Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504731
58 M PS E . O R G priest with his head down. Right as the reverb of the music is fading away, the picture cuts to Salieri, who smirks right when the music fades. Both the choice of images, their juxtaposition and their temporal synchronization with Mozart's music to bring closure to Salieri's tale make this a masterpiece sequence. Let's look at two different scenes from Nomadland (2020), one where music is used to create closure and another where that rule is broken. In Nomadland at [0:46:16], there is a sequence where we see the protagonist Fern (Frances McDormand), travelling across multiple locations while Ludovico Einaudi's "Petricor" plays non- diegetically. The sequence ends with the music track coming to an end accompanied by a shot of her walking at dusk in the camp where her truck is parked. The track ends naturally and the tonic note gives the sequence a sense of closure. At [1:20:57], there is a similar sequence which is glued extra diegetically by music while Fern is revisiting photos and discovering new places on the road. At [1:22:16], the music is interrupted and so is her journey with a close-up of her van's door shutting down. Leaving the impression that her journey is being paused or interrupted. A journey which resumes at [1:31:34] as she's heard offscreen leaving Dave's house and the extradiegetic music resumes. In a SBIFF Cinema Society Q&A (official SBIFF, 2020), Sergio Diaz who is one of the film's supervising sound editors, along with Zach Seivers, said, "the DNA of the film was, for me, fragility." I found that really interesting because Chattah points out that "the tonic is generally addressed as 'stable,' Shots from Amadeus (1986) edited against the last two bars of Amadeus Mozart's "Lacrimosa." CLOSURE IN NARRATIVE IS CLOSURE IN MUSIC at play.