<\/p>\n
By Adrian Martin<\/strong><\/p>\nPublished in\u00a0[in]Transition<\/a><\/strong>, 1.3, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n\u2014 para Cris \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/103797365\">Where I Come From, Where I’m Going<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/regularlovers\">A. Martin & C. \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Voice script for audiovisual essay)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When I was fourteen years old, I drew up a list of films I needed to see as a budding cinephile \u2014 and then I scoured the columns of the Australian TV guide each week, waiting for them to appear.<\/p>\n<p>So, one night, I set an alarm for three a.m., tiptoed to the lounge room and watched Nicholas Ray\u2019s <em>They Live By Night<\/em> on my parents\u2019 small, black-and-white television, with the volume turned down very low.<\/p>\n<p>About one hundred minutes later, happy and satisfied, I went back to bed. But when I awoke again to go to school the next day, I had forgotten absolutely every detail of the film. It had vanished like a dream in the night. All I knew was that I had liked it, and that it had left a strong, melancholic feeling in me.<\/p>\n<p>I saw <em>They Live By Night<\/em> perhaps three or four further times over the next thirty-five years. Yet, each time \u2014 as if cursed by that initial, nocturnal viewing \u2014 I had real trouble holding the details of the film in my memory. It has proven hard, even impossible for me to recall. It turned into a permanent blur.<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, I am not the only cinephile to experience weird disturbances of memory in relation to <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. French philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re recounts how he rewatched the film in order to relive a particular, \u201coverwhelming\u201d moment in it \u2014 but as he discovered: \u201cI couldn\u2019t find this shot because it doesn\u2019t exist\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>What Ranci\u00e8re went back to re-find was a powerful, introductory image he had remembered of a singular woman: the character of Keechie, played by Cathy O\u2019Donnell. What he then discovered was really this: a figure of indeterminate gender, her facial features obscured, revealed little by little in the course of the first encounter between her and Bowie, played by Farley Granger.<\/p>\n<p>How different this is to Robert Altman\u2019s casual introduction of the same character, twenty-seven years later, in his adaptation of the same novel, Edward Anderson\u2019s <em>Thieves Like Us<\/em> \u2014 where Keechie is simply real, unglamorous, just another piece of the overall <em>mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Ranci\u00e8re realised, upon examining Nicholas Ray\u2019s film, that Keechie is a poetic figure precisely because she is \u2018not quite all there\u2019: she has been removed from Old Hollywood\u2019s conventions of stereotypical representation, as well as from the later New Hollywood code of realism. That\u2019s no doubt the same reason why Jean-Luc Godard fixed on these shots of Keechie for his <em>Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, for their singular strangeness and beauty, marking for him what he calls \u201ca true beginning of artistic montage\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, I finally decided to really try to get <em>They Live By Night<\/em> into my head, once and for all \u2014 by teaching it. So I started watching it again, pen in hand \u2014 and was instantly startled by something I had never before realised was always present in its famous opening moments.<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t that music the main, theme song from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s film <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>, a film that has long counted among my all-time favourites, seen and re-seen and studied many times over. A film that expresses for me (I\u2019m not exaggerating) something of the Utopia of what love is, in all its dimensions: emotional, sensual, ethical. A film with electrifying moments like this \u2026<\/p>\n<p>How could I have never heard, across all these years, that <em>They Live By Night<\/em> uses the tune that gives its very title to Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film?<\/p>\n<p>So I started concentrating on the musical score of <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. It\u2019s no accident: this tune, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d, appears, in various arrangements and modulations, and in large chunks, no less than eight times across the entire length of the film \u2014 including in its prologue and over its final credits. In fact, it is the major \u2014 and uncredited \u2014 melody in Leigh Harline\u2019s score.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, a Christmas medley is emitted from a radio; it begins with \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d (or \u201cAdeste Fidelis\u201d), a hymn I used to sing and play on a church harmonium during Catholic Mass, also when I was fourteen years old. Now, \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d itself can easily be superimposed over \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n<p>This whole concept built around the song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d must have come from Nicholas Ray, who had a well-developed musical sense. His association with the song was no doubt particular, perhaps personal. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax, recording folk songs throughout America\u2019s heartland for the Library of Congress; these experiences also formed the basis for a regular, beloved radio program they made, called <em>Back Where I Come From<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, strictly, the folk ballad \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d is of traditional Scottish or Irish origin (and Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film is set in Scotland). But music traditions recognise no national boundaries. In America, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d was a hit for Burl Ives in 1941 on his debut album. It was recorded by many subsequent performers including Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins.<\/p>\n<p>Burl Ives had appeared on Ray\u2019s folk radio program at Christmas 1940. Seventeen years after his first hit, he acted in a film by Ray, the ecological, rural melodrama <em>Wind Across the Everglades<\/em>. It is said that, each night, he spontaneously entertained the cast and crew with a concert of folk songs. Did he sing to them, I wonder, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Let us return to the mystery of coincidence of these two films, <em>They Live By Night<\/em> and <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em> \u2014 both of which play a significant part in my formation as a cinephile. Powell and Pressburger\u2019s movie appeared in 1945. Ray shot his film in 1947; it was released first in London in 1948 \u2014 where it garnered a positive review from his future screenwriter and lover, Gavin Lambert \u2014 and then in the U.S., belatedly, in 1949. There is no sign that Ray saw or knew the Powell-Pressburger film in the 1940s, or ever.<\/p>\n<p>The use of music in <em>They Live By Night<\/em> is quite remarkable. After its prologue, except for brief bursts of diegetic radio, the film has no music at all for over thirty minutes; and the score is generally sparsely laid on, for a feature of only ninety-five minutes. Many scenes glaringly lack the kind of Hollywood underscore music you would typically expect.<\/p>\n<p>The sound and music design devised by Ray is systematic and crystal-clear, once you are listening for it. The bleak, Depression-era milieu of poverty and violence and theft has no real music, except (for example) the banal, functional, mercenary drone of a cheap, quick-wedding harmonium.<\/p>\n<p>It is very characteristic of Nicholas Ray\u2019s cinema that the only real music is the lovers\u2019 music, the score that envelops Keechie and Bowie\u2019s fleeting, ever-endangered moments of tender and erotic intimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows why, finally, Ray chose and borrowed, as the melody for this romance, the tune of the folk song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d? Its standard lyrics do not appear in <em>They Live By Night<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know where I’m going<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">And I know who’s going with me<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know who I love<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">But the dear knows who I’ll marry.<\/p>\n<p>But the title of the song does work its way, unmistakably and pointedly, into the film\u2019s dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>This plot reference, however, is a bit paradoxical: as the scholar Ria Banerjee has pointed out, if there\u2019s one thing that these \u2018lovers by night\u2019 do <em>not<\/em> know, it\u2019s where they are going, or how they are going to get there \u2014 and in the fatalistic course of the story, they never do get there.<\/p>\n<p>But what Keechie and Bowie do know \u2014 and this is what the song\u2019s lyrics essentially say \u2014 is that they love each other fiercely, and are pledged to each other, unto death.<\/p>\n<p>Where am I going with this?<\/p>\n<p>The music that connects these films reveals to me the two, Janus faces of the Romanticism which, I realise, is such a predominant part of my own cinephilic personality and experience (and probably not mine alone). In the Ray film, there is a doomed love, doomed by the world interrupting all the time, that nonetheless shines and sings at each, ephemeral moment that it exists on screen.<\/p>\n<p>This is a depiction of love that avoids the codes \u2014 social and cinematic codes \u2014 and forms itself in the precious cracks, the interruptions or suspensions of the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film, by contrast, is a much tighter narrative machine, and gloriously so. It leads its main characters along a twisted path, bringing them ultimately face to face with a recognition of love\u2019s meaning for them.<\/p>\n<p>In my psyche, I think this was a more palatable, more reassuring, and certainly more optimistic lesson in love than the one formulated by Nicholas Ray.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve never forgotten one of these films, while I immediately forgot the other.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Adrian Martin August 2014<\/p>\n<p> <\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Biographical note<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"http:\/\/\" href=\"http:\/\/profiles.arts.monash.edu.au\/adrian-martin\/\">Adrian Martin<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He is published internationally and has been translated into over twenty languages, with\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\" target=\"_blank\">regular columns<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>De Filmkrant<\/em><\/a><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>(Holland) and\u00a0<em>Caim\u00e1n<\/em>\u00a0(Spain). He is the author of six books (<em>Phantasms<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Once Upon a Time in America<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The Mad Max Movies<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Last Day Every Day<\/em>,\u00a0<em>What is Modern Cinema?<\/em>) and is Co-Editor of the online film journals<em>\u00a0<\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lolajournal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">LOLA<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.screeningthepast.com\/)\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Screening the Past<\/em><\/a>, as well as the books\u00a0<em>Movie Mutations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Images of Passage<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where I Come From, Where I\u2019m Going By Adrian Martin Published in\u00a0[in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 \u2014 para Cris \u2014 Where <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/reflections\/intransition-1-3\/adrian-martin\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ADRIAN MARTIN<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":120,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-204","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4VcpT-3i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":740,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions\/740"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Published in\u00a0[in]Transition<\/a><\/strong>, 1.3, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n\u2014 para Cris \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/103797365\">Where I Come From, Where I’m Going<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/regularlovers\">A. Martin & C. \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Voice script for audiovisual essay)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When I was fourteen years old, I drew up a list of films I needed to see as a budding cinephile \u2014 and then I scoured the columns of the Australian TV guide each week, waiting for them to appear.<\/p>\n<p>So, one night, I set an alarm for three a.m., tiptoed to the lounge room and watched Nicholas Ray\u2019s <em>They Live By Night<\/em> on my parents\u2019 small, black-and-white television, with the volume turned down very low.<\/p>\n<p>About one hundred minutes later, happy and satisfied, I went back to bed. But when I awoke again to go to school the next day, I had forgotten absolutely every detail of the film. It had vanished like a dream in the night. All I knew was that I had liked it, and that it had left a strong, melancholic feeling in me.<\/p>\n<p>I saw <em>They Live By Night<\/em> perhaps three or four further times over the next thirty-five years. Yet, each time \u2014 as if cursed by that initial, nocturnal viewing \u2014 I had real trouble holding the details of the film in my memory. It has proven hard, even impossible for me to recall. It turned into a permanent blur.<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, I am not the only cinephile to experience weird disturbances of memory in relation to <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. French philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re recounts how he rewatched the film in order to relive a particular, \u201coverwhelming\u201d moment in it \u2014 but as he discovered: \u201cI couldn\u2019t find this shot because it doesn\u2019t exist\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>What Ranci\u00e8re went back to re-find was a powerful, introductory image he had remembered of a singular woman: the character of Keechie, played by Cathy O\u2019Donnell. What he then discovered was really this: a figure of indeterminate gender, her facial features obscured, revealed little by little in the course of the first encounter between her and Bowie, played by Farley Granger.<\/p>\n<p>How different this is to Robert Altman\u2019s casual introduction of the same character, twenty-seven years later, in his adaptation of the same novel, Edward Anderson\u2019s <em>Thieves Like Us<\/em> \u2014 where Keechie is simply real, unglamorous, just another piece of the overall <em>mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Ranci\u00e8re realised, upon examining Nicholas Ray\u2019s film, that Keechie is a poetic figure precisely because she is \u2018not quite all there\u2019: she has been removed from Old Hollywood\u2019s conventions of stereotypical representation, as well as from the later New Hollywood code of realism. That\u2019s no doubt the same reason why Jean-Luc Godard fixed on these shots of Keechie for his <em>Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, for their singular strangeness and beauty, marking for him what he calls \u201ca true beginning of artistic montage\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, I finally decided to really try to get <em>They Live By Night<\/em> into my head, once and for all \u2014 by teaching it. So I started watching it again, pen in hand \u2014 and was instantly startled by something I had never before realised was always present in its famous opening moments.<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t that music the main, theme song from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s film <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>, a film that has long counted among my all-time favourites, seen and re-seen and studied many times over. A film that expresses for me (I\u2019m not exaggerating) something of the Utopia of what love is, in all its dimensions: emotional, sensual, ethical. A film with electrifying moments like this \u2026<\/p>\n<p>How could I have never heard, across all these years, that <em>They Live By Night<\/em> uses the tune that gives its very title to Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film?<\/p>\n<p>So I started concentrating on the musical score of <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. It\u2019s no accident: this tune, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d, appears, in various arrangements and modulations, and in large chunks, no less than eight times across the entire length of the film \u2014 including in its prologue and over its final credits. In fact, it is the major \u2014 and uncredited \u2014 melody in Leigh Harline\u2019s score.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, a Christmas medley is emitted from a radio; it begins with \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d (or \u201cAdeste Fidelis\u201d), a hymn I used to sing and play on a church harmonium during Catholic Mass, also when I was fourteen years old. Now, \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d itself can easily be superimposed over \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n<p>This whole concept built around the song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d must have come from Nicholas Ray, who had a well-developed musical sense. His association with the song was no doubt particular, perhaps personal. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax, recording folk songs throughout America\u2019s heartland for the Library of Congress; these experiences also formed the basis for a regular, beloved radio program they made, called <em>Back Where I Come From<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, strictly, the folk ballad \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d is of traditional Scottish or Irish origin (and Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film is set in Scotland). But music traditions recognise no national boundaries. In America, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d was a hit for Burl Ives in 1941 on his debut album. It was recorded by many subsequent performers including Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins.<\/p>\n<p>Burl Ives had appeared on Ray\u2019s folk radio program at Christmas 1940. Seventeen years after his first hit, he acted in a film by Ray, the ecological, rural melodrama <em>Wind Across the Everglades<\/em>. It is said that, each night, he spontaneously entertained the cast and crew with a concert of folk songs. Did he sing to them, I wonder, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Let us return to the mystery of coincidence of these two films, <em>They Live By Night<\/em> and <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em> \u2014 both of which play a significant part in my formation as a cinephile. Powell and Pressburger\u2019s movie appeared in 1945. Ray shot his film in 1947; it was released first in London in 1948 \u2014 where it garnered a positive review from his future screenwriter and lover, Gavin Lambert \u2014 and then in the U.S., belatedly, in 1949. There is no sign that Ray saw or knew the Powell-Pressburger film in the 1940s, or ever.<\/p>\n<p>The use of music in <em>They Live By Night<\/em> is quite remarkable. After its prologue, except for brief bursts of diegetic radio, the film has no music at all for over thirty minutes; and the score is generally sparsely laid on, for a feature of only ninety-five minutes. Many scenes glaringly lack the kind of Hollywood underscore music you would typically expect.<\/p>\n<p>The sound and music design devised by Ray is systematic and crystal-clear, once you are listening for it. The bleak, Depression-era milieu of poverty and violence and theft has no real music, except (for example) the banal, functional, mercenary drone of a cheap, quick-wedding harmonium.<\/p>\n<p>It is very characteristic of Nicholas Ray\u2019s cinema that the only real music is the lovers\u2019 music, the score that envelops Keechie and Bowie\u2019s fleeting, ever-endangered moments of tender and erotic intimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows why, finally, Ray chose and borrowed, as the melody for this romance, the tune of the folk song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d? Its standard lyrics do not appear in <em>They Live By Night<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know where I’m going<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">And I know who’s going with me<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know who I love<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">But the dear knows who I’ll marry.<\/p>\n<p>But the title of the song does work its way, unmistakably and pointedly, into the film\u2019s dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>This plot reference, however, is a bit paradoxical: as the scholar Ria Banerjee has pointed out, if there\u2019s one thing that these \u2018lovers by night\u2019 do <em>not<\/em> know, it\u2019s where they are going, or how they are going to get there \u2014 and in the fatalistic course of the story, they never do get there.<\/p>\n<p>But what Keechie and Bowie do know \u2014 and this is what the song\u2019s lyrics essentially say \u2014 is that they love each other fiercely, and are pledged to each other, unto death.<\/p>\n<p>Where am I going with this?<\/p>\n<p>The music that connects these films reveals to me the two, Janus faces of the Romanticism which, I realise, is such a predominant part of my own cinephilic personality and experience (and probably not mine alone). In the Ray film, there is a doomed love, doomed by the world interrupting all the time, that nonetheless shines and sings at each, ephemeral moment that it exists on screen.<\/p>\n<p>This is a depiction of love that avoids the codes \u2014 social and cinematic codes \u2014 and forms itself in the precious cracks, the interruptions or suspensions of the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film, by contrast, is a much tighter narrative machine, and gloriously so. It leads its main characters along a twisted path, bringing them ultimately face to face with a recognition of love\u2019s meaning for them.<\/p>\n<p>In my psyche, I think this was a more palatable, more reassuring, and certainly more optimistic lesson in love than the one formulated by Nicholas Ray.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve never forgotten one of these films, while I immediately forgot the other.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Adrian Martin August 2014<\/p>\n<p> <\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Biographical note<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"http:\/\/\" href=\"http:\/\/profiles.arts.monash.edu.au\/adrian-martin\/\">Adrian Martin<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He is published internationally and has been translated into over twenty languages, with\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\" target=\"_blank\">regular columns<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>De Filmkrant<\/em><\/a><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>(Holland) and\u00a0<em>Caim\u00e1n<\/em>\u00a0(Spain). He is the author of six books (<em>Phantasms<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Once Upon a Time in America<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The Mad Max Movies<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Last Day Every Day<\/em>,\u00a0<em>What is Modern Cinema?<\/em>) and is Co-Editor of the online film journals<em>\u00a0<\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lolajournal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">LOLA<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.screeningthepast.com\/)\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Screening the Past<\/em><\/a>, as well as the books\u00a0<em>Movie Mutations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Images of Passage<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where I Come From, Where I\u2019m Going By Adrian Martin Published in\u00a0[in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 \u2014 para Cris \u2014 Where <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/reflections\/intransition-1-3\/adrian-martin\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ADRIAN MARTIN<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":120,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-204","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4VcpT-3i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":740,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions\/740"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u2014 para Cris \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/103797365\">Where I Come From, Where I’m Going<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/regularlovers\">A. Martin & C. \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Voice script for audiovisual essay)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When I was fourteen years old, I drew up a list of films I needed to see as a budding cinephile \u2014 and then I scoured the columns of the Australian TV guide each week, waiting for them to appear.<\/p>\n<p>So, one night, I set an alarm for three a.m., tiptoed to the lounge room and watched Nicholas Ray\u2019s <em>They Live By Night<\/em> on my parents\u2019 small, black-and-white television, with the volume turned down very low.<\/p>\n<p>About one hundred minutes later, happy and satisfied, I went back to bed. But when I awoke again to go to school the next day, I had forgotten absolutely every detail of the film. It had vanished like a dream in the night. All I knew was that I had liked it, and that it had left a strong, melancholic feeling in me.<\/p>\n<p>I saw <em>They Live By Night<\/em> perhaps three or four further times over the next thirty-five years. Yet, each time \u2014 as if cursed by that initial, nocturnal viewing \u2014 I had real trouble holding the details of the film in my memory. It has proven hard, even impossible for me to recall. It turned into a permanent blur.<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, I am not the only cinephile to experience weird disturbances of memory in relation to <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. French philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re recounts how he rewatched the film in order to relive a particular, \u201coverwhelming\u201d moment in it \u2014 but as he discovered: \u201cI couldn\u2019t find this shot because it doesn\u2019t exist\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>What Ranci\u00e8re went back to re-find was a powerful, introductory image he had remembered of a singular woman: the character of Keechie, played by Cathy O\u2019Donnell. What he then discovered was really this: a figure of indeterminate gender, her facial features obscured, revealed little by little in the course of the first encounter between her and Bowie, played by Farley Granger.<\/p>\n<p>How different this is to Robert Altman\u2019s casual introduction of the same character, twenty-seven years later, in his adaptation of the same novel, Edward Anderson\u2019s <em>Thieves Like Us<\/em> \u2014 where Keechie is simply real, unglamorous, just another piece of the overall <em>mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Ranci\u00e8re realised, upon examining Nicholas Ray\u2019s film, that Keechie is a poetic figure precisely because she is \u2018not quite all there\u2019: she has been removed from Old Hollywood\u2019s conventions of stereotypical representation, as well as from the later New Hollywood code of realism. That\u2019s no doubt the same reason why Jean-Luc Godard fixed on these shots of Keechie for his <em>Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, for their singular strangeness and beauty, marking for him what he calls \u201ca true beginning of artistic montage\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, I finally decided to really try to get <em>They Live By Night<\/em> into my head, once and for all \u2014 by teaching it. So I started watching it again, pen in hand \u2014 and was instantly startled by something I had never before realised was always present in its famous opening moments.<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t that music the main, theme song from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s film <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>, a film that has long counted among my all-time favourites, seen and re-seen and studied many times over. A film that expresses for me (I\u2019m not exaggerating) something of the Utopia of what love is, in all its dimensions: emotional, sensual, ethical. A film with electrifying moments like this \u2026<\/p>\n<p>How could I have never heard, across all these years, that <em>They Live By Night<\/em> uses the tune that gives its very title to Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film?<\/p>\n<p>So I started concentrating on the musical score of <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. It\u2019s no accident: this tune, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d, appears, in various arrangements and modulations, and in large chunks, no less than eight times across the entire length of the film \u2014 including in its prologue and over its final credits. In fact, it is the major \u2014 and uncredited \u2014 melody in Leigh Harline\u2019s score.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, a Christmas medley is emitted from a radio; it begins with \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d (or \u201cAdeste Fidelis\u201d), a hymn I used to sing and play on a church harmonium during Catholic Mass, also when I was fourteen years old. Now, \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d itself can easily be superimposed over \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n<p>This whole concept built around the song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d must have come from Nicholas Ray, who had a well-developed musical sense. His association with the song was no doubt particular, perhaps personal. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax, recording folk songs throughout America\u2019s heartland for the Library of Congress; these experiences also formed the basis for a regular, beloved radio program they made, called <em>Back Where I Come From<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, strictly, the folk ballad \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d is of traditional Scottish or Irish origin (and Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film is set in Scotland). But music traditions recognise no national boundaries. In America, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d was a hit for Burl Ives in 1941 on his debut album. It was recorded by many subsequent performers including Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins.<\/p>\n<p>Burl Ives had appeared on Ray\u2019s folk radio program at Christmas 1940. Seventeen years after his first hit, he acted in a film by Ray, the ecological, rural melodrama <em>Wind Across the Everglades<\/em>. It is said that, each night, he spontaneously entertained the cast and crew with a concert of folk songs. Did he sing to them, I wonder, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Let us return to the mystery of coincidence of these two films, <em>They Live By Night<\/em> and <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em> \u2014 both of which play a significant part in my formation as a cinephile. Powell and Pressburger\u2019s movie appeared in 1945. Ray shot his film in 1947; it was released first in London in 1948 \u2014 where it garnered a positive review from his future screenwriter and lover, Gavin Lambert \u2014 and then in the U.S., belatedly, in 1949. There is no sign that Ray saw or knew the Powell-Pressburger film in the 1940s, or ever.<\/p>\n<p>The use of music in <em>They Live By Night<\/em> is quite remarkable. After its prologue, except for brief bursts of diegetic radio, the film has no music at all for over thirty minutes; and the score is generally sparsely laid on, for a feature of only ninety-five minutes. Many scenes glaringly lack the kind of Hollywood underscore music you would typically expect.<\/p>\n<p>The sound and music design devised by Ray is systematic and crystal-clear, once you are listening for it. The bleak, Depression-era milieu of poverty and violence and theft has no real music, except (for example) the banal, functional, mercenary drone of a cheap, quick-wedding harmonium.<\/p>\n<p>It is very characteristic of Nicholas Ray\u2019s cinema that the only real music is the lovers\u2019 music, the score that envelops Keechie and Bowie\u2019s fleeting, ever-endangered moments of tender and erotic intimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows why, finally, Ray chose and borrowed, as the melody for this romance, the tune of the folk song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d? Its standard lyrics do not appear in <em>They Live By Night<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know where I’m going<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">And I know who’s going with me<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know who I love<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">But the dear knows who I’ll marry.<\/p>\n<p>But the title of the song does work its way, unmistakably and pointedly, into the film\u2019s dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>This plot reference, however, is a bit paradoxical: as the scholar Ria Banerjee has pointed out, if there\u2019s one thing that these \u2018lovers by night\u2019 do <em>not<\/em> know, it\u2019s where they are going, or how they are going to get there \u2014 and in the fatalistic course of the story, they never do get there.<\/p>\n<p>But what Keechie and Bowie do know \u2014 and this is what the song\u2019s lyrics essentially say \u2014 is that they love each other fiercely, and are pledged to each other, unto death.<\/p>\n<p>Where am I going with this?<\/p>\n<p>The music that connects these films reveals to me the two, Janus faces of the Romanticism which, I realise, is such a predominant part of my own cinephilic personality and experience (and probably not mine alone). In the Ray film, there is a doomed love, doomed by the world interrupting all the time, that nonetheless shines and sings at each, ephemeral moment that it exists on screen.<\/p>\n<p>This is a depiction of love that avoids the codes \u2014 social and cinematic codes \u2014 and forms itself in the precious cracks, the interruptions or suspensions of the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film, by contrast, is a much tighter narrative machine, and gloriously so. It leads its main characters along a twisted path, bringing them ultimately face to face with a recognition of love\u2019s meaning for them.<\/p>\n<p>In my psyche, I think this was a more palatable, more reassuring, and certainly more optimistic lesson in love than the one formulated by Nicholas Ray.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve never forgotten one of these films, while I immediately forgot the other.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Adrian Martin August 2014<\/p>\n<p> <\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Biographical note<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"http:\/\/\" href=\"http:\/\/profiles.arts.monash.edu.au\/adrian-martin\/\">Adrian Martin<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He is published internationally and has been translated into over twenty languages, with\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\" target=\"_blank\">regular columns<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>De Filmkrant<\/em><\/a><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>(Holland) and\u00a0<em>Caim\u00e1n<\/em>\u00a0(Spain). He is the author of six books (<em>Phantasms<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Once Upon a Time in America<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The Mad Max Movies<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Last Day Every Day<\/em>,\u00a0<em>What is Modern Cinema?<\/em>) and is Co-Editor of the online film journals<em>\u00a0<\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lolajournal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">LOLA<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.screeningthepast.com\/)\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Screening the Past<\/em><\/a>, as well as the books\u00a0<em>Movie Mutations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Images of Passage<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where I Come From, Where I\u2019m Going By Adrian Martin Published in\u00a0[in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 \u2014 para Cris \u2014 Where <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/reflections\/intransition-1-3\/adrian-martin\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ADRIAN MARTIN<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":120,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-204","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4VcpT-3i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":740,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions\/740"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/103797365\">Where I Come From, Where I’m Going<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/regularlovers\">A. Martin & C. \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Voice script for audiovisual essay)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When I was fourteen years old, I drew up a list of films I needed to see as a budding cinephile \u2014 and then I scoured the columns of the Australian TV guide each week, waiting for them to appear.<\/p>\n<p>So, one night, I set an alarm for three a.m., tiptoed to the lounge room and watched Nicholas Ray\u2019s <em>They Live By Night<\/em> on my parents\u2019 small, black-and-white television, with the volume turned down very low.<\/p>\n<p>About one hundred minutes later, happy and satisfied, I went back to bed. But when I awoke again to go to school the next day, I had forgotten absolutely every detail of the film. It had vanished like a dream in the night. All I knew was that I had liked it, and that it had left a strong, melancholic feeling in me.<\/p>\n<p>I saw <em>They Live By Night<\/em> perhaps three or four further times over the next thirty-five years. Yet, each time \u2014 as if cursed by that initial, nocturnal viewing \u2014 I had real trouble holding the details of the film in my memory. It has proven hard, even impossible for me to recall. It turned into a permanent blur.<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, I am not the only cinephile to experience weird disturbances of memory in relation to <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. French philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re recounts how he rewatched the film in order to relive a particular, \u201coverwhelming\u201d moment in it \u2014 but as he discovered: \u201cI couldn\u2019t find this shot because it doesn\u2019t exist\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>What Ranci\u00e8re went back to re-find was a powerful, introductory image he had remembered of a singular woman: the character of Keechie, played by Cathy O\u2019Donnell. What he then discovered was really this: a figure of indeterminate gender, her facial features obscured, revealed little by little in the course of the first encounter between her and Bowie, played by Farley Granger.<\/p>\n<p>How different this is to Robert Altman\u2019s casual introduction of the same character, twenty-seven years later, in his adaptation of the same novel, Edward Anderson\u2019s <em>Thieves Like Us<\/em> \u2014 where Keechie is simply real, unglamorous, just another piece of the overall <em>mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Ranci\u00e8re realised, upon examining Nicholas Ray\u2019s film, that Keechie is a poetic figure precisely because she is \u2018not quite all there\u2019: she has been removed from Old Hollywood\u2019s conventions of stereotypical representation, as well as from the later New Hollywood code of realism. That\u2019s no doubt the same reason why Jean-Luc Godard fixed on these shots of Keechie for his <em>Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, for their singular strangeness and beauty, marking for him what he calls \u201ca true beginning of artistic montage\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, I finally decided to really try to get <em>They Live By Night<\/em> into my head, once and for all \u2014 by teaching it. So I started watching it again, pen in hand \u2014 and was instantly startled by something I had never before realised was always present in its famous opening moments.<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t that music the main, theme song from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s film <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em>, a film that has long counted among my all-time favourites, seen and re-seen and studied many times over. A film that expresses for me (I\u2019m not exaggerating) something of the Utopia of what love is, in all its dimensions: emotional, sensual, ethical. A film with electrifying moments like this \u2026<\/p>\n<p>How could I have never heard, across all these years, that <em>They Live By Night<\/em> uses the tune that gives its very title to Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film?<\/p>\n<p>So I started concentrating on the musical score of <em>They Live By Night<\/em>. It\u2019s no accident: this tune, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d, appears, in various arrangements and modulations, and in large chunks, no less than eight times across the entire length of the film \u2014 including in its prologue and over its final credits. In fact, it is the major \u2014 and uncredited \u2014 melody in Leigh Harline\u2019s score.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, a Christmas medley is emitted from a radio; it begins with \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d (or \u201cAdeste Fidelis\u201d), a hymn I used to sing and play on a church harmonium during Catholic Mass, also when I was fourteen years old. Now, \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d itself can easily be superimposed over \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n<p>This whole concept built around the song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d must have come from Nicholas Ray, who had a well-developed musical sense. His association with the song was no doubt particular, perhaps personal. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax, recording folk songs throughout America\u2019s heartland for the Library of Congress; these experiences also formed the basis for a regular, beloved radio program they made, called <em>Back Where I Come From<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, strictly, the folk ballad \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d is of traditional Scottish or Irish origin (and Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film is set in Scotland). But music traditions recognise no national boundaries. In America, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d was a hit for Burl Ives in 1941 on his debut album. It was recorded by many subsequent performers including Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins.<\/p>\n<p>Burl Ives had appeared on Ray\u2019s folk radio program at Christmas 1940. Seventeen years after his first hit, he acted in a film by Ray, the ecological, rural melodrama <em>Wind Across the Everglades<\/em>. It is said that, each night, he spontaneously entertained the cast and crew with a concert of folk songs. Did he sing to them, I wonder, \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Let us return to the mystery of coincidence of these two films, <em>They Live By Night<\/em> and <em>I Know Where I\u2019m Going<\/em> \u2014 both of which play a significant part in my formation as a cinephile. Powell and Pressburger\u2019s movie appeared in 1945. Ray shot his film in 1947; it was released first in London in 1948 \u2014 where it garnered a positive review from his future screenwriter and lover, Gavin Lambert \u2014 and then in the U.S., belatedly, in 1949. There is no sign that Ray saw or knew the Powell-Pressburger film in the 1940s, or ever.<\/p>\n<p>The use of music in <em>They Live By Night<\/em> is quite remarkable. After its prologue, except for brief bursts of diegetic radio, the film has no music at all for over thirty minutes; and the score is generally sparsely laid on, for a feature of only ninety-five minutes. Many scenes glaringly lack the kind of Hollywood underscore music you would typically expect.<\/p>\n<p>The sound and music design devised by Ray is systematic and crystal-clear, once you are listening for it. The bleak, Depression-era milieu of poverty and violence and theft has no real music, except (for example) the banal, functional, mercenary drone of a cheap, quick-wedding harmonium.<\/p>\n<p>It is very characteristic of Nicholas Ray\u2019s cinema that the only real music is the lovers\u2019 music, the score that envelops Keechie and Bowie\u2019s fleeting, ever-endangered moments of tender and erotic intimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows why, finally, Ray chose and borrowed, as the melody for this romance, the tune of the folk song \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going\u201d? Its standard lyrics do not appear in <em>They Live By Night<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know where I’m going<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">And I know who’s going with me<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I know who I love<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">But the dear knows who I’ll marry.<\/p>\n<p>But the title of the song does work its way, unmistakably and pointedly, into the film\u2019s dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>This plot reference, however, is a bit paradoxical: as the scholar Ria Banerjee has pointed out, if there\u2019s one thing that these \u2018lovers by night\u2019 do <em>not<\/em> know, it\u2019s where they are going, or how they are going to get there \u2014 and in the fatalistic course of the story, they never do get there.<\/p>\n<p>But what Keechie and Bowie do know \u2014 and this is what the song\u2019s lyrics essentially say \u2014 is that they love each other fiercely, and are pledged to each other, unto death.<\/p>\n<p>Where am I going with this?<\/p>\n<p>The music that connects these films reveals to me the two, Janus faces of the Romanticism which, I realise, is such a predominant part of my own cinephilic personality and experience (and probably not mine alone). In the Ray film, there is a doomed love, doomed by the world interrupting all the time, that nonetheless shines and sings at each, ephemeral moment that it exists on screen.<\/p>\n<p>This is a depiction of love that avoids the codes \u2014 social and cinematic codes \u2014 and forms itself in the precious cracks, the interruptions or suspensions of the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Powell and Pressburger\u2019s film, by contrast, is a much tighter narrative machine, and gloriously so. It leads its main characters along a twisted path, bringing them ultimately face to face with a recognition of love\u2019s meaning for them.<\/p>\n<p>In my psyche, I think this was a more palatable, more reassuring, and certainly more optimistic lesson in love than the one formulated by Nicholas Ray.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve never forgotten one of these films, while I immediately forgot the other.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Adrian Martin August 2014<\/p>\n<p> <\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Biographical note<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"http:\/\/\" href=\"http:\/\/profiles.arts.monash.edu.au\/adrian-martin\/\">Adrian Martin<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He is published internationally and has been translated into over twenty languages, with\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\" target=\"_blank\">regular columns<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>De Filmkrant<\/em><\/a><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>(Holland) and\u00a0<em>Caim\u00e1n<\/em>\u00a0(Spain). He is the author of six books (<em>Phantasms<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Once Upon a Time in America<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The Mad Max Movies<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Last Day Every Day<\/em>,\u00a0<em>What is Modern Cinema?<\/em>) and is Co-Editor of the online film journals<em>\u00a0<\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lolajournal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">LOLA<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.screeningthepast.com\/)\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Screening the Past<\/em><\/a>, as well as the books\u00a0<em>Movie Mutations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>Ra\u00fal Ruiz: Images of Passage<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where I Come From, Where I\u2019m Going By Adrian Martin Published in\u00a0[in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 \u2014 para Cris \u2014 Where <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/reflections\/intransition-1-3\/adrian-martin\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ADRIAN MARTIN<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":120,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-204","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4VcpT-3i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":740,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions\/740"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}