Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America, and is based on the real conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and senator Joseph McCarthy (Clooney ii). The director, George Clooney , chose to release this film in black and white, and used famous jazz music from 1950s to successfully bring the audience into the time period in which this film really happened.
There are five jazz songs, which were all reinterpreted by the American jazz singer, Dianne Reeves. The first time the main character Murrow said the famous concluding catch phrase “Good night, and good luck”, there was a song named I've Got My Eyes on you. Based on the functions of creating atmosphere and reflecting emotions, the significant lyrics fit the timeline perfectly, and the effect of muting every other sound and leaving the song alone, allows this clip to be the most typical and significant example of jazz music working in this film, and plays an important part in how they support the narrative.
Jazz, as a special music genre, was used to create a kind of unstable atmosphere of that time period and reflects emotions of the characters. Just as we've seen, the scene with a jazz song underscored has a lot of smoke, which successfully sets the dark and smoky mood of the era. After the intense and orderly work of broadcasting, people relaxed their bodies and some of them stood up and started to walk around, and the loose rhythm of this song paralleled these actions and created a very subjective view of those characters. This makes audiences easily have the same feeling as what the characters have. It's the main function that this song relaxes the emotions and sets the special mood of the era.
The song also has significant lyrics in this clip, which counterpointed and foreshadowed what is happening on screen. In the film, people were all living in fear of being secret watched. Murrow was the first one who declared on his television program that it was illegal “to restrict civil liberties in the name of security” (Lane 130), and which made the senator notice him. With the lyrics “I've Got My Eyes on You ” right after the Murrow's program, the song in this clip revealed the whole conflict between these two people. In other words, the director chose this song in this special clip as a hint to serve to set the common core of narrative and support the timeline.
The last and the most important thing that the director did to make this clip very different from the other four, is that it was the only clip that he muted every other sound and left the music alone. With movement and rhythmic cutting that matched the melody perfectly, the director was trying to cut time into pieces in order to pass into several sets of simple and rapid footage. In this clip, “music is a kind of binding veneer that holds a film together” (Fischoff 11). What's more, in the end of this clip, the song turned from underscore music into diegetic music. The scene ended with a shot that showed the singer was singing in a recording studio, which pulled the audiences back into the stage.It's the reason that the director muted the other sounds and only used this jazz song to build a sense of continuity and link the two pieces of this film together.
There's no doubt that jazz music plays a huge positive role in this movie, especially the clip from 00:22:45 to 00:23:45, which was not only used to reflect the emotion and the atmosphere, but also used as a clue to provide unity and coherence to the timeline of the film. It is used “to make narrative points, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, through association of melodies and lyrics with the story unfolding onscreen” (Buhler 173).
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Works Cited
Buhler , James, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer. Music and Cinema. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. Print.
Clooney, George, and Grant Heslov. Good Night, and Good Luck: The Screenplay and History Behind the Landmark Movie. Newmarket, 2006. Print.
Fischoff, Stuart. The Evolution of Music in Film and its Psychological Impact on Audiences. California State University, Los Angeles: Psychological Impact of Film. 2005. Web. 3 May 2015. ( http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/ abloom/tvf454/5filmmusic.pdf )
Lane, Frederick S. American Privacy: The 400-year History of Our Most Contested Right. Boston: Beacon Press. 2009. Print.
Mero
0512 2015
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