Memo on Music and Film: Finding Titine! -- By Payman Akhlaghi (Draft 3, 08.11.2014) -- So all along, it was Titina, aka Je Cherche après Titine -- I Look for Titine -- originally a French comic song and dance in the foxtrot-shimmy style, composed in 1917 by Léo Daniderff, with lyrics by Mauban and Bertal. Cf. Wikipedia.[1] As it happened, I had heard its tune for several decades; it was consistently registered on my mind in various instrumental versions; but the history of this music kept evading me without a name attached. Let me first cite one of the first, if not the first, performances of it, sung by Marcelly, altogether probably recorded some time before 1920. [2, 3] Over time, lyrics in other languages were added to it, including a version in English by E. Ronn, arranged for voice and piano, copyrighted first in 1924 by a London-based publisher, Dix.[4] Despite the prominent presence of the composition in Fellinis I Vitelloni (1953), it was clearly not composed by Nino Rota, the films composer; rather, it was carefully set up as a source music in at least two key scenes. [2] To my recollection, we first hear this music when Alberto Sordis character dances to the tune as his purchased copy of the music, a souvenir from a trip abroad, is playing on a gramophone. It implies a reference apparently understood at the time to suggest a Parisian trip, and a touch of the bigger world brought into a small Italian town. Later on, however, the composition is allowed to rule the masquerade in the carnival sequence.[5] Then came my first complete viewing of Chaplins Modern Times (1936).[6] As we are told, it was here that for the first time the artist let his voice be heard in his movies.[7] Remember that the first official talkie, The Jazz Singer, had been published about a decade earlier in 1927; and that Chaplin is known for his long resistance against the flood of spoken dialogue for its damaging impact on the visual language of cinema. Hence, it wouldnt come as a surprise that for this first vocal appearance, he chose carefully to sing only toward the end of the film, performing a deliberately absurd if not utterly meaningless sequence of words from various languages, while he continued to tell the story of the song through precise mime. To set this up, his character first complains that he keeps forgetting the words to the song; so he lets the words be written on his cuff. The close-up reads, a pretty girl and a gay old man, flirted on the boulevard, he was a fat old thing, but his diamond ring, caught her eye as...[8] (The words are not from the English version by E. Ronn, cited above.) Naturally, his cuffs fly away at the beginning of his act, and the little flow resorts cleverly to improvise the words. No doubt, the construction as a whole was meant to further emphasize his lingering affection for mime and silent cinema; and to that end, he made spoken words superfluous, minus their very sound, timbre, and some faint linguistic allusions. The result amounts to a playful treatment, if not a mockery, of verbal language and its literal communicative powers, especially as compared to the efficacy of the visual narrative; and as far as his art and times are concerned, he made a convincing, successful, remarkable, and simply hilarious case for it.[9] Modern Times also presents music arranged and orchestrated based on probably original tunes which reportedly were hummed by Chaplin to hired professional composers. This would be consistent with the tradition that he followed most evidently in his later releases that are known to me so far. In this case, more notably among others, Alfred Newman is credited with the conducting of the music, while David Raksin is mentioned for his role as one of the arrangers (and orchestrators).[6, 10, 11]. NOTES: [1] See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Daniderff [2] Marcelly singing Titina, probably ca. 1920: youtube/watch?v=1i59daT_fP8 [3] The Marcelly version is made available in the following albums, available online: (a) Caf Conç, Vol. 1 (1864-1914): Chansons café-concerts dans les estaminets (b) Les chansons de ces années-là 1914-1918 [4] The score of English version of Titina! with piano accompaniment, ca. 1924: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/6322 [5] Fellinis I Vitelloni (1953), the carnival scene, in which people dance to Titine: youtube/watch?v=UfnaKx4bLMs [6] See the restored version published by Criterion Collection, made available on Hulu . [7] See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film) [8] See: filmsite.org/mode3.html [9] Modern Times, Chaplin, the song & dance scene, aka Titina, the missing cuff, performed in mime, with absurd lyrics: youtube/watch?v=0daS_SDCT_U [10] See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)#Music [11] IMDB was consulted for such information as dates, titles, and the names of the artists. (*) The above was an original essay by Payman Akhalghi. (*) The author is a musician, by inclination and education. (*) As its been the norm, the author tried to give due credit to the most prominent sources of information that contributed to this essay. However, the blame for the line of research, the observations, collections, and conclusions would land on his shoulders alone. © 2014, Payman Akhlaghi. All rights reserved.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 21:09:43 +0000
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