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Excerpt from the introductory essay from 100 Modern Soundtracks
Chimera cinema
Welcome to a vital component of the cinematic experience: the Soundtrack. An awkward realm where grand symphonies collide with overhead helicopters in panoramic spectacle; a bloodied field where composers and sound designers come to blows during the final mix; a deep pit of disinformation from which are echoed altruisms like “modern movies are too noisy”, “only orchestras can produce quality music”, “film sound should be natural”, “film music works best when you don’t notice it”, and “the art of movies died with the coming of sound”.
Clearly, the Soundtrack is a chimera of the cinema. It is sound and noise; noise and music; music and speech; speech and sound. At no point can it be distilled into a form which allows us to safely state its essential quality. The Soundtrack is a world caught in eternal disequilibrium by two meta-forces: Film Scores – the commissioned composition of music for specific scenes – and Sound Design – the conceptualisation of how dialogue, sound effects and atmospheres are edited and mixed to provide the sound for a scene. Despite the many existing ways in which critics and practitioners tend to separate the two forces, they continue to combine according to a wide range of unique, mutative and hermetic logic – little of which conforms to literary models, operatic figures, painterly diagrams or photographic allusions. In order to accept this inability of sound and music to be essenced from each other, one has to think with one’s ears.
The Cinesonic Womb
Sonic beings at our deepest & most unconscious level, we are shaped by sonar and aquatic sensations well before we are birthed into air and light. The sensorium of the womb is our primary induction into sound. The curvaceous film theatre returns us directly to a psycho-physical zone of uterine impressions: deep rumbles, pink noise, shifting timbres, spatial reflections, swelling rhythms. Much has been made of the cinema as some sort of primordial social cave for storytelling. The cinema is a womb where the sonic prevails.
We say we ‘watch’ movies, but the ‘cinesonic’ experience is far more than a mere optical event. Try watching a film with no sound: gone is its power, emotion, drama, vitality. Shut your eyes and listen to the soundtrack, and through the blackness one can be excited by the orchestration of voices, atmospheres, effects and music. This is how the sonic engulfs us in the unfolding audiovisual carnival that is the cinema.
Yet like a mysterious hieroglyphic stream, those squiggly white lines to the left of the celluloid film strip lay silent even to the inquiring eye. Under-theorised, presumed unimportant, yet vital to the history of audiovisuality, and integral to technological advances in the entertainment industries over the past twenty-five years. You know this without realising it. But thanks to years of optical and literal orientation, you articulate filmic experience through words which use visual metaphors. Though after a few simple pointers about how sound works, the most complex issues of the Soundtrack’s narrative power can become remarkably evident.
Planet Sound
100 Modern Soundtracks will guide you through the audiovisual layering of a wide range of films, as eclectic in their collection as they are essential in their status. Instead of forcing these varied movies into an pre-fab mould for ascribing significance, they are discussed to demonstrate how they shoot us back into the noise of reality – into its psychological sonorum which affects our everyday sense of time, space, mass, force, presence. The first bird of morning, a distant siren at midnight, a woman’s scream next door, your baby’s giggle, the last breath of your dying father, that inopportune phone ring, that heavenly voice – these are not mere ‘sound effects’ to you or I. Nor do they ever behave so in a film.
Night clubs, the ocean, tunnels, elevator muzak, stadium concerts, shopping malls, Walkmans, home theatres, subway PAs, forests, freeways, televisions in the next room while we eat breakfast – we are surrounded by sonic spaces. You have experienced all this – but little has been said about how cinema revives and reworks these temperate aural realities which direct your everyday momentum.
Braille for the Deaf
In an attempt to move away from many well-applied literary and visual frameworks through which the cinema has been perceived, structural models of meaning are disavowed in favour of flow charts of effects. Following the voluminous ways in which sound and music become manifest, every film covered in 100 Modern Soundtracks is treated primarily as a spatio-temporal event whose movement, denouement and performance is cited and noted for its audiovisual impact. Fundamentally, this requires a different mode of writing whose ‘flow’ is more important in its capture, replay and rendering of a film’s momentum, than it is in summarising, reducing or even encapsulating a film’s signifying skeleton. A kind of ‘Braille for the deaf’ is required.
While many ‘classics of cinema’ are absent here, its focus on the complexity of the Soundtrack uncovers that the more interesting and engrossing films may not be those missing ‘classics’, but those whose soundtracks psychologically excite the auditory membrane. The ultimate aim of 100 Modern Soundtracks is to induce a consciousness of how the Soundtrack operates on what we presume to be our perceptual facilities for comprehending film.
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy