ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of music in Jean-Luc Godard's 1983 film Prenom: Carmen: a film which makes considerable use of Beethoven string quartets and also foregrounds a song by Tom Waits. It argues that Prenom: Carmen is a film about the conventions of classical Hollywood scoring. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Jean-Luc Godard — along with Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — spent much of his time at the Cinematheque Francais in Paris, watching repertory programmes chosen by Francois Langlois built predominantly around Hollywood cinema. Along with the others, Godard wrote review essays for various film magazines and journals, in particular for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, started by Andre Bazin in 1950. In Cahiers these critics vented their anger at the lack of innovation they found in films of the French establishment, which was, at the time, largely involved in filming adaptations of novels or stage plays.
