Vehemence and Discretion: Film Music according to Roland-Manuel

Abstract

Roland-Manuel has been associated with the seventh art since the beginnings of talking
pictures. Alone or with another composer, he scored some thirty films, including
feature and short films, documentaries and commercials. In his collaborations with
Jean Grémillon as well as with other directors (Jacques de Baroncelli, Henri Decoin,
Léo Joannon, Maurice Tourneur), Roland-Manuel offers film music that is both
discreet and vehement. Unlike Arthur Honegger, who favours autonomous musical
forms that constitute a kind of parallel discourse to on-screen narration, Roland-
Manuel elaborates a more cinematographic approach in a search for complementarity
with the image, blurring the frontiers between popular music and art music, between
spoken and sung voices, between noise and music. Through the analysis of a few
specific cases, this study aims to establish the importance of Roland-Manuel in the
development of music specifically designed for the screen, a role that historiography
has tended to attribute only to Maurice Jaubert.