Asian traditional costume in the movie - Cheongsam

The film's original Chinese title is "花样年华" that means "the age of blossoms" or "the flowery years" which is a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love. The actress Maggie Cheung's performance just match this meaning providentially. She always worn cheongsam through the film which best reflects the women's characteristics of Hong Kong in the 1960s. 

Cheongsam is an amazing costume, not as many shining bare-chested evening dress, it wrapped very tight, but extremely sexy. In the movie, Maggie Cheung replaced two dozen dress which are all very beautiful and attractive. With the Cheongsam cloth changing, the actress showed different state of mind which looked sometimes melancholy, sometimes graceful, sometimes sad, sometimes generous. 

In the dim light, although the actress kept changing the color and style of Cheongsam, the audience still not feel redundant,  but enjoy oriental classical temperament bloom. Especially the actress's slender figure, quite natural walk swing and soft qualities create a natural era atmosphere. 

I used to experience a dress show when i was study in China in 2011. I took part in a cloth party show at the Christmas day, hold by New Dynamic Institute, which called "Super model". We have five group, each group has randomly chose a different theme to demonstrate, which include retro style, comic style, national style, preppy style and elegant style. Our group has chosen the retro style, and we have 6 girls and 2 boys. so girls are choosing the Cheong-sam, boys are choosing Chinese tunic suit. At that time, we have to do the model show and the background music is just "Yumeji's Theme". It was so impressive that all the members try their best to win the first prize which is a crystal trophy. 

In the mood for love (2000)

"In the mood for love" is a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, and this is his seventh movie. The video below is the trailer of this movie. The background music is “Yumeji’s Theme” which is also originally from the soundtrack of Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji. It has been composed by a Japanese musician Shigeru Umebayashi, who used to the leader of Japan’s new-wave rock band. After the band broke up, he began to score films in 1985, and became best known by his score “Yumeji’s Theme” for this movie. The background music played again and again in different part of this film, to build a poignant atmosphere.

This music is really famous in film that Shigeru Umebayashi use graceful orchestral with dim lighting to give us a cheongsam show of the actress who has worn over 20 set of cheongsam cloth in the film, when the actress walked very slowly every time with slow body wave, the music began and set her figure and elegance temperament off to advantage. Since then, this theme music has become the background music of a lot cheongsam catwalk, it always connect to Cheongsam show or retro fashion show which showed the extent of its classic.

This post is about the relationship between "Yumeji's Theme" and Cheongsam dress. For my next post i will make a supplementary to describe the relationship between film and Cheongsam dress.  Asian traditional costume in the movie - Cheongsam  

The video below is an original sound tape, it's really nice to wear a headphone and listen to this piece of music, because you can hear the bass part with power. 

The phantom of the opera (2004)

The phantom of the opera is a musical film, 

The most interesting thing is the actress is a singer in this movie,as same as out of the movie. 





The video above is a piano violin duet which is performances by Taylor Davis and Lara, this is really good corporation and recomposed production.














Emmy Rossum as Christine Daaé is a real singer. 

Pirates of the Caribbean

It's really different and amazing feeling to listen to piano music after the voice of violin.



Except the celebrity, there also have many people that try to learn this music and play it to friends or upload to YouTube and Vimeo. Here is one of the example.


Piano lesson






Music score "He's a Pirate"

Secret (2007)

 

The Concert (2009)

There are a lot of films that are made for music, "Le Concert" should be one of the most famous one in this genre. It won the Best Original Score and Best sound awards at César Awards 2010. The musical work which has a central role in the film and is played during the final scene is the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 by Tchaikovsky. It is the best performance because each performer has deep emotion and strong spirit for the stage, and each of them has story behind the gorgeous.

This film described the chief conductor of the Russian opera who have been forced to leave the music scene because of rejecting to sever the Jew musicians, and became a cleaner of the theater. Many of the jews who followed Andre have become porters, taxi drivers and mechanics. Day after day, the passion of music make the music conductor anonymity work and also listen to other musicians practice performances until one day he grab a chance to change his life. Andre gathered all his old friends together to pretend the orchestra members and do the performance in Paris. Finally, their dreams come true, they win the applause and cheers for their rest of life.

Schindler's List (1993)

Nicola Benedetti won the Classical Brit Awards in 2012, and she did the performance of  violin solo for "Schindler's List". 

The video below is the encore piece after the recital of the live concert in Berlin, two artists play a duet, double bass by Božo Paradžik and piano by  Hansjacob Staemmler. 

Theme from "Schindler's List" - Live in Berlin (2010), encore

Daisy （2006）

Amélie (2001)

The video below is made by Aron and Irene. The piano part and violin part are really corporate well and sounds like something new based on the original soundtrack, the violin melody comes out so nature that set off the piano voice more beautiful. This recomposed production are really popular in YouTube that has a lot of views.

The video below is really a nice recomposed music production by Sascha Nedelko Bem who use classical guitar to play the melody. It is so beautiful sound that will make you touched as same as piano version when you listen to it. 

The attach below is the music score and piano lesson for this beautiful melody.

La Valse D'Amelie is another piano song from this film, it's also very nice and impressed. People who love Comptine d'un autre été will also love that piano song.

The scent of a woman (1992)

The film “The scent of a woman” has a piece of good interlude piece in the middle of the movie, the hero ask a beautiful lady to dance tango with him. While the band playing the tango music “Por una cabeza”, the audience really get deep impression by the dancing period, either the tango music and also the humorous personality and versatility of hero. After finishing the film, when people hear the familiar song will always think over the dancing fragment.  

Since the music comes out, not only many musicians make a series of music video and do live concert,but also a large number of user upload their video performance to YouTube,  which are becoming more and more popular. 

This is Nicola Benedetti's official music video for tango.


This is also Nicola Benedetti's live concert in The Greene Place for Por Una Cabeza.



This is the piano solo for Por Una Cabeza which composed by Carlos Gardel in 1935, and Matthias Dobler played this song in 2012.




This piece of video is a combination of Carlos Gardel and Itzhak Perlman's version which is blended with Mark Shian's own improvisations. Mark Shian said,  the first part of the song is something he wrote as an intro and he call it 'March of the Angels', and the second half of the song then moves into his rendition of Por Una Cabeza as a piano solo.




Lastly, it's the Tango dance from Jessica Biel and Colin Firth which shows in the movie "Easy Virtue" . However, it matches the tango song very well.

Stage performance from the music of film （Introduction ）

Source:

This blog is going to talk about the film music mainly. I will not only talk about the film music in the movie, but also talking about the influence of the film music to stage performance. In the post, we will see different area has different film style and film music style, there will also include some example of Asia movie, like Hong Kong movie, Tai Wan movie and Korean movie.  Moreover, not only the celebrity like pianist and violinist play that music in their concert, also the people who love to practice those music for fun, they can do performance in stage or just in front of other friends and influence them a lot. We also provide the music score together with the film music and stage performance as well.

A song or a piece of music is a significant part of movie. It is the key to help explain the emotion of film. For a video production, the combination of vision and audio can be better to deliver the meaning.

When a film music become famous, the movie it came from can become famous as well, they are inseparable. Even after many years, when people talk about a film, the enduring melody is accompanied by that memory. Sometimes, a good theme song is even better than the movie itself.

We can imagine the influence of film music inside and out, and wonder when people watching a movie what kind of psychological or visual impact it will bring to the audience after a movie soundtrack is released. On viewing the movie, people might have deep impressions of the soundtrack, always echoing in their mind, such as the symphony in “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Titanic”. Such people will inevitably hum the melody, or imitate or create through a variety of instruments and musical performances. Violinist and pianist are corporate together to recreate the new song based on the original soundtrack, their recomposed production are really popular that lots of audience are followed. Such a phenomenon brings a new wave of interest after the movie, with everyone eager to learn and play a movie’s music, which can endure for many, many years.

Film music brings immense benefits to both composers and musicians. Film music spreads more widely and becomes more famous with writers, and singers and performers sometimes becoming household names. Singers have greater visibility and win more fans with composers having the chance to do more music soundtracks for other movies. Thus, movies, composers and singers will be an important part of film and music history.

P.S.

The inspiration that makes me to create this film music blog is from one of my Korean friend who can play those film music by piano. After listening to her playing those famous recomposed piano songs, i feel heart shaking and deeply touched. I really wish to play those piano songs as well, so i create this blog based on my favorite and share with the people who love these film and music.