twentieth-century music 1/2, 253–275 © 2004 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1478572205000149 Printed in the United Kingdom Listening to Ravel, Watching Un coeur en hiver: Cinematic Subjectivity and the Music-film JULIE BROWN Abstract This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène – to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about its role in cinematic representation. In this paper I consider one such ‘music-film’: 1 Claude Sautet’s Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) (1992). Saturated with musical characters and musical metaphors, Un coeur en hiver uses music and reflections on the nature of music to tell a faltering love story. 2 As the characters engage in ambiguous seductions and mutual misunderstandings, 1 The term ‘music-film’ has begun to be used to refer to films whose subject matter is music: the term was coined by Nicholas Cook, in Analysing Musical Multimedia, to describe ‘a genre which begins with music, but in which the relationships between sound and image are not fixed and immutable but variable and contextual, and in which dominance is only one of a range of possibilities’ (214). See also Martin, ‘Musical Mutations’: Martin defines the music-film as ‘any film which feels as if it is driven by its music (whether instrumental or lyrical), where the guiding role of music in relation to image is especially foregrounded’ (74). 2 The film is in this respect a middle-class ‘art house’ version of a process that I identified and saw worked through in television’s Ally McBeal. See my ‘Ally McBeal’s Postmodern Soundtrack’, 251–79; <www.jrma.oupjournals.org/ content/vol126/issue2/>. Both papers are part of a larger ongoing project on films driven by their music. 253