P R O G R A M M E     s p e a k e r s     c r e d i t s

Cinesonic 4:
Between Sound & Music

JODI BROOKS Worrying the Note: Mapping Time in the Gangsta Film Friday June 22nd@ 12.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

The gangsta film of the late 1980s and 1990s heralded what has frequently been referred to as new wave of young black American filmmakers and quickly became a focal point for questions around black nationalism and its inscriptions of black masculinity and for discussion of the function of the ghetto in both the public imaginary and in black popular culture. Much of the critical debate around the gangsta cycle has focused on its (assumed) claims to an authentic black urban experience and what Sharon Willis has called the 'documentary effects' of these films. In this essay I examine some of the ways that the gangsta film simultaneously deploys and destabilizes these documentary effects, most significantly through the ways that it plays with generic clich?s. Arguing that the gangsta film mobilizes the clich? as a kind of arrested image and stages its collapse, I approach these films in terms of their articulations of time and historical experience. In this paper I argue that rhythmic play-stretching, delaying, anticipating and eliding the beat-plays a significant but overlooked role in the gangsta film: it underlies the pacing of the image, performance, and editing in these films and is central to their structuring of time. These are films in which time fractures, repeats, stretches, collapses and in which different rhythmic structures are set against each other both across the body of the films and within particular scenes. Drawing on Arthur Jafa's proposal of a black film practice structures through the tonal and rhythmic practices of black popular musics and focusing on films such as Friday, Dolemite and Set It Off, this paper examines the gangsta film in terms of questions of rhythm and affect and argues that what many of these films stage is the affective outline of missed experience.

Referenced films: Friday, Dolemite, Set It Off

© Jodi Brooks 2001

KATHRYN BIRD Mouthing and Hong Kong Cinema Friday June 22nd @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

This clips-based presentation will investigate what makes sound in Hong Kong cinema and which sounds seem to matter. It will listen for the sounds for hard and soft bodies, and the sound-embodiment of bodies that routinely operate vertically as well as horizontally. It will dwell on a performer whose voice is so soft he canÍt stand up, and another who has made a career of inarticulacy. It will explore vocalising, the relevance of the match between voices and lips, and what else mouths are for in Hong Kong Cinema.

Referenced films: Days Of Being Wild, Happy Together, Chungking Express, Iron Monkey,The Bride With White Hair, Swordsman , Heroic Trio, The Blade, Way Of The Dragon (Return Of The Dragon), Enter The Dragon, Big Boss, Rumble In The Bronx, The Man From Hong Kong, 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, Broken Oath, Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, The Sword

© Kathryn Bird 2001

McKENZIE WARK The E.R.-Effect: The Sound of Ambient Suffering Friday June 30th @ 4.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

With the arrival of 'home theatre' and the 'home entertainment centre', some television producers are making more of an effort to make TV sound interesting. A good case in point is the hit TV drama ER. Set in a hospital emergency room, ER makes extensive use of diagetic sound. Every machine within the frame clicks and beeps and pulses. Rhythms are generated by these plausible noises, but so too are dramatic counterpoints and surprises. In keeping with much of the unspoken tone of the show, human feeling and suffering is expressed through the language of technology. In the sound, as in the narrative and the images, one is drawn toward an emotional relation to an other through the intermediary of the machine. The show is a textual analogue for television itself, as an empathetic machine, but a machine nonetheless. In this paper, so classic examples of this ER-effect will be explored in detail.

Referenced show: ER

© McKenzie Wark 2001

SIMON FISHER-TURNER Music for the films of Derek Jarman Friday June 22nd @ 7.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

In the hip blurred world between rock and dance, there are two schools of 'film music'. One is the popular 'ambient' fraternity of composers and musicians who mimic film music, writing for 'imaginary films' and layering textures reminiscent of Brian Eno's early forays into Satie-esque ambient music. The other is a much smaller collection of composers and musicians who actually transform such work for films. In the gulf that still separates the filmic sensibilities of musicians from the musical aesthetics of directors, Simon Fisher-Turner's work is a rarity

Listening to either a Simon Fisher-Tuner CD (there are many) or one of the many films containing his music, one is struck by the rich indistinction between musical atmospherics and narrative orchestration. A film composer who is more at home in the studio than the concert hall, Fisher-Turner brings a sonic awareness of musicality which allows his work to blend, bleed and bend with the full spectrum of the film soundtrack. Drawing equally on noise, rock, electronica and lounge, his work is eclectic in its instrumentation and multi-faceted in its narrational approach. While boasting an impressive track record with a number of international independent directors, it is Simon Fisher-Turner's work for the late Derek Jarman that typifies the ongoing potential his work holds for expanding the contemporary film soundtrack. From the intricate 'musicscape' of THE LAST OF ENGLAND to the distilled quietude and momentary bombast of BLUE, the Fisher-Turner/Jarman collaboration stands as an impressive example of how 'ambient' can work within the core of a film rather than standing outside, mimicking its evocative sonic textures.

Referenced films:Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, Young Soul Rebels, The Garden, Blue, Nadja, Loaded, Croupier

© Philip Brophy 2001

PHILIP BROPHY Body Mats & Super Slams: Sport, Sound & Violence
Saturday June 23rd@ 12.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

The body in space occupies two primary states: it can be an object without contacting form - floating in atmosphere, checked by gravity, gripped by substance, floating via boyancy - or it can be an object in contact with form - slammed to a wall, brushed against a cheek, rammed into a car, smashed through a window. The life of a body can be conceived as a cancatenated flow between movements-to-impact and repulsions-from-impact.

The sound of the externalized body-object in audiovisual media is similarly divided between sound and silence; between a percussive rupture and a diffused atmosphere of non-eventfullness; between a collision of the human and the numbing pre-delays and after-shocks which hold the actor-lump as a body-object for the orchestration of dramatic effect. Just as that blow on the head divides your life into a period of innocence before the fateful incident and a period of trauma suffered after its explosive occurrence, cinema often applies the ramp-up/ramp-down model directly to the physicality of its characters' dramatic shaping.

From Curly Howard's skull conks to Bruce Lee's trapezius ripple to Robert DeNiro's fist pummels, the cinematic body is an engorged and phantasmagoriacal drum kit imagined somewhere between the minds of Harry Partch and the Marquis deSade. Much of cinema can be aurally perceived in relation to this notion of the body as a marker for distinguishing pre-hit and post-hit states. Musicals, for example, celebrate the freedom of not being caught between these two crucial states. Its utopian aura is the feeling of not being struck down and pummelled by force, of deftly escaping all impact. At the other extreme, horror films luxuriate in the pathological fixation of penetrating and being penetrated. Their dystopia is aurally unleashed by erasing the space between points of impact, so that one is being struck incessantly, unremittingly, eternally.

Such openly orgiastic celebrations of bodily nature in the cinema have noticably withered during the 90s. Unobserved and unheard by many, the pornographic impulse (also a 'repulse' and 'expulse') had relocated itself in televisual spectacles like WWF in the early 80s, leaving sportscasting to extend the cinematic trajectory of the body on the televisual small screen rather than the cinematic big screen. In outdoor stadiums and indoor arenas, bodies make the sounds they should be making in the cinema. They roam, rove and rush across spaces, through fields, along channels, betwixt zones, over lines - always making noise and always generating sound.

Sport is good because it is - like all prime pornography - a hulking shell of narrative: pumped up and hollowed out; exasperated and expectorated. Better, it melds body image and body sound into a televisual artifice which mocks the competitive 'realism' in which sportsfans become so embroiled. And best of all, its classical gladitorial battles (as idealized by WWF) drag cinema's grand ideals of narrational form onto the body mat where they belong.

Referenced films: WWF, XFL, FA Cup, Song of Youth (1933 Winter Olympics), Flashdance, Godzilla Vs. Megalon, Gangster Soldier, Batman (1966), Raging Bull

© Philip Brophy 2001

JAMES LASTRA Sound Design & the Wagnerian Impulse - or, The Fate of the Senses Saturday June 23rd @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

The advent of sound design in the late 1970s reawakened cinema's Wagnerian ambitions to provide the total artwork of full sensory immersion. As directors and sound designers grappled with the techniques and meanings appropriate to the new audio-visual form, they simultaneously reinvigorated debates about the relationship among the senses themselves and between the sensory perception and technological forms. Following Adorno's analysis of Wagner's project, this essay investigates the place of modern sound design within a history of the senses, and within a politics of representation. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now thematizes issues central to this account (the alienation and fragmentation of the senses, the compensatory production of phantasmagoria, the aestheticization of violence, etc.), but it also works out its own formal responses to them.

Referenced films: Apocalypse Now, Forrest Gump

© James Lastra 2001

ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA Post-dubbed Sound in Indian Cinema Saturday June 23rd @ 4.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

A discussion of the Indian cinema's general tendency for dubbing everything, and its consequent elimination of all ambient sound. The result of this tendency is that everything appears to emerge from a single sound "source" whatever the diegetic "location" of the shot. (Indian cinema - including the documentary - has never, ever, used the concept of ambient silence.) This somewhat quixotic practice in fact offers the clearest definition for the category of the "character" of the fiction - the narrative space from where the character speaks - and in turn allows a conduit by which a range of musical and theatrical practices get smuggled into the cinema, and deal with its endlessly dynamised - therefore endlessly problematic - vanishing point. We know that the absence of a perspectival tradition in Indian art has led to many controversies around how it may work with narrative at all, and more specifically with the 'character in/of the fiction'. The coming of sound in fact changed, and transposed this visual aspect into a problem of sound.

Referenced films: to be confirmed

© Ashish Rajadhyaksha 2001

SKIP LIEVSAY Designing Sound for Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese & the Coens Saturday June 23rd@ 7.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

The world may think of Hollywood as the mainspring for all that is both the classical and modern American cinema, but numerous filmmakers and craftspeople have drawn clear distinctions between movies made in Los Angeles and those made elsewhere throughout the USA. Just as there are many who choose to work within and from LA, there are a sizeable number who are based in America's notorious metropolis, New York. Directors like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee are noted for their relationship with NYC, and many other notable directors have commented on the difference they enjoy in working 'away from Hollywood'.

For over 15 years, Skip Lievsay's sound post-production company C5 has been based in New York. This in itself may not appear significant Ü until one notices that Skip Lievsay has sound designed, 6 films for Martin Scorsese, 7 films for Spike Lee and 8 films for the Coens, as well as having worked on a number of films with John Sayles, Errol Morris, Barry Levinson, Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman. With a CV boasting work completed more for directors than producers or studios, Skip's experiences and views on sound post-production provide a rare insight to the audiovisual matrix of contemporary American 'auteur' filmmaking. It is particularly in his work with Scorsese, Lee and the Coens that Skip has had the opportunity to develop a dialogue with directors whose authorial traits are well-noted. In the realm of sound-design, it has been acknowledged time and time again how important it is to have a type of 'dialogue' with the director of a film. Like film composers, sound designers relish being brought in on a job early Ü even at script stage Ü rather than receiving a phone call 3 weeks from final mix. And numerous sound designers have noted how that it is only through having more time to discuss their ideas with a director do they then contribute interesting, integral and vital work for a film. Skip Lievsay's work is proof of this. From his supply of intricate shapes, gestures, movements and moments of multi-leveled sound editing and mixing in Scorsese's GOODFELLAS, to his carefully modulated sonic nuances in Demme's SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, to the gorgeous detail and ambience in the Coen's O, BROTHER WHERE ARE THOU?, Skip Lievsay stands as a major figure in that strange beast labelled 'Hollywood cinema'.

Referenced films:O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Last Temptation of Christ, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Raging Bull, Jungle Fever, Malcom X, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy

© Philip Brophy 2001

MEGAN SPENCER Shout It Out Loud: The Voice of the Documentary Subject Sunday June 24th @ 2.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

The VOICES of the central Queensland people featured in the Australian documentary Cunnamulla caused a cultural 'stir' when the film was released early this year. This paper aims to look at the voice of the documentary subject with reference to not only Cunnamulla but a range of other documentaries. It is an area which this writer believes is often under-analysed and marginalised within the confines Australian International Documentary Conferences and industrial non-fiction forums. The paper will examine and explore how the voice of the documentary subject can be defined, analysed and interpreted; how it sounds and manifests and where it can be identified and located within the film's text and subtext; its power on the audience; its transcendent and transgressive potential and its importance in defining the documentary - the film - in which it sits. And, the reception and 'resistance' these voices sometimes receive from audiences, the media, the film industry and cultural commentators.

Referenced films: Cunnamulla, We The Children of the 20th Century, Killing Time (from First Person SBS video diary'series), Crazy, Benjamin Smoke, Drinking For England, Grey Gardens, Fishtank, Pie In The Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, Dream Deceivers, When I'm 21, Subway Cops and the Mole King, A Pair of One, various video diary material.

© Megan Spencer 2001

AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRY SESSION SUE BROOKS, RICHARD LOWENSTEN & MARK SAVAGE Directing for Sound & Music: Discussing the Australian Feature Soundtrack Sunday June 24th @ 4.30pm Treasury Theatre - lower plaza, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne

This panel session will discuss how Sue Brooks (Road to Nhill), Richard Lowenstein (He Died With A Felafel In His Hand) and Mark Savage (Sensitive New Age Killer) have dealt with sound and music in their current//recent feature films. Issues to be discussed by the directors include: MUSIC: How was a composer decided upon? At what stage was the composer secured? Were parts of the score available during the edit? Did any ideas for music change from script through to post-production? How did you go about choosing songs for the film? SOUND: How was a sound designer or editor chosen? Was the sound post facility an important consideration in the choice? Did the sound designer/editor do any work in tandem with the picture editor while you editing the film? SOUND & MUSIC? What was it like handling the combination of sound and music during the final mix? Referenced films: Road to Nhill (Sue Brooks), Sensitive New Age Killer (Mark Savage), He Died With A Felafel In His Hand (Richard Lowenstein).

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