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“Musical Innovation in Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman and François Truffaut’s The Soft Skin”
Strings Group Quartet
10-26-2026 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm (America/Chicago) (1 hour 30 minutes)
The French New Wave is generally regarded as a film movement that brought innovation to the cinematic medium. Such innovations include novel modes of storytelling, a spontaneous acting style, frequent use of handheld shooting, unusual editing featuring jump-cuts, and a preference for direct sound recording. Even though various studies have recently been published investigating the music in New Wave cinema, the central question whether music is also used as an innovative device in these films has not yet been addressed. This talk will investigate this question on two landmark films of the movement: Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman and François Truffaut’s The Soft Skin (both 1964). These films are well suited for a comparison, since both films resemble each other in terms of the stories (betrayal) and the filmic style (black and white photography by Raoul Coutard). This apparent resemblance may have been overlooked by scholars due to the very different music in the two films. The Soft Skin features a score by one of the leading New Wave composers Georges Delerue and A Married Woman pre-existing music by Ludwig van Beethoven. My talk will show that both directors investigate with their scores in a self-reflexive manner the leitmotif technique commonly used in Hollywood studio era films. Truffaut resorts to his role model Alfred Hitchcock and presents Delerue’s music as an exaggerated Bernard Herrmann score. Godard, on the other hand, completely deconstructs Beethoven’s music by fragmentizing the several string quartet excerpts. As with other filmic devices in New Wave cinema, Godard and Truffaut show that their use of music is in fact much more a reaction against the practices of classical Hollywood cinema than a momentous innovation.

Bio: Michael Baumgartner is Professor of Musicology at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on music in relation to cinema, theater and visual arts; music of the twentieth and twenty-first century; and the exploration of the immersive and narrative abilities of music. He is the author of the monograph, Metafilm Music in Jean-Luc Godard’s Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is the co-edited, with Ewelina Boczkowska, of three anthologies, Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War; Music, Ideology, Commerce, and Popular Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s; and Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s (all Routledge, 2020–26).
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