A Film Canon

Rameau's Nephew is the most novelistic of Diderot's philosophical dialogues, largely because its sceptical voice - Jean-Francois Rameau ('He'), nephew of the notorious composer, with whom Diderot ('I') enjoys an extended conversation in the Tuileries - is a character, rather than a mouthpiece; or, rather, is imbued with a multifarious, prosopopoeic intensity that transforms every utterance into a nascent narrative, anticipating the dead ends of Jacques The Fatalist. As a result, the various objects of discursion - education, epistemology, aesthetics, commerce - are ultimately subordinated to a rhythmic rehearsal, catharsis and expulsion of the philosophical stance itself, as if the most entertaining defense of Diderot's encyclopedic materialism were a taxonomic reduction of all its opponents to so many behavioural deformities. This may explain the privileged role ascribed to musicology as the culmination of all these argumentative strands - and, more specifically, Rameau's insistence on the replacement of baroque proportions and pedantries with the maxim that "it is the animal cry of passion that should dictate the melodic line...phrases must be short and the meaning self-contained, so that the musician can utilise the whole and every part...turning it all ways like a polyp, without destroying it."