Misc.

a long analysis of the 1917 OST

The Bosche follows and Newman treats us to some more ambient / organic / percussive / cacophonic / rusty noise as george mackay and dean charles-chapman make their way through the enemy barracks. i'm sure there's theory behind it but i personally think it's almost thought provoking.

Following The Bosche we get Tripwire and this kind of backs the whole Scho POV thing. Tripwire is just static and percussion for two minutes. If you listen closely, I'm pretty sure the piece starts right when Schofield regains consciousness, or when he coughs. It's not anything discernable because Schofield can't think properly. The piece stops immediately after the two get out of the mineshaft and Schofield knows they're properly safe.

Scrap of Ribbon plays next kind and the first little bit is more ambience, but it's a nice sound, more like the one we heard in Gehenna, kind of. There's some percussion in the background, and I would say that this mimics a heartbeat. Schofield almost just died, his heart would be racing, and if we're going with the theory that the music is from Scho's POV, then this makes sense. We get some more of the same dissonance we heard at the end of Gehenna. They're not safe, but they're safer than they were. Yo, remember that Blake motif? She comes back about halfway through the track. The melody in Scrap of Ribbon is a little different than the one in Blake and Schofield, but it's the same style. I could be wrong here, and I might be reaching but they really feel like the same melody. It plays while Blake tells Scho about Wilko, and it brings us closer to Blake. It's his motif over him speaking about a light-hearted, funny story. This all sets us up for when Blake dies. You get emotionally attached to him because of the music, and then it hurts more when he actually gets fucked over.

It's silent when Blake talks about the cherry trees and I think this is done because there's nothing that's been told to us in the music that's also relevant to the story at that moment. You could play more piano, but there was just piano and you don't want the piece to drag on too much, and if the music is Schofield's thoughts you could say that the cherry trees are almost like a distraction from everything.

Milk is a really interesting piece. It's ten minutes long and starts the second the boys decide to go to the farmhouse. I think it starts here because it's at this exact moment in time they've chosen that Blake is going to die. That exact point is kind of like a butterfly effect moment. I think that there's some sort of extension in the movie because I didn't find it to quite match up with the movie, but it's not super detrimental. there's a sort of beat drop when the plane gets hit, like a knife cutting through the air. This is the first comprehensible sound that we've gotten the entire time, everything else has just been ambience. To me, every single time, that noise sounds like what it feels when a stone drops in your stomach. It represents the shock that goes through the guys when they see that the plane was actually hit. the plane crashes and its just really, really loud brass and these gross scratchy dissonant chords. I think it's supposed to confuse us, throw us off beat, because it carries through until Schofield shoots the German soldier. The danger is gone, and now it's extremely focused on Blake. We've gone through the movie until now thinking that Blake is the main protagonist, and when Schofield goes to get the water this is proved wrong. Why didn't we just stay with Blake? I mean yeah there's shock value in seeing him suddenly get fucked over, but we would have been surprised regardless because a central character is dying not even halfway through the film. The moment Scho goes to get the water, the story is passed on to him in the sense that at first, he was just an observer, but now he has to take the responsibility. The ambience that plays while Blake is fucking losing his life is, in my opinion, kind of like meditation music. You know ?? Like go on YouTube and type in meditation music, and tell me is doesn't sound like the part in Milk when Blake is dying. This is really cool though, because it's a really subtle way of playing adequate music without a sweeping melody. 1917 is all about showing what war was kind of cut and dry. im not a historian so i can't say how realistic the movie is, but it doesn't feel fitting to have a great piece of music while Blake is dying. Meditation is kind of about letting go of your body and it's part of a practice where the ultimate goal is to ascend to a non-earthly reality. to put it over Blake's death kind of shows that he's fucked and that it's the end for him. THEN, to really hammer it home, the second Blake loses his life, the music stops, like a heart monitor machine flatlining. Schofield just kind of sits there with a dead body in his arms, and a barn burning to ashes in the background, and he doesn't know what to do with himself. There's more to the actual soundtrack, but I don't hear it anywhere in the movie so maybe they cut it? I'm not super sure.