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Cinesonic 1:
The World of Sound in Film
P R E S E N T A T I O N SCARTER BURWELL Composing Music for the Films of Joel & Ethan Coen
The relationship between Burwell and Joel & Ethan Coen is rare. Burwell's music - chamelon-like, eclectic, unexpected - perfectly matches the many genre-bending excursions of the Coens' projects. Often working at a meta-textual level, the Coens' films are acutely aware of an audience being conscious of the story-telling manipulations which drive contemporary cinema. To this end, the Coen's use of Burwell's music always seeks ways to side-step conventional methods of 'emotional cueing' an audience with snippets of mood music. Burwell's prime eclecticism lies in a strange mis-matching, whereby his cues at first appear to 'not fit' - but eventually reveal a depth that is rooted in the compex story-telling craft of the Coens' narratives.
Carter Burwell will discuss his ongoing collaboration with the Coens, using the Coens' films as illustrations of aesthetic choices in film music and detailing the various changes which occurred through the editing and sound post-production phases. "Barton Fink" will be discussed as an example of collaboration between sound design and score, "The Big Lebowski" for the frustrations and challenges of working with a song score, and "Fargo" as a balance between irony and believability. Excerpts of the films will be augmented by samples of scenes before-and-after music, and examples of score that didn't make it to the final films.
YASUNORI HONDA The Voice From The Mixing Room: The Transition from Analogue to Digital in in Japanese Animation Sound Design
Transcript of Yasunori Honda's outline of a history of how sound design has developed in the Japanese Anime industry - focussing on three key titles he has done the sound design for: MACROSS, NINJA SCROLL and TENCHI MUYO IN LOVE.
HOWARD SHORE The Score to CRASH - Performed Live
Howard Shore will conduct the score to David Cronenberg's CRASH live with 14 musicians. The music for CRASH calls for 3 harpists, 1 prepared piano player, 1 percussionist, 3 woodwinds and 6 electric guitars. The score is an assemblage of the cues from the film, configured to a continuous 40 minute piece. The musicians are positioned in a spatial pattern to reconstruct the spacing used for the recording of the score. The film is not screened for this presentation. The focus is on the music and the live spatialization of sound which traditionally would only be experienced via the film soundtrack.
Howard Shore has composed the music for 7 films directed by Cronenberg. CRASH is typified by an economy in the tonal palettes, shifting between two distinct textures: the breathing wind of the clarinets and oboes and the electrified strings resonating in the amplified guitars. Throughout the score, each grouping of instruments assumes the identity of the other, often morphing between the two. The harps effectively embellish both, occupying a srange half-space between the two primary textures. The film contains many memorable moments where the tonal texture appears to be in one guise, only to devlop and resolve in the other. This befits the psychological unravelling of the story's central character James (played by James Spader) as it reflects the polysexual paraphilliac drive which defines the collapse and transition of conventional sexual binaries in J.G. Ballard's novel.
T A L K S
RICK ALTMAN The Living Nickelodeon
I will both discuss and illustrate the medium of "illustrated song slides", which alternated with films in virtually all nickelodeons. This historical (and utterly fascinating) material will be new and I trust interesting to most participants, but the real reason for using this material goes far beyond historical topicality. Song slides permit me to think out loud about the problem of film music and fixed-form songs. In the mid-aughts virtually all accompaniment was either "cue" music (playing of source music such as bugles and on-screen bands), and thus assimilated to sound FX, or popular songs (often connected to the film by lyrics rather than sound quality). A decade later, the song was all but abandoned as an accompaniment device, not to return until the late twenties, and then only in the form of the theme song. Since then, we have gone through several return-of-the-song cycles. What I want to investigate through song slides is the tension that exists in film music from the start between songs (=short fixed forms with words) and the light classical compositions (=open-ended forms with emotional content) that became the accompaniment standard starting in the teens.
© Rick Altman 1998
PHILIP BROPHY I Scream In Silence: Cinema, Sex & The Sound Of Women Dying
The scream of Woman in the cinema is the aural nexus between sex and violence, delight and terror, life and death. It vocalizes its own heightened degree of hysteria, over-performing its function and rendering itself excessive, ornamental, feminine. Screams of terror are thus indistinguishable from screams of delight. Cinema clouds the orientation of Woman's scream so as to mark the real voice of violence as an imaginary projection. Both cinematic and social rape survive as unfortunate events made acceptable through this conceit. When a woman is heard screaming outside or next door, hope is held that it is merely a woman laughing. From the silent scream of Pearl White on 18fps train tracks to the discordant dialogue between Leatherface's chainsaw and Marilyn's vocal chords, cinema allows the scream primarily to discredit its anguish and create a hyper-dramatic state of sono-erotic peaking. Drama, suspense, thrills - all mainpulate cinema into a Big Boo Theory to make women shriek and men laugh.
There are no boisterous 'boos' in I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. Nor is there any music. There is a surfeit of silence - all of which is ruptured, ravaged, raped. Stillness is figured as the harbinger of death - a moist, sonic bed awaiting incision. Space, form and matter - from the woods to the lake to the body of Carol - are vessels awaiting disturbance. Invaded, terrorized, penetrated, they bear the marks of shocks waves - but as is the nature of sound waves, the shock subsides and fades away. The woods go silent, the lake goes still, Carol goes quiet. Sonically heightened through a self-anaesthetization due to physical trauma, Carol becomes an internalizer of the scream: she breathes deep, inhales slow, swallows hard. She doesn't call the cops. She is the gulp that precedes and proceeds the cinematic scream.
As I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is once again banned on video in Australia, the imperception of functions within the Audio Visual realm governs recurring presumptions about the cinema. For I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is post-pornographic in its collapse of image into the dynamic shuddering of the soundtrack. Its manifest and literal depiction of extreme sexual violence is offensive only in its blunt image-scaping of the sexual jungle which awaits in the bright light outside the cinema. The film's voicing of Carol as the body through which Woman screams is politicised beyond the binaries of today's naively concerned cinema. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is the reply to rape in the form of a retort unacceptable in the face of the law. No words, no, screams, no cries, no pleas. Only the sound of spittle whistling through the air.
Referenced films: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (in detail), plus BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL, BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXEN, THE BIRDS, BLUE STEEL, KLUTE, 3 WOMEN, VAGABONDE, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, SALO, SUSPIRIA, THE EXORCIST
© Philip Brophy 1998
ROYAL S. BROWN Sound Music in the Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Ce n'est pas du sang, c'est de la peinture rouge. Glissements progressifs du plaisir.
In the 1974 Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Progressive Slidings of Pleasure), the fifth (or sixth, if one counts the anagram version of L'Eden et apres, N a pris les des) film directed by French novelist-filmmaker-theoretician Alain Robbe-Grillet, there is a key sequence (the fifteenth in the published screenplay) that begins about 25 minutes into the film and that runs a little over two minutes. The scene seems to be one of many instances in his work in which Robbe-Grillet examines the theme of voyeurism: A magistrate (Michael Lonsdale) investigating the apparent murder of a young woman named Nora (Olga Georges-Picot, who also plays a lawyer in the film) by her friend Alice (Anicee Alvina) stands outside a door to a room that may either be a prison cell or a cell in a convent (or both). After a moment, he opens up the judas and peers through it, which leads to the expected point-of-view shot of Alice standing naked beneath a high, barred window in a sparsely furnished room. At the same time, however, on the intricate sound/music track composed and designed by frequent Robbe-Grillet collaborator Michel Fano, we hear an intriguing variety of sounds and noises: a) a woman's sensual moanings; b) breaking glass; c) the sound of a fire burning; d) the cracking of a whip; e) a dog barking. During this sound-musical cue, the sound of the woman's voice moves from sensual pleasure to outcries of pain and, finally, to screaming. In this way, Robbe-Grillet creates a parallel theme that might be called Ècouteurism, which arouses our expectations (and, apparently, those of the magistrate) at least as much as the closed door. But here, in a kind of audio-visual counterpoint created out of narrative anticipation, Robbe-Grillet and Fano frustrate expectations. As the magistrate enters Alice's cell, we see nothing to resolve our aural expectations. Instead, the camera shows a cheap phonograph on the bed. The magistrate lifts the tone arm from a small disc spinning on the turntable, and the sound/music stops. "What are you doing with this gadget?" the magistrate asks. "Can't you see?" the nude Alice answers. "I'm listening to music."
Much has been made, both by Robbe-Grillet and by his various interpreters, of the various ways in which the author-filmmaker has throughout his oeuvre shifted reader/viewer/listener attention in his texts away from a conventionalized, quasi-mimetic presentation of the subject matter to presentations that stress what Robbe-Grillet has often referred to as travail and materiaux: the work of the creative artist and the materials used by him/her in that work. Most work on Robbe-Grillet has concentrated on the ways in which the author-filmmaker has subverted linear narrative structure in his novels and his films, and, in his films, on how he has used noncontinuity editing as a part of this process. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, the overall structures that turn up in the author's novels and films have much more in common with the blending, in music, of serial and tonal techniques that one finds in composers such as Alban Berg than with classical narrative structure. A less considered area in which, in his films, Robbe-Grillet subverts standard practice is in the use of sound and music. Indeed, Michel Fano, the composer who worked with Robbe-Grillet at the height of his cinematic career, steadfastly refused to make a distinction between the sound and music tracks of the films he worked on, referring to his contributions as a partition sonore (sound score), and organizing the many (apparently) diegetic and (apparently) nondiegetic sounds into the film into a kind of ongoing musique concrete, of which the instance cited from Glissements progressifs du plaisir is a perfect example. Sounds heard throughout the film - the motor boat and the dog barking in L'mmortelle, the woodpecker in L'Homme qui ment, even the subtle shiftings of the sounds of the air system in the train car of Trans-Europ-Express - establish themselves as quasi-musical motifs that also reappear, intertextually, throughout Robbe-Grillet's work as a filmmaker. Just how non-action-specific the sound music for Robbe-Grillet's films can become can be seen in the way the various cues are resited from l'Eden et apres in its anagram version, N a pris les des.
As for the actual music composed for his films, Robbe-Grillet has more often than not shown a predilection for very fractionalized, modernistic music that mirrors his own work as an artist, as described in the screenplay for L'Annee derniere a Marienbad: serial music consisting of notes separated by silences, an apparent discontinuity of notes and unrelated chords. But at the same time the music is violent, disturbing and for the spectator who is not interested in contemporary music it must be both irritating and somehow continually unresolved. Although director Alain Resnais betrayed Robbe-Grilletís intentions in Marienbad by using an ongoing score of mostly lugubrious, Phantom of the Opera type organ music, Robbe-Grillet was able, particularly in L'Homme qui ment, L'Eden et apres, and Glissements progressifs du plaisir (the latter a virtuoso piece of sorts) to get from Michel Fano the type of music described in the Marienbad screenplay. It is music that also interacts almost seamlessly with the musique concrete made up of the sounds, as in the mirroring of the machine-gun fire in L'Homme qui ment by snare-drum tattoos in the musical score. When Robbe-Grillet turns to tonal music, it is almost invariably as found music presented in brief snippets throughout the film, whether the fragments from Verdiís La Traviata in Trans-Europ-Express, the final chords from the various scenes of the same composer's Il Trovatore in le Jeu avec le feu, for the snippets from Schubert's 15th String Quartet and Wagner played at half speed in la Belle captive. Popular music, often foreign also finds its way to the sound/music tracks of certain Robbe-Grillet films, whether the Turkish song in L'Immortelle, the Brazilian song Carolina in le Jeu avec le feu, or the Duke Ellington piece in la Belle captive.
In the same way that voyeurism is the psychological mechanism that allows access to the visual universes in Robbe-Grillet films, it is the kind of Ècouteurism suggested above that leads the viewer-listener of the director's films into their aural domains. By transforming everything heard into a kind of ongoing musique concrete or otherwise, Robbe-Grillet is able to strip this Ècouteurism of its psychological underpinnings of control and domination, just as his convoluted and self-contradictory narratives and his noncontinuity editing resite the elements of voyeurism from a sado-masochistic concentration on the illusion of reality to an aestheticized, postmodern contemplation of the reality of the illusion. Ultimately, we see and hear red paint, not blood.
Referenced films: THE IMMORTAL, EDEN & AFTER, THE MAN WHO LIES, TRANS EUROPE EXPRES, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, PROGRESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE
© Royal S. Brown 1998
CARYL FLINN The Legacy of Modernism: Film Music, Fassbinder, Kluge, and Political (After) Shock
Fassbinder's longtime collaborator and composer, Peer Raben, has argued that film music should function as a series of shocks. For anyone familiar with Rabens compositions (with their unconventional modification of standard form) and to his scores more generally (with manipulated fragments taken from classical and romantic repetory), his claim makes immediate sense. The shock of new musical forms and contexts may be said to create a certain defamiliarization or Verfremdungseffekt. The connection to modernist aesthetic concepts is not incidental. For although the New German Cinemas obsession with Germanys war and postwar periods is well-documented, the movement was equally marked by the interwar and prewar period during which European modernism flourished. There are the remakes (Mother Kusters, Nosferatu), the references to techniques (Fassbinder's anti-illusionist mise-en-scene; Elfi Mikeschs often expressionistic camerawork; Kluge's collage-like manipulation of film and other artifacts). My talk explores how Rabens notion of musical shock--which describes with equal appropriateness the scores of Alexander Kluge's films-- is indebted to earlier notions of shock at the same time that it reworks them, filtering these modernist conceits through a series of distorting mirrors and amplifiers. Through their critical re-energizing of modernist ideas and practices, Raben/Fassbinder and Kluge's soundtracks, I believe, raise important issues in terms of reworking Germanys cultural and historical traditions, its movements and experiences. Moreover, given the intensity with which Nazism and the Holocaust were thematically addressed by these two (and other) directors, it seems appropriate to inquire how these nationally-specific experiences may also have helped shaped the post modern deployment of shocks in their postwar filmcores. Referenced directors & composers (partial list): Hanns Eisler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Paul Hindemith, Alexander Kluge, Peer Raben Referenced films: PACIFIC 231, MOTHER KUSTER'S TRIP TO HEAVEN, LILI MARLEEN, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, POWER OF EMOTION, KUHLE WAMPE, YESTERDAY GIRL, OUR HITLER, BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, CHINESE ROULETTE
© Caryl Flinn 1998
SARAH KOZLOFF Genre Talk
Most of the scholarship on American film genres has dealt with such subjects as underlying thematic resonances, historical evolution, and visual iconography. With a few notable exceptions, what has most often been overlooked is the way that dialogue functions in genres. In fact, genre dialogue falls into recognizable conventions and these patterns turn out to be crucial in the structure of each genre's dynamics.
This talk--which is excerpted from my forthcoming book, OVERHEARING FILM DIALOGUE--will concentrate on summarizing the distinct ways in which the Western, the Screwball Comedy, the Gangster film and the Melodrama utilize character speech in terms of furthering their narratives, creating their characterizations, and positioning their viewers.
Referenced films: Major examples for "Genre Talk" will include, but not be limited to: RED RIVER, THE MAGNIFICIENT SEVEN, MY MAN GODFRY, THE AWFUL TRUTH, THE GODFATHER, BUGSY, RESERVOIR DOGS, CAMILLE, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.
© Sarah Kozloff 1998
ADRIAN MARTIN Threads of Voices: Three Studies
Studies of voice-over in cinema have so far predominantly analysed the meaning of voice-over speech, the dream-like effects it creates, the way the blocks of spoken text structure and inflect the narrative,its effects on point-of-view systems, and so on. I wish to add to this body of work by concentrating more materially on the registers of voice (not only voice-over narration, but some other special sorts of vocal work) in a number of films - tracing back effects of meaning, mood and structure to the sonorities of voices, the ambiguities of its spatial placement, and the precise interaction of vocal lines and music & soundscape cues.
I will offer three, overlapping case studies:
1. Ambiguities of voice placement, status & perception in two thrillers: CRUISING (William Friedkin, 1979) and WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK (Fred Walton, 1993). In both films, the villain is defined through - sometimes only through - unusual peculairities of voice production and projection. Plot-wise, the films use such devices as psycho-somatic voice substitution and ventriloquism ('throwing one's voice'). These devices then structure the careful (and creepy) ambiguities of scene dynamics at extreme high-points of tension and violence.
2. Voice-over in CARLITO'S WAY (Brian De Palma, 1994) and ANTOINE ET COLETTE (Francois Truffaut, episode of LOVE AT TWENTY, 1962). De Palma's film presents a high watermark of 'classical' voice-over narration in American cinema. I will discuss, esepcially, the way the blocks of vocal text are recorded, delivered and placed, and their precise interaction with elements of sound design and mise en scene. Truffaut's short film, by contrast, presents a model of what has been called a lyrical, 'free indirect' use of voice-over and 'quoted' speech and music fragments. It is, in particular, by studying the tripartite relation of voice, music and foley effects - assembled in a characteristically French New Wave manner - that we can best appreciate the special elan and mood of Truffaut's style.
3. Orson Welles. I will conclude with a commentary on some of the material properties of Welles' voice and the effects it creates on many levels of mood, style, textual rhetoric and meaning. Examples used will be a segment from one of this radio programs of the 30s, and the opening scene of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942).
© Adrian Martin 1998
DAVE SANJEK Reeling In The Years: American Vernacular Music & Documentary Film
In this presentation, I want to examine the documentary record of three of the principal genres of American vernacular music: gospel, blues and bluegrass. The term "vernacular" itself is as problematic as the films; however, I want to use it rather than "folk" as the paper will problematize the definition of "folk" music. By my use of "vernacular" I mean to focus on music native to North America, connected to particular geographies and genres, and possessed of a tenuous connection to the mainstream music industry.
I want to look at three aspects of these films: 1.) depiction of place or scene; how the films constitute the "aura" of primary places - e.g. Dockery Farms or the Miss. Delta 2.) the connection between the music industry and these not exactly non-commercial musics but what the industry would call "niche" genres; these concerns will be examined in light of how the industrial compoenent of music is either elided or demonized; 3.) the hisorical narratives constructed by the films; how either originary figures, places or moments are idealized and how narrative tropes of degeneration of cultural forms occur time and again.
Referenced films: SAY AMEN SOMEBODY, MISSISSIPPI BLUES, SEARCH FOR ROBERT JOHNSON, DEEP BLUES, HIGH LONESOME. Other may be drawn upon, particularly the work of Robert Mugge and Les Blank. Last, I would add that my title references both the Steely Dan tune as well as the effort on the part of these films to corral the meaning of this music as well as drag the past, kicking & screaming, into the present.
© Dave Sanjek 1998
WILL STRAW Ornament, Entrance and the Theme Song
The proposed paper would examine the role of credit sequences in offering an "entrance" into film texts. In particular, I am concerned with a historically specific relationship between the movie theme song and the animated credit sequence. As the point of entry into films, credit sequences often manifest historically specific ideas about the status of popular entertainment and the explicitness with which an entertainment function for films is to be marked. The degree of autonomy of credit sequences, their location in the unfolding of a film, the extent to which they are decorative and ornamental -- all of these serve to signify the extent of a film's particular artistic ambitions, locating it within hierarchies of taste and artistic ambition. This signification of ambitions will take place through particular economies of music and image in which restraint, playfulness and an explicitly ceremonial function of opening a film are marked.
The paper will focus on two divergent tendencies within credit sequences during Hollywood films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of these works, in the name of an avowed and realist seroiusness, to supress the emblematic or ceremonial aspect of credit sequences, delaying them until the narrative is underway and minimizing their musical and graphic autonomy. Another tendency, found in adult-oriented sex comedies, functions to endow credit sequences within a playful autonomy, drawing on conventions of animated film, popular orchestration, and magazine design. Here, the ceremonial function of credit sequences -- their explicit recognition of the ritualistic nature of a film's opening sequence -- is foregrounded.
© Will Straw 1998
ELISABETH WEIS Narrative Functions Of The Ecouteur
The presentation will examine narrative functions of the ecouteur or eavesdropper as the aural equivalent of the voyeur. Exemplars range from characters who accidentally overhear conversations to "acousmophiles," who derive sexual pleasure from the act of listening in. Like the voyeur, the ecouteur poses questions about the moviegoer's eager complicity in the act, as in situations where we strain to overhear a whispered secret or a confession to a priest.
© Elisabeth Weis 1998
ALAN WILLIAMS The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies
What David Bordwell calls the "Standard Version" of film history would have it that the "silent" cinema developed into a mature art, only to be thrown back to a state of aesthetic infancy by the arrival of sound. With sound, cinema was thought to have lost what made it an independent, viable art; it was taken over by the enemy: theatre.
But recently rediscovered and restored materials from the era of the transition to synchronized, recorded sound show a more complicated picture. There was an experiment and innovation from the very beginning, and not just in "art-oriented industries like that of France. We must learn to escape the Standard Version's historiographical blinders and examine all the various productions of the years 1926-31. There are three types of material, equally important: (1) the early sync sound works, including short subjects; (2) part talkies, which were produced in the U.S. until 1930; and (3) "silent" films which were released or re-released )e.g. THE BIG PARADE) with synchronized music and effects tracks, also until about 1930.
Examples of all three types of film will be given, related to selected problems such as: the formal relations between sequences recorded sync and those shot silent; relative levels and sound quality (mostly, amount of reverb) of music, dialogue, and effects; editing criteria for sync sound materials; the problem of acknowleding filmic performance as performance.
© Alan Williams 1998
S A T E L L I T E - E V E N T S
LAZY, TIM CATLIN & ATOMIC FUZZ SCREEN NOISE The Public Bar, cnr. Victoria &O'Connell Sts. City
Dave Brown (current MA in Media Arts) and Sean Baxter form the unique jazz noise nucleus that is Lazy. Their gigs are generally duo affairs with occasional guests - in the past including KK Knull (Tokyo) and members from Zeni Geva (Tokyo). At The Public Bar, Philip Brophy rejoins them on a non-MIDI-ed Roland SH1 to form the trio that The Beatles ended up once John Lennon was shot dead. Sort of.
Tim Catlin runs the ECHO CHAMBER show on 3CR and is a current undergraduate in Media Arts. Tim will be performing a live solo set with his amazing sheets of endless drones derived from harmonic manipulations of re-tuned E-Bow guitars.
Atomic Fuzz is Philip Samartzis and Thomas Couzinier (from Paris and a current MA in Media Arts). A collision between post-Cramps guitar shuddering, reto-futurist vocoder garble, and a general time warp between Link Wray and falling bits of Skylab over the Australian desert.
Ph2 & HONEYSMACK TWEAK FREAK Revolver, 229 Chapel St. Prahran
Ph2 is a live surround sound project by Philip Brophy & Philip Samartzis. Ph2 has performed "Surround V.1" in 6-8 channel sound recently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, & The Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne. .At Revolver they will present "Surround V.2" in low noise kickin' club stereo.
Honeysmack is Dave Habberfeld - a Media Arts MA graduate and director of SMELLY Records Dave also performs around town as Acid Opera, does kung-fu wrestlemania bouts with Voitek, and DJs at many a salubrious affair. At Revolver, Dave will present the seriously warped acid belching Melbourne audiences have come to admire from this sophisticated animal of 303 brain pulsing.
Contents of this page © Philip Brophy unless otherwise specified