(Email, University of Virginia)
Sounds of the Downfall – Music and Narrative Agency in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s “Der Untergang”
In his 1961 publication “The Rhetoric of Fiction” Wayne C. Booth introduced the concept of the “implied author” to identify “an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails.”
About thirty years later in his 1994 essay “Film Music and Narrative Agency” Jerrold Levinson tried to apply Booth’s terminology to film in order to identify the narrative agency that presents the spectator with non-diegetic film music.
He argues that in the case of diegetic film music we can locate the origin of music within the frame, but in the case of non-diegetic film music the spectator assigns its source to a narrator-agent. Levinson calls these agencies the “cinematic narrator” and the “implied filmmaker.”
In my essay I dispute the usefulness of Levinson’s project to analyze the cinematic text and propose that the notion of the “implied filmmaker” assesses the spectator’s reading of a film rather than its narrator agent.
Using the example of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 feature film Der Untergang about the last ten days of the fascist regime in Germany I furthermore examine the use of film music and silence to create a quasi-documentary feel for a fictional narrative based on historic events. Rather than implying a filmmaker Hirschbiegel uses musical soundtrack to conceal an authorial stance. Thus Levinson’s approach to music and narrative agency or music as narrative agency becomes obsolete and even misleading.
The essay looks in detail at a scene which, in Levinson’s reading, would represent a classical instance of the “implied filmmaker” as narrative agent. The use of music and montage in this scene breaks up the documentary style and constitutes one of the most obviously subjective passages in the film. The subjectivity draws our attention to the narrative apparatus. The spectator suddenly becomes aware of fact that we are not witnessing historic facts but a fictional interpretation of historic documents. At the same time we hear actors reading the words of two historic artefacts, Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels’ last letters, whose cinematic juxtaposition draws additional attention to the artificiality of their presentation.
A spectator unfamiliar with the historic facts may perceive the entire film as a complex narrative and attribute the use of film music here to the narrator. If the spectator is, however, familiar with the historic details the sudden use of music hints at the films subjectivity and inability to function as a historic document on its own. It does then not make anything fictional, a condition that according to Levinson clearly denotes the “implied filmmaker,” but self consciously reveals what narrative film can and cannot do. It becomes clear that the question which narrative agency presents film music does not answer questions about the cinematic text as such, but about its reception.
