WebSense  2000

By David Toop


"Dancer In the Dark by David Toop"


'I still have so much music in my head,' said Maurice Ravel. 'I haven't 
said anything yet, and I have still so much to say.' True artists are 
not judged solely by the nature and quality of their work. They can be 
recognised by their capacity to change, to adapt, to leave achievements 
behind, to move into areas that may be uncomfortable and unexpected, 
even risking complete disaster. News of a collaboration between Björk 
and Lars von Trier raised eyebrows. How? Why? At what cost? The 
uncompromising strictures of DOGME 95 construct a dark and spare 
universe, apparently opposite to the exultant, metamorphosing, 
gloriously rich aesthetic that has distinguished Björk's solo music 
since the release of Debut in 1993. Yet Lars von Trier was determined to 
pursue his vision of a musical in which the actress playing the central 
role of Selma - a woman whose fantasy life is expressed through private 
song - also composes 'her' music.

This is a territory previously explored by Dennis Potter in musical 
dramas such as The Singing Detective. Within a silent prison of the body 
in which feelings are denied, music is a covert release of the soul. For 
Björk, this raised an immediate problem. 'I'm definitely more at home in 
the studio doing this...', and she hits a water bottle with a pencil, 
'but it took Lars a year to convince me it had to be the same person 
writing the songs. I can now see his point but it is a very different 
thing, acting. Making music is a very introverted thing, very personal 
and private.. Actually, I think that quite a lot of people who are into 
music are not very good in social situations. Music is like a rescue 
thing.'

For this reason, her starting point for composing the music for Dancer 
In the Dark was an identification with Selma. 'Reading the script,' she 
says, 'I straight ahead was defending this girl. I know instinctively - 
a lot of the time I'm not sure but then when I am I'm sure I know it - 
and I really instinctively knew what this girl's head would sound like 
from the inside. So in that sense I'm very pleased because I was being 
truthful. It's not my music, in a way. Before, I'd done three albums 
that were all about me. So to go completely to someone else's joys and 
pains was quite liberating.'

Composed painstakingly, over time, often in the evenings after a day's 
shooting, the score began with melodies. The first song to emerge was 
'I've Seen It All', heard on the album as a duet with Radiohead's Thom 
Yorke. 'That's sort of the heart,' she says, 'and like her manifesto. 
It's quite humble. There's no ego. The minute the song starts in her 
head she gives herself up to something that's bigger than her. There's 
nothing selfish in her. None of the songs are "I want". It's always 
"What can I give?". That was curious for me, to write from that point of 
view.' To compose for cinema is a distancing process in itself. Björk 
found herself questioning her way of working. 'I think the biggest 
personal victory I won,' she says, 'was conquering restlessness and 
being able to deal with craftsmanship. That's something I wanted to do 
for years. The next project, everything is going to be craftsmanship. 
I'm going to have the discipline to sit down and do it myself. I still 
love communication and collaborations but I think there's a line where 
you're being lazy and where you're being brave.'

Along with the vocal duets with Thom Yorke and Catherine Deneuve, 
Björk's collaborators on Dancer In the Dark included friends such as Guy 
Sigsworth and Mark Bell. The challenge for Bell was to create beats from 
concrete sounds recorded on location. The use of concrete sounds as 
music has an interesting history in cinema. Toru Takemitsu, for example, 
integrated location recordings of sand and coal into his music for 
Teshigahara's remarkable 1960s films, Woman of the Dunes and The 
Pitfall. This sense of the materiality of sound and its relation to 
image and narrative had a specific purpose in Dancer In the Dark, as it 
did for Takemitsu and Teshigahara. Isolated through blindness, through 
stoicism and through physical imprisonment, Selma searches for music in 
the circumscribed reality of her environment. 'She's trying to make it 
all into a tune,' says Björk, 'like listen to the drain pipes to 
desperately make it into a happy thing.'

On 'Cvalda', this absorption of environmental realism into the fabric of 
the music begins as an industrial symphony that suggests the art of 
noise theories of the Italian Futurists and Pierre Schaeffer's Musique 
Concrète innovations of the late 1940s. For Björk, this raised the 
danger that these concrete rhythms would be too dispersed. 'We didn't 
know how strong we could make the beats if we couldn't use any drum 
machines or drums,' she says. 'First it sounded as if it would be too 
bric-a-brac to hold the tunes.' Then, as the music and melodies 
coalesced, the need to create a strong atmosphere of fantasy demanded a 
full orchestra.

With the help of Guy Sigsworth, Björk had experimented with arranging 
songs for string octet, an instrumental grouping she had used on her 
1997 album, Homogenic. As she admits, for her to attempt orchestral 
arrangements at that point would have been reckless. During a previous 
project, a duet with Joni Mitchell, she had met the Los Angeles arranger 
Vince Mendoza. Called in to add orchestral colourations, Mendoza 
encouraged Björk to define her reference points in order to uncover the 
territory he could explore. They looked at the history of musicals, 
eventually leapfrogging over film music to one of the major sources of 
soundtrack composing, Maurice Ravel. Again, for a Lars von Trier film, 
the music that emerged out of these discussions comes as a shock. At 
times, Mendoza's orchestrations of Björk's melodies are majestic enough 
to suggest Wagner and Sibelius; others throb with lush Les Baxter style 
Hollywood exoticism, chill the bones with Ligeti's angularity or melt 
the heart with the poignancy of Ravel.

As for the bric-a-brac beats, these mutate into slapstick rhythms that 
vibrate with the crazy energy and humour of late '50s, early '60s space 
age experimentalists such as Esquivel, Dean Elliot and Jack Fascinato. 
This is a complex, layered music, sophisticated into its stylistic 
fluidity, confrontational in its approach to the tensions of dialogue 
and narrative versus musical integrity, resonant with emotional and 
sonic depth. A story that might have been unsparingly bleak is suffused 
with strange joy, Björk's voice flooded with ecstasy, pain and optimism.

By the time the music for Dancer In the Dark was completed, Björk found 
herself in the strong position of being able to compose and arrange her 
own music from inception to conclusion. 'I panic sometimes because I've 
got so many things to do,' she confesses. 'I think you can only mature 
so much in celebrity party situations. It doesn't take many years to 
master it and then it becomes boring. But I could do this for 50 years 
and I still wouldn't have mastered it. It gives me a lot to do.'