ABSTRACT
In an intriguing scene near the beginning of They Shall Have Music (Archie Mayo, 1939), we follow Frankie (Gene Reynolds) into Carnegie Hall, where he witnesses Jascha Heifetz perform Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1863 violin showpiece, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso. Rather unusually for a Hollywood feature film, the Saint-Saëns is experienced in its entirety (lasting some nine minutes) not only by Frankie and the audience in Carnegie Hall but also by us the cinematic audience: the music is not edited at all. Paralleled by a number of other performances during the film featuring the famous violinist, this scene raises questions for us as filmgoers, for what models of listening and watching are implicated here? Since this appears to be a genuine musical performance that has an existence external to the constructed world of the film, where do we, as cinematic spectators, locate the distinction between what we ascribe to the film’s fictional world and what may plausibly be considered ‘reality’? 1
