David Lean: Filmmaker and Philosopher

David Lean’s extraordinary films enact themselves through the sights and sounds of the technologies of modernity: through trains, planes, ships, and automobiles - through the radio and the gramophone.

His musical motifs are known worldwide: Lara’s theme in Zhivago; the Colonel Bogey March in Kwai; Estella’s motif in Great Expectations; Rosy’s motif in Ryan’s Daughter; Lawrence’s motif for his adventure in Arabia, and of course Rachmaninoff’s pounding chords in Brief Encounter. When, however, Lean described the process of cutting pictures as akin to the music flowing through them, what sort of music or musicality had he in mind: a classical or popular music, or a way of using musical form to mix up the meaning and material of his films?

Lydia Goehr’s new book tracks the soundscape of Lean’s films not only through their musical scores, but also through the radios and gramophones that, at the start of Lean’s career, were becoming indispensable household commodities. The book begins and ends with a motif, running from the early domestic films situated in the English home, to the subsequent extensive epics of colony, commonwealth, and empire. The fidelities and infidelities of the domestic world are traced across to the loyalties and betrayals of nations in war and peace - dualities that are bound up in this book with the witty British filmmaker’s art itself

Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, USA. Her publications include The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (1998) and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (2008).