ABSTRACT
In the scholarly literature (particularly recently), musical accompaniments for mute motion pictures have been acknowledged, even as the major attraction for over 40 per cent of moviegoers at the time, but still in a certain way mute film music has been marginalised. The two films are very different, both in story and in the rationale for the disposition of original and pre-existing music. The musical accompaniments for these two moving pictures reflect their stories and also the different choices made by the composer/compilers. The pre-existing operatic music functioned in the film the same way it had in the operas, suggesting that the Axt-Mendoza team knew the operatic repertory extremely well and chose the appropriate pre-existing music for their themes, based on how that music had functioned in the opera. The opportunity to capture this coordination between image and music has to be realised by the use of rubato in the actual performance.
