A “semi-documentary” is documentary-like, but allows staged or fictional elements, sometimes recreations or reenactments, sometimes flat-out embellishments, often with non-actors playing most of the roles. This week on “Picture Perfect,” enjoy music from four acclaimed examples.
Aaron Copland, one of America’s most respected composers, was more active in film than most people realize. He even won an Academy Award in 1950, for his score to “The Heiress.”
During the World War II, Copland was approached by the Office of War Information to score a brief film about the resettlement of European refugees in a rural Massachusetts town. The film was called “The Cummington Story” (1945). The music is rather interesting in that, having been written at the height of Copland’s “populist” phase, he employs melodies which were later fleshed out into more familiar concert works, such as the Clarinet Concerto and “Down a Country Lane.”
Director Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” (1948) is often misidentified as a straight documentary. (Flaherty made the first commercially-successfully, feature-length documentary, “Nanook of the North,” in 1922 – itself later revealed to have been more of a docudrama.) However, the plot is entirely fictional, an idealized story of a Cajun family that reaps the rewards of oil drilling that takes place in an inlet behind its house. The film was shot on location in bayou country, using Cajun locals as actors, giving it a certain verisimilitude.
Although it was selected for preservation in the United States film registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and its script was nominated for an Academy Award, “Louisiana Story” acts as a kind of time capsule in its naiveté. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire project is the film’s score, by American composer and revered critic of the New York Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson. So far, it is the only film score ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Like Copland and Thomson, Ulysses Kay is associated more with his works for the concert hall. Nevertheless, he wrote music for numerous television shows and documentaries in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. His first scoring assignment was for an experimental quasi-documentary called “The Quiet One” (1948), a film about an abused African American child and his subsequent coming of age. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Story and Screenplay, and was listed as one of the ten best movies of the year by the New York Times and the National Board of Review. Kay, a long-time resident of Teaneck, NJ, was a rarity in the world film scoring, a composer of color.
Finally, we’ll turn to Morton Gould and “Windjammer” (1958), the only film ever to be shot in the widescreen “Cinemiracle” format. “Windjammer” depicts the training cruise of a fully-rigged sailing ship, from Oslo, across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, New York, and back home again. Its dreamy theme music is full of the romance of the high seas.
Artistic truth is based on fact this week. I hope you’ll join me for an hour of selections from semi-documentaries on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
