Reforming "Jackass Music": The Problematic Aesthetics of Early American Film Music Accompaniment

Abstract

Whatever the theater, we experience time there as continuous. Time in the music hall is by definition interrupted: it is an immediate time. And this is the meaning of variety: that stage time be a just, sidereal time, the time of the thing itself, and not that of its anticipation (tragedy) or of its reconsideration (epic). The advantage of this literal time is that it can serve gesture best, for it is quite obvious that gesture exists as spectacle only from the moment when time is severed. Ultimately, variety is not a simple technique of distraction, but a condition of artifice (in the Baudelairean sense of the word). To remove the gesture from its sweetish pulp of duration, to present it in a superlative, definitive state, to give it the character of pure visuality, to disengage it from any cause, to exhaust it as spectacle and not as signification, such is the original aesthetic of the music hall. -Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies'

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