produced adaptations of literary classics for the screen. In contrast to their
American contemporaries, who mainly targeted a vaudeville audience, the Ž rst
French Ž lm-makers produced Ž lms for a wide variety of audience types across
the social spectrum.
35 Abel 1984, 9.
As the war dragged on, cinemas were eventually reopened, but,
because the whole structure of French Ž lm production was no
longer in place, it was imported American Ž lms that largely Ž lled
the theatres. The French industry never recovered its losses, and
by 1919, at most only about 15% of the Ž lms seen in Paris were
French-made. It was claimed in the journal Mon-Ciné in 1919 that
“the French cinema is stripped of its glories, it will perish, and we
will have to resign ourselves to being a country that no longer
makes good Ž lms.”36
The prestige and the nationalistic associations of the early cin-
ema would have made it all the more attractive to Debussy as a
model for musical forms. Debussy’s own crusade for a nationally
distinct musical tradition, with himself playing the role of the ex-
emplary musicien français, becomes most pronounced in his later
career. His desire to express what he felt to be a uniquely French
kind of lyricism is perhaps best achieved in these late works,
which also, I believe, most clearly capture the spirit of cinema.
Perhaps Debussy’s deployment of Ž lmic devices, his cultivation of
the modes of cinematic editing and its special temporal and spatial
associations, was motivated by a sense of the cinema as a particu-
larly French art. And this awareness of cinema’s “Frenchness”
was probably most acutely felt with the demise of the French Ž lm
industry in 1914. At a time when Debussy’s work becomes most
self-consciously French, the cinematic aspects of his style become
most pronounced.
But before the attempt to claim Ž lm as a French art, cinema of-
fered to all turn-of-the-century artists the means to make a radical
break from previous modes of representing time and space. The
techniques of the cinema, as I have suggested, are the Ž lmic ana-
log to the formal discontinuities embraced by these artists, not the
least of whom was Debussy. Thus, recognizing a relationship
between Ž lmic and compositional techniques can create a new un-
derstanding of his music, particularly in the analysis of his con-
spicuous techniques of formal enchainment, which can be contex-
36 Quoted in Abel 1984, 6.
 Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema 241
tualized within the “modes of continuation” peculiar to a co-
emergent narrative medium such as Ž lm. The silent cinema’s
montage of shots and perspectives, its reconŽ guration of narrative
time, and its multiplicity of “viewing views” give Debussy’s formal
procedures a particularly modern cast. May we, long-accustomed
to the techniques of Ž lm, appreciate these procedures anew.
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———. 1988. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology,
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Berman, Lawrence. 1980. “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune and Jeux:
Debussy’s Summer Rites.” 19th Century Music 3: 225–38.
Bottomore, Stephen. 1990. “Shots in the Dark.” In Early Cinema: Space,
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Forte, Allen. 1988. “Pitch-class Set Genera and the Origin of the Modern
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Newcomb, Anthony. 1987. “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century
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Parks, Richard. 1989. The Music of Claude Debussy. New Haven: Yale
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Rank, Otto. 1971. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated and
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Salt, Barry. 1990. “Film Form 1900–1906.” In Early Cinema: Space,
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Smith, Richard Langam. 1973. “Debussy and the Art of Cinema.” Music
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———. 1977. Debussy on Music. New York: A. A. Knopf.
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Vuillermoz, Emile. 1916. “Devant l’écran.” Le Temps, 29 November: 3.
———. 1917. “Before the Screen: Les Frères corses.” Le Temps, 7
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Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and
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ABSTRACT
The article situates Debussy’s late works within the context of the tech-
nologies of the early silent cinema. Cinematic techniques developed by
French Ž lm-makers during Debussy’s lifetime can provide the basis for a
model of continuity and succession in this music and suggest some new
ways of approaching form in his late style. Cinema was of considerable
consequence in France during Debussy’s mature career, and the technical
devices of the cinema constituted a markedly new way of representing
time and space. Very few of the Ž lms from the late 1890s and early 1900s
have survived, but the extant Ž lm reviews and contemporary criticism pro-
vide a vivid sense of the early cinema, its reception, and its characteristic
devices. Particular cinematic editing techniques are noted as models for
Debussy’s own characteristic repertoire of musical devices. Finally, some
of the connections are made between cinema and Debussy’s nationalism
in the years surrounding the Ž rst world war.