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Cinesonic 3:
Experiencing the Soundtrack
JACK NITZSCHE Revolutionizing Cinema - or, how I put Rock'n'Roll in movies Thursday June 29th @ 7.30pm Capitol Theatre - 113 Swanston St, MelbourneOne wonders why film history has ignored Jack Nitzsche. The guy has moved from cool cult twang (check the opening credits to the classic Village of the Giants) to truly radical son-musical collages (Performance is way ahead of its time) to winning an Academy Award (for writing "Up Where We Belong" for An Officer and a Gentleman). Maybe he gets passed by because he has rarely delivered the orchestral niceties, which remain the tacky hallmark of quality cinema. But the reasons for his invisibility are more complex than aesthetic conventions. For Jack Nitzsche is a living breathing merger of two strains which govern the audio-visual nature of cinema: score composing and music producing. Born of the rock/pop recording industry yet a rock migrant in the cinema, Nitzsche did not simply write music, and then get an orchestra or ensemble to record it on a sound stage. He treated the score as he would the recording of an album: the musicians were crucial to the resulting sound, as was Nitzsche's role in engineering and producing the music he directed them to play. This is why a distinctive "Nitzsche' sound is hard to discern: he blends well with the musicians of his choice, and in doing so develops a character peculiar to each individual film. The baggage that Nitzsche brings to the cinema is normally not allowed to pass thought the film industry's cultural metal detectors. You see, Nitzsche doesn't simply 'recreate' the sound of rock when it's needed for a scene: the guy arranged for Phil Spector and went on to produce for the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, The Monkees and The Cramps. In the sonic sense, he is the real thing. When he scored muzak-inspired 'beautiful music' for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, he did so without resorting to camp or knee-jerk counter-culturalism. When he got Captain Beefheart to contribute vocals to his blues score for Blue Collar he created a post-roots modern machine thump. And when he fused Miles Davis with Taj Mahal for The Hot Spot he produced a uniquely po-mo collage whose influence is still felt in many ambient '4th world' projects since. Frankly, many other claims to eclectic scoring pale in the face of Nitzsche's prodigious output. And while film history is still yet to sing his praise to the full, it is impossible to ignore his contribution to strategically working the soundtrack as a site for truly modern manifestations of rock's infection of the cinema.
Referenced films: Village of the Giants, Performance, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Cruising, Blue Collar, Starman, Stand By Me, The Hot Spot, Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard
© Philip Brophy 2000
BILL ROUTT Hearing Silent Images Friday June 30th @ 9.30am Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
Perhaps the question of sound in silent cinema might be re-posed as a question of sensing. That is, what is it to hear silent images? This paper will sketch out some reasons for taking the madness of thinking images seriously, using evidence from certain writing and a handful of films released between 1913 and 1915.
Referenced films: A House Divided (1913, d. Alice Guy); Hypocrites (1915, d. Lois Weber); Alias Jimmy Valentine (1914, d. Maurice Tourner); A Florida Enchantment (1914, Sidney Drew); A Fool There Was (1914, d. Frank Powell); And The Light Went Out (1914, d. Fritz Bernhardt); The Children & The Major (1914, d. unknown); Trooper Campbell (1914, d. Raymond Longford); The Sick Stockrider (1913, d. W.J.Lincoln)
© Bill Routt 2000
PHILIP BROPHY Funny Accents: The Sound of Racism Friday June 30th @ 11.30am Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
The removal of the sound of an original voice is always problematic. The replacement of it with another can be culturally traumatic. Not only is the cultural timbre of a voice erased, it is also replaced in a way that figures the act of replacement as necessary, desirable and - worse - appreciable. Woody Allen thought he was being real funny when he dubbed an erotic-action spoof of the James Bond films into English. A bunch of 'slanty-eyed' people wander around the screen, supposedly overacting, supposedly being stupid. Woody Allen's comic re-narration sparkles on the surface like 60s Madison Ave copy writing. Underneath lies the deeply muted tones of ignorance and presumption: Allen replaced the original humour of the film with an ancillary humour which implies that the original film was bereft of either irony, self-reflexivity or parody. Clive James thinks he's real funny when he shows excerpts of Japanese TV - over which he drolly pontificates through a series of cliched witticisms only Eurocentric literary types would find amusing. Like an overbearing megaphone, his voice forces the original TV soundtrack into submission. He functions like an Anglo-amped Zeus; his power lies in the proportionate relationship between his full-bodied frequencies and the thin crackling of the TV soundtrack. These validated 'intelligent' forms of vocal racism have long remained unquestioned. If one were to come across a German, Italian or Turkish post-dubbing of SCHINDLER'S LIST with numerous cracks about gas cooking, one would most likely not defend its racism. Yet the English language - particularly in the hands of American and British productions - has a long history of territorially occupying the soundtracks of films and TV shows from Russia, Mexico, Italy, France, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines. Numerous comedians have driven these trajectories toward an ever-expanding auditorium of post-dubbed configurations, voiced-over xs and re-scripted narration. The end results aggregate a similar effect: less a 'voice-over' and more a 'talk-over' - a mode of vocal delivery which bludgeons the original text into a decimated residual version of itself. More commonly, comedians stream their comedy through fake accents, false voices and fraudulent dialects. Their flip dismissal of Otherness possibly splits us into far more troubling cultural schisms wherein the sound of any accent is pre-rendered for us through questionable oral colonialism. This paper will trace the exploitation production history which has grounded the 'cheap' the importation and re-marketing of 'foreign' film product since the 50s, and view this history in line with non-English speaking models of sound post-production in Europe and Asia. Mention will also be made of differing cultures' internal tensions between the written word and the spoken word, and how they - in combination with the English tradition - create a series of tensions which are plucked, strummed and detuned through the action of 'talk-over'.
Referenced films: What's Up Tiger Lilly?, For Your Height Only, Spermula, The Queen of Blood, Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, Fists of Fury, The Good The Bad & The Ugly.
© Philip Brophy 2000
ADRIAN MARTIN Musical Mutations Friday June 30th @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
My paper is about that very particular phenomenon of how films get 'in' and 'out' of songs, how they pass from one 'world' to another. Apart from classical musical exponents of this art, like Fred Astaire, I am going to discuss some of the modernist variations in the musicals by Resnais (SAME OLD SONG) and Rivette (UP DOWN FRAGILE), and also look at things including the Dennis Potter TV dramas, the Holly Hunter film LIVING OUT LOUD, and the Ally McBeal-driven fad to have TV characters bursts into song and/or dance without the slightest 'lead in', for just a few seconds.
Films referenced: Living Out Loud; Same Old Song (d. Alain Resnais); Up Down Fragile (d. Jacques Rivette); Dennis Potter's TV dramas; Ally McBeal.
© Adrian Martin 2000
KRIN GABBARD The Greatest Music the World Has Known: Kubrick Markets High Culture Friday June 30th @ 4.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
With A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick signalled a new direction for the art cinema. Along with several gestures associated with canonical art films, Kubrick dressed up his dystopian vision of the future with easily recognizable classical music by Beethoven, Rimsky Korsakov, and Rossini. Kubrick had previously revolutionized film music by releasing 2001: A Space Odyssey with his "temp track" instead of with the compositions of Alex North. But whereas the score for 2001 was probably not identified as "classical" music by the majority of filmgoers, the music for A Clockwork Orange comfortably signified high culture and gave an artistic legitimacy to an extremely provocative film that might have been even more widely condemned if Kubrick had used less exalted music. And yet A Clockwork Orange resembles mainstream Hollywood films in allowing the audience to sympathize with its protagonist, Little Alex, in spite of his sociopathic behavior. In particular, Kubrick's screenplay associates Alex's love for Beethoven with sensitivity and freedom rather than with Nazi brutality, as it does in Anthony Burgess' novel.
Films referenced: A Clockwork Orange, Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut (all d. Stanley Kubrick)
© Krin Gabbard 2000
Satanic Noise & Screaming Rock'n'Roll The Exorcist + Sympathy for the Devil Friday June 30th @ 7.30pm Capitol Theatre - 113 Swanston St, Melbourne
William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1971) is a well known contribution to the modern horror film. What is less noted is the unique position it occupies in the history of film soundtracks. The sound effects design by Ron Nagle, Doc Seigel & Fred Brown is a landmark in brute sonic violence. The first half of the movie employs loud sound effects which continually and harshly rupture the domestic silence of the family home, which serves to amplify the hidden demonic forces which well from within the progressively possessed Regan. The fact that so much of the final series of demonic expulsions eschew musical accompaniment indicates the rigor and purpose of the sound design. Music, though, does creep throughout The Exorcist; a cool selection of tracks featuring some incidental themes by the inimitable Jack Nitzsche, a Japanese muzak version of Tubular Bells (!), plus chilling passages by George Crumb, Anton Weber, Bela Bartok and Kryzstyzof Penderecki.Jean Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1970) is less an excursion into the bowels of Satanic forces and more a fascinating sono-doco of the recording of The Rolling Stone's classic song. True to Godard's excavation of the filming process, Sympathy For The Devil records every stage of the Stones' time in the studio - from their first fumbling chord work-outs to the gradual layering of tracks for the final mix. Godard employs a ground-breaking series of long circular tracks which calmly move around the large studio space while the Stones and their entourage go about their business. Juxtaposed with the Stones' studio noodling is a series of portraits of Black Panthers; decked with real guns &endash; proclaiming radical dogma whilst sitting atop derelict cars in a junkyard. Definitive Hip Hop before its time. This double bill is introduced by Adrian Martin - long-standing admirer of Godard and renowned for locking the doors to the theatre when he used to screen The Exorcist to unsuspecting film students.
© Philip Brophy 2000
ANAHID KASSABIAN Listening for Identifications: Compiled vs. Composed Scores in Contemporary Hollywood Films Saturday July 1st @ 9.30am Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
Processes of identification have mainly been theorized in terms of visual fields and narrative structures. But film music is an integral condition for any process of identification. In fact, I will argue, two different kinds of contemporary scores condition different processes of identification. Composed scores, in the tradition of classical Hollywood, track identifications down a narrow path. They tend to condition what I call 'assimilating identifications', which position perceivers in dominant ideological positions. Compiled scores, on the other hand, call on perceivers' own histories of listening, and condition what I call 'affiliating identifications'. I will elaborate on this distinction and compare the different processes through readings of The Mask of Zorro and Dangerous Minds.
Referenced films: The Mask of Zorro (1998 d. Martin Campbell, music by James Horner); Dangerous Minds (1995 d. John N. Smith, music by Wendy & Lisa)
© Anahid Kassabian 2000
JEFF SMITH Taking Music Supervisors Seriously Saturday July 1st @ 11.30am Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
The paper will attempt to briefly outline four aspects of the music supervisor's place within Hollywood production. First, I will briefly discuss the low regard with which most music supervisors are treated, both within the industry and within the academy. Second, I will also attempt to explicate the particular duties that are performed by the music supervisors. More specifically, in terms of their administrative duties and placement of songs, music supervisors share certain similarities with both producers and casting agents. Next, I will also address the place of the supervisor within a larger sense of the industry's political economy. Music supervisors occupy a particularly important site of negotiation between the music and film industries, one that balances aesthetic concerns with economic pressures. As such, the music supervisor's work adheres to larger ideological norms of classical cinema sound, albeit according to slightly different conceptions of "appropriateness," "unobtrusiveness," and "image-sound hierarchy." Finally, I will also discuss some of the broader implications of music supervision for the field of film studies, namely how it might considered within debates about postmodernism and about labor and gender.
Films Referenced: The Graduate, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Saturday Night Fever, Roadie, The Ice Storm, 200 Cigarettes, Can't Hardly Wait, Ten Things I Hate About You, Singles, Forrest Gump, Waiting to Exhale, The Crow, Boys on the Side, Bulworth, Dazed and Confused, Batman Forever, Twister
© Jeff Smith 2000
IAN PENMAN KLANG! Garvey's Ghost meets Heidegger's Geist - Or, how DUB became everyone's soundtrack already, always & forever more Saturday July 1st @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
My paper explores the fascinating apocalypse of sound in Jamaica in the 1970s - and how and why it's become such a predominant 'user friendly' form. But I will dig a bit deeper (and crosswise, against the grain) than that. How did such a thing - so specific to its time and place, so religiously and philosophically Other - become so 'user friendly'? Do we risk glossing over whole histories in the process? What might be a 'proper' dub today? What is the way to remain 'true to the Spirit of' dub. (I would say: by making the least xeroxy dub.) The use of the word Spirit isn't co-incidental. (As neither is the word Klang, if you have a German dictionary handy.) Even the word dub itself is a dream - promising echoes of post dub, double, doppel, etc... I will present STEREO reading of two scenes/sonics : roots/dub in JA in the 70s; and today's German modem/electronica cut'n'click 'dubmusik'. I want to read them against one another, into one another, bringing out hidden histories, tones, elipses, omissions, etc. In the process, one of the things I come up against is the use of the word 'soundtrack' in so much current criticism - esp as regards electronica. In my reading of this, I find it is bedeviled by assumptions and omissions - especially as regards Race. The "we" or "us" or "our" of any statement such as "this is like a soundtrack to our lives..." etc. Here we investigate parallel notions of 'roots' and rootedness, heimat and homeland, heimlich and unheimlich. One conclusion along the way is that reggae/dub was in fact - far from being a supplementary or imaginary soundtrack - ITS OWN FILM. And that the best - the most uncanny - adaptations of its form today follow this course. They are way ahead. What I would say in fact is that far from needing more soundtracks for our films, we are currently in a position where we need more (and better) films for our soundtracks. Look at the profusion of musik in Germany today - it IS the ['new'] German Film Industry. I think there is so much that is 'spoken around' or just plain omitted in so much music writing - especially issues of nationality, etc. I find writing 'about' reggae to be especially culpable in this respect. And I think too much fascinating current music is lazily glossed over with the 'noir soundtrack' etc etc type writing. What lies behind these designations? What uncanny Thing are we not confronting? I think dub was an apocalypse whose true complexity and unending reverberations are only just becoming apparent. And I think the situation in Germany today - weirdly - mirrors that of Jamaica in the 1970s. But I want to loop these notions in & out of one another: full of echoes, hints, elisions, ellipses, wipes, etc. [any resemblance here to Derrida's work Glas is entirely intentional: the first 'stereo' book]. I'd like this to be a 'musical' presentation, rather than just a dry academic "I hope to prove that...". This is, rather, a ghost story of sorts.
Films & music referenced: Forthcoming
© Ian Penman 2000
Sounds of the City -Taxi Driver + Playtime Saturday July 1st @ 7.30pm Capitol Theatre - 113 Swanston St, Melbourne
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) features the last film score composed by Bernard Herrmann; famous for his deeply brooding work for Orson Welles, George Pal, Ray Harryhausen and Alfred Hitchcock. Typical of his seething, sighing and heaving orchestral surges, Taxi Driver showcases Herrmann at an estranged intersection between lyricism and modernism. Two chord patterns elegantly breathe in and out, timed to the numerous slo-mo passages of passing traffic, matched to the rising clouds of steam which float from the New York subways. A striking audio-visual portrait of Manhattan which also includes a suitably neurotic sound design by the renowned Walter Murch. Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) is possibly the most stylish audio-visual treatise on modern life committed to film. Through a sharp and incisive deployment of urban planning, architectural erection, industrial invention and interior design, Tati parodies the obsessive drive by the middle classes not to succeed, but simply to relax. Vinyl couches, elevator muzak, automated food dispensers and heavenly cars populate Tati's world so as to tyrannize its inhabitants with unending noise, interruption and insomnia. Once having heard this film, the 'sound of the city' will take on new meaning. Taxi Driver and Playtime serve well as polarities in how the sound of the city is figured and inverted. Both terrify in their own way: Tati's use of muzak and sound effects is sometimes as unsettling as Herrmann's abuse of orchestrated jazz tonalities. Both work to soothe through applications of sonic salve: Herrmann's score is the slow yet cathartic release of pent-up angst born of urban pressure. This double bill is introduced by Philip Brophy - long-standing user of public transport and advocate for the banning of Walkmans.
© Philip Brophy 2000
REBECCA COYLE Speaking 'Strine': Locating 'Australia' in Film Voice & Speech Sunday July 2nd @ 11.30am Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
My presentation will explore how the sound of Australian feature films can assist in locating them in Australia. This is not to contend that there are necessarily sounds that can only be Australian, although this is more true of sound like Australian speech and birdsong, etc than I think is true of 'Australian' music. Rather I want to explore how we can locate Australian films in a particular place and culture by listening to them in addition to viewing them. So I am analysing some mainstream features in relation to their music, sounds, voice and mixing styles. In this paper, I concentrate on voice. How can voice and associated vocal utterances locate, or place, or identify a character or event or scene? In this paper, I will explore voice, dialogue and accent particularly in relation to mainstream Australian feature films. Similar analyses could easily be applied to films from Britain, the USA and elsewhere, but for this occasion I will talk about Australian films, particularly those which have had wide international distribution. Rather than focus entirely on dialogue and speech as exercises in scriptwriting, I will be concerned with: how Australian speech patterns and accents are used to locate the films and their characters; the representation of Australian speaking mannerisms and colloquialisms in these films; the manner in which various accents are used to represent class and location; and the redubbing of dialogue for English-speaking international distribution. What I want to discuss is: first, how voice in these films can be seen as culturally prescribed, and second, how the cultural prescription can be identified as 'Australian'. So I want to link aspects of Australian dialect (or dialects) to the use of voice in these films to argue that this assists in locating the film in 'Australia' or identifying or tagging it as 'Australian'.
Films referenced: Walkabout (d. Nicolas Roeg, 1971); The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (d. Bruce Beresford, 1972); Mad Max trilogy - Mad Max (d. George Miller, 1978), Mad Max Road Warrior d. George Miller, 1982), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (d. George Miller & George Ogilvie, 1985); Crocodile Dundee (d. Peter Faiman, 1986); Muriel's Wedding (d. PJ Hogan, 1994); The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (d. Stephan Elliott, 1994); Kiss or Kill (d. Bill Bennett, 1997); Toyota car advertisement
© Rebecca Coyle 2000
BRUCE EMERY Beyond the Matrix - Dolby Digital Multichannel Sound NOW Sunday July 2nd @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
This session will go into practical detail of Dolby Laboratories' involvement in film sound; including a brief history of Dolby's film sound developments in analogue optical sound & perceptual coding for digital delivery, what is involved in producing a Dolby Digital soundtrack from the license application to the finished print, Dolby Digital 5.1 channel sound for broadcast, music & DVD applications. Maximum benefit to those with questions.
Films referenced: Forthcoming
© Bruce Emery 2000
VINCE GIARRUSSO, FIONA EAGGER & PHILIP BROPHY MALLBOY - case study of sound and music for an Australian feature Sunday July 2nd @ 4.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne
Mallboy is the only Australian film to be selected for Director's Fortnight @ Cannes this year. Producer Fiona Eagger, director/composer Vince Giarrusso & sound designer / music supervisor Philip Brophy will go through key scenes of the film. The original digital multi-track will be set-up (synced to a telecined work print) to recreate the actual sound post-production environment. Pre-production, location and post-production issues will be covered. Not to be missed by anyone wanting to find out how sound/music are co-designed for a feature film.
© Philip Brophy 2000
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