Las figuras femeninas y su representación musical en la película Safo, historia de una pasión (1943)

Abstract

The article aims to study the relationship between music and the figures of women represented in the film Sapho, a passion story directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen. The director inaugurated a change in the cinematography of that time by introducing at the beginning of the 40s audacious subjects such as eroticism, turbulent passions, suicide, betrayals or divorce.

The music was commanded to George Andreani, a composer born in Warsaw in 1901 who is formed musically in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, and who before arriving in Argentina fleeing from Nazism, had already composed numerous soundtracks, and received awards in Czechoslovakia and France. From the film El inglés de los güesos (1940), Christensen and Andreani formed a close tandem between director and composer, as evidenced by the more than twenty titles in which they worked together.

The compositional cohesion of the music is based fundamentally on the use of the leitmotif of a Wagnerian imprint that is associated with the characters of Selva, the femme fatal, Irene the naive adolescent and Teresa, the puritanical aunt. Parallel to the musical construction of the characters, the musical soundtrack adheres to the dramatic arc underlining the moods and emotions. Andreani handles orchestration with expertise through a rich and contrasting use of the timbral palette, exploiting the resources of Romantic and Post-romantic languages.

The character of Selva (the femme fatal) played by Mecha Ortiz is leitmotivistically associated with a slow and pasty waltz, worked with dotted rhythms and with the tune played by the strings, with portamentos connoting the sensuality and density of this experienced woman. It is the most developed musical motif throughout the film and the one that suffers the greatest transformations. Its progressive rupture and fragmentation built by contrasts of register, orchestration, and rhythms generate the variety of moods as the plot is stressed. As a contrast, the musical motif of Irene (the naive) played by Mirtha Legrand is elegant and brilliant, associated with the musical topic of the minuet. The soundtrack presents a third motif, associated with Teresa (the protagonist's aunt) built on the topic of "the morning”, a pastoral and bucolic style that not only represents the character but also the idyllic and Catholic rural space.

One of the findings of the work is the relationship between the stereotypes of women that appear in the films and their transcendence beyond the screen in the lives of the actresses. This issue is verified in the representation of movie stars in the magazines of the time analogously to the figures they represent in the films, both in the photographs as well as in the texts and interviews.

The article takes as a theoretical approach to gender theory, in particular, to the applications of this perspective to study film and music, such as the pioneering work of Laura Mulvey for classical cinema (Mulvey, 2001), the germinal book of Susan McClary, who approaches music from a feminist musicology (McClary, 2002) and the most recent approaches by Pilar Ramos López (Ramos López, 2003) and Laura Viñuela (Viñuela Suárez, 2003). For the approach of musical analysis, we consider the Topical Theory, (Ratner, 1980) that allows unraveling the construction of the musical sense through the topics as discursive units that make sense in a sociocultural context.

Methodologically, we made a cross between the tools of musical analysis with film analysis crossed with the proposed theoretical framework and supplemented with documentary sources such as interviews and press articles of the time.