Jean-Marc Vallée and the narrative song

• Grant number: 18/14106-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2018
• End date: November 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Eduardo Vicente
• Grantee: Ângelo Tavares Lopez
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Jean-Marc Vallée is a French-Canadian contemporary director that already set his mark in the audiovisual industry, with his portraits of trauma, abuse, violence, mortality and overcoming. His style is precise and economic, but with great sensibility. Inside his filmic universe, we enter not only in the psyche of each of his protagonists, but also on the multicultural, referential, punctual and symbolical layer built by the songs picked to go with the scenes on his works. Whether it's a rock staple, a pop hit, a root of blues, or a whisper of folk, these songs tell a story inside the story, accentuating a certain aspect of an environment, a character or a situation, revealing information to the watcher still no visible at the moment, allowing to know better about something still uncertain, or even invert the value of one scene. Merging two rich cultural universes, the director, editor and his main contributor Susan Jacobs innovated not only the way in which a story is told through song, but also made clear the importance of the music supervisor in the process of filmmaking, from the script to the editing. In this research, we will enter in Vallée's most significative work, from 2001 to 2017, in order to understand how each song, in each scene, manifests itself as a vehicle to the story and the audiovisual means, just as important as the actor, the screenplay, or the mise-en-scène.