10 - The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise

Summary

The director's movies are full of the sense of what it's like to walk down a safe, empty street at 4 a.m., the only soul awake for miles. When you are young, such an hour means having nostalgia for the way you feel, even as you feel it. (von Busack 1997: 13)

One of the cultural functions of fictions, Frank Kermode (1966) famously argued, is eschatological: the stories we share provide ways of making sense of the temporary nature of existence. In The Sense of an Ending, Kermode was primarily concerned with post-apocalyptic eschatology, but his insight has wider applications, some of which we can explore here by focusing on a much more local and secular context: the end of a trip to Vienna in the 1995 romantic film Before Sunrise, the first instalment of Richard Linklater's so-called ‘Before’ trilogy.

Cinematic journeys are a fertile context for thinking about time. Most things come to an end, of course, but films and trips typically have conspicuous temporal brackets. In this sense, the cinematic setting of a journey is twice subject to the pressures of time, with the significance of the trip constantly tested against the film's own termination. This is particularly evident when the end of the journey coincides with the end of the film, a formal pattern that is common in Linklater's work. Scholars including David Johnson, Rob Stone (2013) and Thomas Christie have noted that many of Linklater's films combine a recurring ‘theme of journeying’ (Christie 2011: 184–95) with a ‘fascination with temporality’ (Johnson 2012: 7) that typically involves both a commitment to sensitive representations of the characters’ experience of time and an exploration of the temporal boundaries of film. Here, though, I want to focus on Before Sunrise as a way of thinking through some of the less explored eschatological implications of cinematic time. In particular, I want to make theoretical inroads into the relatively unexamined role that music plays in negotiating the sense of endings, both at plot-level and at meta-level. My wider argument will be that a closer look at the film's soundtrack can advance our understanding of the audiovisual nature of cinematic time and of the role that music has at the intersection between genre, form and broader cultural logics for making sense of passage.