Flickers of Doubt : Music in Reticent/Ambiguous Cinema

Flickers of Doubt explores the role that music plays in films whose storytelling is far from straightforward. Compared to the classical style of cinema that weaves verbal, visual, and sonic information together to produce a perfectly coherent narrative, the cinema studied here generates an aura of uncertainty—it is a cinema characterized as much by reticence as by ambiguity. After introducing key musical signals of ambiguity in film, author James Wierzbicki gives a close look and listen to celebrated works of uncertain cinema, from early surrealist efforts by Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau to the postwar art cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman and from the cinematic dreams of David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky to the fraught and unsettling narratives by Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier. Rather than simply telling readers how music functions in this mode of cinema, Flickers of Doubt instead offers a framework for thinking about sonicity in such films, demonstrating the myriad ways that both music and the absence thereof can obscure a narrative's meaning. In keeping with its title, Flickers of Doubt ultimately offers more questions than answers, inviting readers to work out for themselves the significance of music in these evocative films while at the same time reminding them that they are not alone if their efforts prove inconclusive.