CINEMATIC
ELECTRONICA:
Schizo Scherzos & Psycho Synths
published in The Wire No.160, June, 1997,
London
For
postwar Hollywood, the world was a place where you hoped you were
stable and centred. If there was a problem, it was not with you
- it was the world around you. Your surroundings were alien, other,
threatening. This is nowhere more apparent than in the chiaroscuro
chasms wedged open in Film Noir. Despite reams written on the
period from a sociological view, the point often missed is that
the visuals 'state' this dilemma, while the soundtrack grants
us access to the interior state of the agonized protagonists.
Film
Noir orchestration is typically an aggressive jostle between jazzy
fly-bys and distant rumblings of avant-garde atonality. And nowhere
is this more audible than in the use of the vibraphone: it would
play modulating chords with the sustain pedal engaged, delivering
the tonality of preceding and proceeding chords at any one point.
Its ability to liquefy harmony in film scores consequently blurred
time and rendered perception watery, shimmering. A magically effective
instrument, the vibraphone imported a certain 'jazziness', and
at the press of a pedal could grant you tonal orchestration that
would take hours to transcribe and effectively conduct. As such,
it is an important technological device in the production and
performance of modern music.
The
sporadic use of the theremin in Film Noir performs similarly.
In Miklos Rozsa's score for Billy Wilder's THE LOST WEEKEND (45)
the theremin is the 'genie in the bottle'. It musicalizes the
allure of alcohol, harmonically suggesting its vaporous form in
the guise of a scantily veiled temptress dancing near Ray Milland's
nostrils. Once again, Hollywood is simultaneously corny and profound,
conveying addiction via a synaesthesia of pheromones, erogenous
zones and harmonic tones. Here, the theremin symbolizes the sound
of something - liquor - which momentarily exists outside of Ray
Milland. For this is postwar Hollywood. The problem is not him
- it's something else, someone else, somewhere else.
Thirteen
years later, in Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (71) the
problem clearly is Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell. He stomps
across a landscape stamped with sociologically scarring potential,
yet his external environment is neither alien, other nor threatening.
The problem is in his head. The 2nd movement of Beethoven's 9th
Symphony rings and climaxes until overcome by something else -
a rich, swirling metallic tone, tuned to the tonic of the piece
and evoking a huge bell. This is pure sonic terror: a ringing
sound you can't get out of your head that keeps you awake all
night. In this case, it is the sound of Wendy (then Walter) Carlos'
electronic rendition of Beethoven's 9th. In a moment of sublime
decision, Kubrick commissioned Carlos - a recording artist by
profession, film composer by invitation - to 'realize' Beethoven
so as to convey the subjective perspective of someone listening
to Beethoven - or being driven by his music. The 70s thus starts
with synthesizers being employed not to simply create imagined
worlds and evoke mental states, but to de-interiorize the mind
of a character: to turn that character's inner world inside-out
by creating a musical soundscape which we as viewer/auditors inhabit.
The strains of Beethoven in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE do not beckon Malcolm
McDowell like the alcoholic theremin in LOST WEEKEND; they are
the sinuous, treacly threads of his problematized psychological
make-up.
Wendy
Carlos (as Walter Carlos, and in collaboration with synthesizer
designer Robert Moog) is perhaps the most important though unacknowledged
figure in the musicological development of the synthesizer. In
the queasily affective SWITCHED ON BACH (68), those chintzy analogue
tones embodying centuries-old melodies are historically implausible
yet technologically possible. Simplistic linear thought labels
this 'new-meets-old' but the implications are lateral. Carlos
effectively played Bach as 'heard' by a synthesizer, and thereby
- devoid of irony - demonstrated the synthesizer's unique ability
not to simply 'represent' something, but to take its place. The
synthesized renderings of Beethoven in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE execute
Beethoven via sonic textures which obliterate the very work being
performed (hence purists outrage with most of Carlos' recordings).
Once you introduce such a severely self-reflexive and radically
dimensional effect into the already overloaded receptive domain
of the cinematic experience, things become very complex indeed.
And from this point - despite what every Adorno-worshipping musician
claims - synthesizers become crucial instruments in expanding
modern and postmodern aspects of film as an audio-visual medium.
Another
seminal composer/performer ensemble who entered cinema through
score commissions is Tangerine Dream. If Carlos leaves us with
much to philosophically ponder in the identity of the synthesizer
(what is its 'own sound'? etc.), Tangerine Dream leave us a legacy
of formal devices in film scoring. Ostensibly a para-druggy 4-chord
cosmic-jamming outfit who mood-twiddled analogue synthesizers,
the simplicity, clarity and effectiveness of their work from PHAEDRA
(74) to AMERICA (81) allowed them to develop a lexicon of textural
and harmonic handles which were easily and readily transposed
to the film soundtrack.
Films
containing Tangerine Dream scores like William Friedkin's THE
SORCERER (77), Michael Mann's THIEF (81) and THE KEEP (83) collectively
sketch thirty years of modern film scoring techniques. In these
scores, one can hear indifference, asynchronism, amorphism and
transcendentalism as Tangerine Dream's 4-chord motifs virtually
hover still while the film narrative moves through them. The role
the score performs in these films is integrally tied to Tangerine
Dream's use of the synthesizer as a non-definable, distanced instrument,
devoid of its own identity yet capable of calling up simulated
timbres in a breathy, hazy way. Jan Hammer's MIAMI VICE (84),
Angelo Badelamenti's TWIN PEAKS (89) and Mark Snow's THE X-FILES
(94) all use Tangerine Dream's synthesizer technique of simplistic
yet dense chordal textures to connote an 'orchestra-ness' while
emptying the screen soundspace of any true orchestral presence.
Just as Carlos did this through direct referencing of Baroque
and Classical works, Tangerine Dream do so with what we expect
to be the sound of 'film score orchestration'.
Though
in depth analysis of both Carlos and Tangerine Dream's work is
not possible here, I am intent on redirecting the presumptive
dismissal of synthesizers in film as 'cheap pseudo-orchestras'.
In fact, I maintain there is great technological, narratological
and musicological importance in them being boldly used as 'cheap
pseudo-orchestras', and that the cinema is the site that allows
these grey areas of artistic endeavour to be richly explored.
Perhaps
the best advocate for this as a positive and liberating manoeuvre
is John Carpenter - a rarity as he is both director and composer.
In collaboration with Allan Howarth as synthesizer programmer,
Carpenter scored numerous of his own films and in doing so may
have had either an indirect or symbiotic effect on Tangerine Dream.
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (76); HALLOWEEN (78); HALLOWEEN II and
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (both 81); HALLOWEEN III and THE THING (both
82, the latter composed by Ennio Morricone under Carpenter's direction)
- in all these Carpenter is the meister of the one note synth
pulse. Through a brutish yet economical employment of this trait,
he helped crystallize the synthesizer as an instrument of indifference
and asynchronism - that 'hovering still' sensation - which then
became the perfect foible against which changing degrees of dramatic
tension could be measured. This was, in effect, a narratological
transposition of Minimalism's drone/loop states, where the absence
of 'horizontal' melody aided in one's awareness of the 'vertical'
depth to any one note or musical fragment. Once again, the synthesizer's
innate ability to be inhuman was crucial to Carpenter's discovery
of this modern effect. Furthermore, Carpenter more de-scored than
scored: his 'cues' are largely dub variations from the analogue
multi-track, as layers and parts of the composition exit and enter
in noticeable fashion. This is yet another example of how musical
technology has been incorporated into the craft of film scoring
in a contemporary vein - by those composers attuned to the technology's
potential.
Ridley
Scott's BLADERUNNER (82) is a film most readily acknowledged for
its modern use of the synthesizer as a scoring instrument, though
little has been articulated about either its precursors (especially
Tangerine Dream) or the function of its score. Scott's use of
Vangelis' electronic score with the sound design of a speculative
Asian-ized LA generates a compound effect of sounds and tones
which perceptually fuse orchestrated timbres with designed sound
effects and atmospheres. Just as BARBARELLA's ambience is a mix
of futuristic fromage and electronic detailing, BLADERUNNER's
ambience is a disorienting blend of multicultural discord and
urban noise. Key modernist traits are sharply defined in the film's
final mix - particularly amorphousness (sounds bleeding in and
beyond the frame to non-specifically suggest a space) and indifference
(sono-musical lines being allowed to flow and resolve independent
of focused dramatic occurrences). While these aspects have been
appropriated by numerous ambient composers over the past fifteen
years, their role in the film is rooted to a perversely futuristic
narrative logic, informed by ideas of the collapsed metropolis
and how time, space and people inhabit and navigate its reinvented
zone.
If
the Scott/Vangelis combine painted a sonic landscape for the urban
pseudo-being of the future, Howard Shore's score for David Cronenberg's
VIDEODROME (83) paints a sonic abstraction of the schizophrenic
media-being of the present. The power of Shore's work lies in
contrasting digital and analogue textures. One simulates the other
to create a schizophrenic oscillation between states of existence
and perception. The film literally breathes with the synclavier
mocking human breath, Debbie Harry's real breath analogue-filtered,
and the synclavier simulating orchestral drones which historically
symbolize vocal sighs and choral murmurs. Abstraction is the key
application in the rendering of all sounds: one is continually
aware of a 'humanness' which audibly strikes one as entirely inhuman.
And once again, the synthesizer is exploited (a la Carlos and
Carpenter) for its innate ability to render human as a timbrelly
pornographic presence.
A
critical problem leaves these observations unresolved. Firstly,
electronica and synthesizers have been applied in the cinema in
monstrously complex ways. The dearth of critical awareness of
this, plus the lack of investigation into technological links
between the film and recording industries paint a barren landscape
of ignorance and disinformation. The second problem is a historical
one. Past the mid-80s, I find scant development beyond the ideas,
devices, forms and approaches employed by Carlos, Tangerine Dream
and Carpenter - the key figures who nurtured synthesizer scoring
as inventively as electronica has ben deployed in the wide genres
of (forgive the blunt names) Krautrock, Jazz Fusion, Electro,
House & Techno. The current dilemma: if synthesizers can do
so much, why aren't they in more film scores? The original THX
logo-jingle-phoneme is all-synthesizer - but what do you hear
most and loudest in the following movie? Anything but a synthesizer.
