Without disagreeing with what you say in general, I wouldn't knock Hollywood film on that score (pun intended). Let's not forget that most European film before Hollywood's huge influence, and leaving Britain out of it, did not pay too much attention to dramatic detail when it came to music. You could have great actors of the age acting out a great script, being brilliantly directed and filmed, and the whole music would be 5-8 recorded cues, capturing say the main characters' themes and some relevant moods of the story, and which then would be allocated again and again throughout the film at "appropriate" places in the action. Now the actual music of those cues was truly inspired for the most part, and that's why this system doesn't just collapse when you watch these films today, although it is painfully obvious to an aficionado. There are of course exceptions, but this was the norm, and this practice amazingly still goes on strongly at times. Someone could talk about budgetary restrictions and such but I don't buy that for a second, certainly not from so-perceived high-brow artiste directors and producers of this continent. They were/are just downright ignorant/undeveloped for the most part. No matter how inspired their ideas were/are for prose and cinematography, they inexplicably belong beneath dilettantism musically. If Hollywood learned some things from the European art-film, European film learned something about musical richness and subtlety from across the ocean.

According to my last psych report......almost certainly yes.

When I say a 'fun film' you're obviously well aware I'm talking about how the two main actors really enjoy hamming it up in a very stylized way. I merely used  What Lies Beneath to illustrate an obvious example of "let's try and make a film like Hitchcock and use a Herrmann score because what else is there to do on a saturday?" 

Sometimes they work though. For instance, Blow Up and Blow Out. Although not Hitchcock in that case.

Erik - I'm not convinced about your Hollywood theory on how it seemingly influenced European film. I'm sure you're right, but Hollywood was not exactly what you would call all- American throughout much of it's inception. The strength Hollywood had was the ability to draw from all over the world. Most of the studios, actors and musicians and many directors were mostly european extraction with a strong Jewish contingent. Herrmann wasn't exactly Church of England was he? First generation American from Russia who wanted to be English. 

Yes, Blow Out was de Palma's best film.  It was a financial failure and he did a crash-dive into the nethermost Cesspools of Cinema after that.  Besides George Lucas, de Palma is the most disappointing American director who came to prominence in the 70s because he seemed very talented back then.  

You're right that many if not most of the great Hollywood studio era directors and composers were from Europe, especially the Expressionist-influenced directors and cinematographers from UFA like Fritz Lang who profoundly influenced American film especially in film noir,  horror and mystery.  So at that time the European influence was immense and extremely good for America.  I never thought of that idea of Errikos - that the film music was less developed in Europe than in America at that time,  but perhaps it is true simply because the great composeers such as Korngold, Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin who came to America were given more power by the studio system than existed then.  

However,  now all of that is gone.  There are equally huge piles of garbage being produced on all continents. 

Quite a few serious composers toyed with the idea of writing film music like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese, Honegger, Milhaud, etc., but it was only those that relied more on inspiration and had natural melodic and voice-leading gifts (like Prokofiev), and/or naturally composed very fluently and fast, that could churn out great music at the time allotted, as could Shostakovich and a few others. Stravinsky asked for a year and was shown the door but at that stage of his life he had started becoming financially more comfortable than his early days and probably did not care to accommodate. If only Schoenberg had lived long enough to serially score Warhol's "watersheds" such as "Sleep", "Blow Job", "Trash", etc. It would compel me to buy the Complete Collector's Editions of those.

That's part of the reason people complain about the state of films today. Especially the ones out of Hollywood.  The influence aspect is not so surprising though because if you take that to directors, cinematographers, script writers and so on - they must have all been influenced by the same ilk. In the early days of film making there was of course no one to influence anyone because film had never been done before. So there is a very static approach akin to stage plays. Technology then advances etc especially with cameras and camera techniques. Hitchcock, for instance, learnt a lot of his technique in Munich during the early 20's.

The worse case scenario for me is when I feel I'm watching a video game. Then it just goes straight off.

 Yeah, you are right we should not lapse into the "everything was great back then and bad today with these young whippersnappers" stuff.   I don't think that actually.  Though I disagree about Solaris which I did not like the remake of. It is true that Tarkovsky didn't even want to make a sci-fi film.  It is not a really successful film of his.  It was too much another author's work.  He was very much a "personal" auteur filmmaker, and if made to do a studio type film was being distorted.   Stalker is his real masterpiece.   Only suggestively sci-fi, and extremely philosophical/metaphysical.  It is one of the greatest of all films ever made, in addition to Nostalghia.    Now you've started me thinking about Tarkovsky.  I love The Mirror also.  btw Tarkovsky was extremely sparing in his use of film music.  Most of the time there is absolutely none at all. 

It would be interesting to look into the future and see what this forum would be like 30 or 40 years from now.  Those "whippersnappers" might be posting things like, "what happened to the good ol' days when we use to just write block chords and let our sequencer's arpeggiators do all the work?  Now everything has to be so thought out, planned and emotional.  Now, everybody is so concerned with score structure and craft.  Composers, if they want to call themselves that, are so concerned with writing themes and motiffs and counterpoint like those old boring Classical composers use to do.  You're all a bunch of HACKS!!!  You hear me?!?!  YOU HACKS!!!  By the way, can somebody tell me what the hell is an arpeggio anyway?  Nobody could ever write like H.Z.  Man those were the days.  Discussions could get quite heated like they do today.

Then of course Dietz would have to issue the dreaded stern 'I'm about to shut this thread down' warning but the posters wouldn't know what he's talking about because poor Dietz has gotten a little senile in his old age and he posted his warning in the wrong thread

Just kidding Dietz  Happy New Year to you!

Well, the train ride was in Solaris, not Stalker, but was indeed overly long.  In fact, insanely long. I don't know why he did that.  He was messed up by having to do a more "commercial" (using the term very loosely) film in the wake of 2001's success.   The Soviets didn't want a Space Movie Gap as Buck Turgidson might have put it.

However, you must change your way of watching a film with Tarkovksy, because they are not plot or even drama-driven but metaphysical and poetic.  And in this sense, Stalker, Nostalghia and The Mirror are considered among the greatest films ever made.  In fact, Bergman stated that Tarkovksy was the greatest of all filmmakers.   I tend to take old Bergman's opinions fairly seriously, as he was no slouch in the cinema department himself.  Ha-ha! 

Yup, why I remember back in the good ol' days when it weren't so easy to create block chords.  Why, even the great Hans had to get LIVE players to do 'em up good.  Nothing like these uppity younguns today, what with their polytonal fugal symphonies and multi-chorus 24-tone oratorios played right out o' their hard-head-wired phones.  Ol' Hans didn't have the benefit of turning his ears into playback monitors back in those days.

Yes, the lighting and every other element down to the promotion long after the film was done was finished was absolutely controlled and dictated by Kubrick to the degree of mania.  That is why his films will live forever.  They became unique - even in their flaws - documents of a mind. 

One thing that struck me when you said that about the lighting/cinematography is that Bergman's films shot by Sven Nykvist have the same total control of all visual elements to an unheard of level of perfection.  btw a film composer never talked about much here but who is really great and did a lot of Bergman films - Eric Nordgren.  Like his score for Wild Strawberries, absolutely beautiful. 

@Errikos (I'm pretty sure I spelled your name correctly this time),

I was first exposed to Angelopoulos' work when I was a film student and I was just blown away with the fact that he could get away with shooting an entire sequence in one shot keeping the subject matter interesting.  Some may say, so he shoots a sequence in one shot, so what?  Well, having worked on films as a student, this is no easy task, even for student films.  Think of any sequence in say, Apocalypse Now, filmed in one long shot.  It was so refreshing to see somebody thumb their noses at the established fad of the day with MTV styled rapid fire jump cuts and camera operators with A.D.D.  I could only imagine what his actors have to go through but it forces them to really reach down inside and perfect their craft because, like stage actors, they have to memorize their lines for the entire sequence.  Film actors today just piecemeal their lines together with the hopes that fancy editing and post production trickery will fix it all later.

I hadn't considered Kurosawa an influence on Angelopoulos but, you know, that's a pretty accurate observation.  I was thinking more along the lines of Sergio Leone sans Morricone but Kurosawa sounds even closer.

I hadn't seen Ulysses Gaze in a long but I do remember the music being unmemorable.  Pretty sparse actually.  It's a shame because I could only imagine what a competent composer could do with those glorious shots.  Still, I think his work is worth paying attention to.

About my name, my dear old mother is probably the one suffering from any form of dyslexia as she is the one who named me but you can call me Jasen, Jansen, Joe Blow, The Dude, or whatever suits your fancy.  From now on, I'm just going to use your complete name, Errikos, instead of trying to abbreviate it because I seem to put in too many 'R's or K's whenever I do that.