Music in DDLJ, Zoe Fong
As an aspiring film scorer, I can’t help but notice the film music in any movie I see. The music in DDLJ fascinated me. Normally, in the usual movies, the audience is not supposed to notice the music, and if their mindset is where you want it to be without them paying a lot of attention to the music, it is considered good film music. However, with DDLJ, and probably with other Bollywood movies we will see, the music was very prominent. You can’t help but listen to the background music, not just the catchy songs that they sing. The score is prominent with dynamics and melody. I feel that the background score was played louder than usual, which catches our attention more easily. Also, the melody itself is more catchy and prominent, making it more noticeable for the movie-goers. In general, I greatly enjoyed DDLJ and its music.
Here is a clip from the movie. The first 20 seconds capture the end of the field scene between Raj and Simran. The music is very loud in dynamics, which is unusual for this particular moment because there is dialogue happening. As I said before, it is louder than usual, but is successful as it captures our attention.
Filed by czfong at January 28th, 2013 under Uncategorized
Looking at your thoughts from this late in the semester, I wonder what you thought of the other films we watched. Since I’m not planning on going into scoremaking (that’s an awesome aspiration, by the way), I can be taken as your average audience-member with no particularly heightened awareness of a film score as I watch a movie. But I can say that I definitely noticed the scores far more in earlier Bollywood movies than I did in the later ones. Movies like Dil Chahta Hai and Kaminey did a GREAT job with the song sequences and the scores definitely shined brightly in moments of intensity (like that first chase in the first few moments of Kaminey, for instance), but despite the attention to sound afforded in a film like Kaminey (given the director’s relationship to sound), the score still subscribed much more to what I think of as the “Hollywood” aesthetic of scoring than did earlier films. The films from the 70s and 80s that we watched, by contrast, highlighted the scores even more than a film like DDLJ did. So I wonder, as the “melodrama” of Bollywood tends to take a backseat to more Hollywood styles in these Bollywood films, does the score also? Will it continue to be that way in the future of Bollywood?
Comment by lime — May 14, 2013 @ 12:57 pm