Getting an (After)Life
Philip Glass gives the classic film Dracula a new lease on life with his score
 

Although Philip Glass has gained more official recognition from Hollywood in recent years (in the form of an Academy Award nomination for the score to Martin Scorsese's Kundun), his love of experimental projects continues in full flush. As in the case of Glass's series of works based on Cocteau films, the composer has again returned to a legendary work from the past. With his music for the 1931 classic Dracula (also available on a new video release), Glass has created an integrated artwork that supplements and gives subtle commentary as the story unfolds on the screen. The fiendishly difficult music--full of sudden shifts from bowing to plucking and back again--receives a full-blooded performance from the Kronos Quartet, longtime collaborators with Glass. The composer speaks with Amazon.com editor Thomas May about his views on film and music, the skill of Bela Lugosi, and the pull of the Dracula myth.

JNBC Each of your film scores has quite an interesting origin. How did this one come about?

Philip Glass: I got a call from a division at Universal that handles their archives. They had decided to refurbish some of the older films and sent me three movies: Dracula, The Mummy, and Frankenstein. None of these films has music tracks, and they asked if I'd like to do one. And, of course, I said I wanted to do all three, and we laughed about that for a while. So I picked Dracula, because Bela Lugosi is so amazing--it's a beautiful, beautiful film. There have been so many versions of Dracula since then, but when you go back to 1931, to this original, you see literally only one drop of blood. By comparison [with contemporary films]--in terms of physical, overt violence--this is like a tea party! But once you start to watch it, it's very easy to be taken over by the aesthetic of the time and of the movie, so that it becomes completely spellbinding.

JNBC This isn't the first time you've worked with a film that was, so to speak, already in the can. How do you deal with the stylistic differences between the aesthetic of that era and your own musical language?

Glass: In the case of Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete, I eliminated the soundtrack and wrote an opera. In Dracula, there's just a monotrack with the dialogue and sound effects, with music from Swan Lake for the titles. I basically decided there's no contemporary aesthetic that should override the aesthetic already there, so I deferred to it. I didn't write a spooky, modernistic film score, nor did I write an experimental film score with lots of electronics. What we are invited to see is the film made in 1931, so my making a comment on writing the score in 1999 is irrelevant. Hence the string-quartet format, as the film mostly takes place in drawing rooms and gardens: that's the kind of music that would be going on there. From another point of view, the string quartet offers a very wide palette for me. It goes from Haydn right into Elliott Carter--anything in that medium is available. The best thing that I hear from people who have seen the movie is "I can't imagine ever having seen the movie without the music!" It was almost like someone at Universal found this film in the archive and said, "Whoops! They forgot to put in the soundtrack."

JNBC With your breakthrough score for Koyaanisqatsi, you were concerned not to overlay the music too heavily on the image. How do you see the relation of music to image in Dracula?

Glass: This has really become the main thing that I do: combining images and music. It's a technique that I've been developing since I began working in the theater when I was 20 years old. I have such a repertoire of tricks now that you can't believe--how to make things longer, how to make things shorter. I know when the music should be far from the image, when it should be behind the image, when it should be on top or underneath it. All the physical relationships of place can be translated into the relationship of music to image. Any spatial relationship that you can imagine, I can make, in music, an image. With Dracula, specifically, it appeared to me that I was looking at a style of acting that no longer really exists, though, oddly enough--and much to my great amusement--it reminds me a lot of [the style of collaborator/director] Bob Wilson, when I see the movement. In fact, I went to see a Bob Wilson piece last night at Lincoln Center and it looked like Dracula to me. The style of acting was there before there was a real cinematic style.

JNBC Isn't it also a style that you could find from opera of the time?

Glass: That's right. [It seems like] the kind of theater that was probably common in the '20s and '30s--very close to the kind of theater that we used to call melodrama. Now, interestingly enough, melodrama has come to mean an overemotionalized state pumped up through theatrical devices. But it originally meant speaking with wall-to-wall music, from beginning to end. When you look at the film in that way, it becomes apparent that the score is missing. There's a period in the mid-'20s to early '30s when film could have become anything. After all, the idea of a projected image was a stupendous addition to the technical arsenal of theater. For some reason, I do consider composers to be primary collaborators on film. I think they're as important as the writers, and therefore almost as important as directors. In other words, the film is really image and text and movement and music. And I consider the music on that level; it's not like the costumes or the lighting, which can change. It's really on a primary-authorship level. There's a moment before everything became institutionalized into the Hollywood industry--what we're doing now is picking up these weird gestures and opportunities that were missed. Of the 12 film scores [I've written], I would say 8 are fairly experimental in ways that we're talking about now.

JNBC I'm intrigued by the inspiration you take from visual imagery, as in your CIVIL warS collaboration with Bob Wilson, where you drew on Matthew Brady photographs. Was there a particular image in Dracula that fascinated you?

Glass: I was so struck by these full-frame images of Bela Lugosi--head shots of him that take up the whole screen, like the one with his top hat in the London streets. People say he wasn't a good actor, but I think he was amazing. He knew how to make you look at him in a particular way; he created this charismatic secretion. That picture of him in London--he doesn't say anything, but he has that way of looking, of creating character through presence. Every once in a while, we'll get a stage actor who can do that. In his early days, Marlon Brando could do that. And now in the movies, they say, Johnny Depp does that. But there are not many people at any time that can do that.

JNBC What do you think keeps drawing us back to the Dracula myth?

Glass: It has to do with eternal life, and it's the same story, in a way, as Orpheus. It's also Gilgamesh, Parsifal, the search for the Fountain of Youth. It's [about] the inability or unwillingness to accept our own death. The idea of being alive for century after century, of course, [implies] that Dracula has made a deal with the devil, has given up his soul for eternal life. The crucifix and all the religious things represent a soul and humanity, and the lack of that represents eternal life. So Dracula is in the tradition of these myths of eternal life. It's about life and eternal life, and it's about death and its finality. Somehow it speaks to the human hope that there's a way to cheat death, and, finally, in the film, our inability to do that. At the end, you see them walking up the stairs and you hear the church bells, and what that is saying is that life is more beautiful in the world of the human and the world of the divine; the church bells refer to the church. This may not be everlasting life, but it's a preferable life. The dark way of Dracula is not the way this is going to work.

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