CINEMATIC
ELECTRONICA: Part 1
Reverberant Oscillators in Outer Space
published in The Wire No.158, April, 1997,
London
Hollywood.
Science Fiction. 1956. Canary yellow and bright red 3-D lettering
zooms forward: FORBIDDEN PLANET. The background is space - Griffith
Observatory style diorama space; deep blue dotted with milky swirls
of stars. This is America's 3-D era, when everything shot forth,
penetrated deep, became form. From giant donuts and flying saucers
on your roof to Cinerama can-can girls' crutches in your face.
But
if objects and images must be big, bright and bold, how will they
sound? They will sound reverberant. As FORBIDDEN PLANET's credits
roll across the screen against a vast vacuum of night, all sound
reverberates in echoic bleeps and tubular squawks. Such specious
logic: sound of course does not operate in airless outer space
as it does within earth's atmosphere. In space no one can hear
your reverb. But this is Hollywood. Science Fiction. 1956.
Louis
& Bebbe Barron's solely-electronic score for Fred McLeod Wilcox's
FORBIDDEN PLANET (56) is a landmark soundtrack for many reasons.
Apart from uncomfortably networking a transplanted European avant
garde with the emigre European executives running Hollywood at
the time, the film signposts the clumsy audio-visual fusion of
'electronics' with 'sci-fi' which persists today. Outer space
still sounds out rightly weird and outwardly electronic.
FORBIDDEN
PLANET's electronics may sound corny, but its rarity as a film
score secures it historical savvy. It is safe - and sad - to say
that 99% of Anglo, American and European film scores inherited
and proclaim a 19th Century aesthetic. Cinema has pompously espoused
its 'truly 20th Century art form' schtick since its inception,
yet an ever-widening gramophone speaker remains impaled through,
say, Franz List, Richard Wagner, Alex Korngold and John Williams.
The sound of the 19th Century now bellows from their bowels in
Dolby Digital Stereo. This is symptomatic of the crisis that persists
when the sciences and the arts collude and collide: technology
surges forward, using aestheticism to 'naturalize' the shocking
newness technologies foster. FORBIDDEN PLANET's musicality naively
yet fortuitously underscores this cultural conundrum by proposing
that the new frontier of space should usher in a new aesthetic
dimension. The pre-war avant garde recognized this only too well.
Cinema is yet to holisitcally perceive this - especially in regards
to music and sound.
Back
to reverb. Reverberation has been possibly the most sensorial
and tactile aspect of acoustic phenomenae for most cultures since
the big bang. Reverb is the penultimate sensation of -literally
- sound occurring outside of itself, of sound leaving a sonic
trace of its absence. Psycho-acoustically, reverb consequently
gives us an out-of-body experience: we can aurally separate what
we hear from the space in which it occurs. When the 20th Century
really kicks in - typically, when WWII assembles and unleashes
a myriad of accelerating destructive technologies - reverb is
rediscovered as an 'electro-acoustic' feature of recorded sound.
When Pierre Henri & Pierre Schaeffer started reversing magnetic
tape in 1947 they heard reverberation precede the event which
created it. Simultaneously trippy, corny and profound, this sensation
has to wit propelled the design lineage of reverb units - from
chamber resonance to spring tension to tape loop to real-time
sample. In other words, reverb was made consciously apparent only
after it was reversed and denaturalized.
Back
to the film. Reverb is grossly employed in FORBIDDEN PLANET (and
all ensuing 'spacey' film scores and sound designs) firstly to
invoke the expansive opening of interplanetary frontiers, and
secondly to evoke an imposing sense of size and space. At least
fifteen centuries of European church architecture used reverb
to conjure up (in separate epochs) social amorphousness, individual
erasure, thundering scale and omnipotent power. Sci-fi movies
have followed suit with their own brand of technological mysticism
and god-fearing morality. FORBIDDEN PLANET is thus a wonderful
sign of its time: archly spooky, frighteningly empty and electronically
baroque.
Yet
there is more. The film's production design proposes that the
planet's deserts are remnants of oceanic regions, hence the film
looks like an empty fish tank cluttered with hardened coralular
and spongeforic formations. And just as the music score emphasises
reverb where there cannot be any, so too do 'bubbly' sounds percolate
incessantly, incongruously overlaying an underwater presence on
a barren visual terrain. Of course, sounds heard by our ears underwater
do not carry the full-frequency detail with which film music and
sound portray aquatic conditions and sensations. In a bizarre
match of wacky logic, the out-of-body experiences of reverb-in-space
and aquasonics-on-land perfectly complement each other in FORBIDDEN
PLANET. The acoustics are unreal, the sound is watertight, and
the symbolism is sound.
The
postwar space race introduced an array of similar illogical, crazed
and charming sono-musical icons: the arrhythmic, echoic twang
of rockabilly songs yodelling about atomic power; the pseudo-sophisticate
savouring of hi-fidelity jet engine sound effects in the loungeroom;
the joy of twiddling the dial on portable short wave radios; the
cosmic and orgasmic symphonies of theremins, oscillators and vibraphones
on record and in the cinema. Certainly a prevailing trash aesthetic
reduces much of this iconography's complexity to the otherwise
enticing celebration of 'exotica', 'easy listening' and so on,
but this does not preclude music born of the space age from embodying
cultural and artistic depth.
Listen
to Bernard Herrmann's use of theremin with orchestra for Robert
Wise's THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951). On the one hand guilty
of again branding electronics with outer-space-weirdness, Herrman
incorporates the instrument with traditional orchestration so
as to blend textures of familiarity and strangeness in an unfamiliar
setting. His theremin motifs symbolize extraterrestrial energy
that powers Klaatu's spaceship and his robot Gort. Through the
music, we hear the sound of that energy - an indication of Herrman's
astute understanding of the potentiality of electronics when combined
with musical instruments. A key figure in 20th century film scoring,
Herrman always knew the psychological purpose behind any 'mood'
he generated through his compositions and instrumentation. Herrman
returned to electronics over two decades later for one of his
final scores, Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE (1974). The score boasts
some freaky analogue synth stings which wreck havoc with the orchestra's
warbling and surges. Clearly the ugly synthesizers symbolize the
hideous mutant baby, as out of place in hyper-normal LA as a voltage-controlled
filter in LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.
Electronica
in the fifties meant outer-space. In the sixties it meant inner-space
- the erogenous body. The most artistically cheesy but gorgeously
hedonistic example of this is Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA (68). Milanese
design meets Parisian electronica meets London fashion meets Hollywood
stars. Every design crevice of the film is moist with camp, imbuing
it with a timeless hipness. Effectively, the score by The Bob
Crewe Generation Orchestra (mixed with much uncredited electronic
atmospherics) is Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand ooh-aahing
in outer space, combining erotica with electronica, Francophilia
with intoxica. The new era aural cheese of The Bob Crewe Generation
Orchestra bluntly but beautifully combines FORBIDDEN PLANET's
aquatic tummy rumbles with suburban California swinger jazz muzak,
all set to the widescreen landscape of Jane Fonda's navel. BARBARELLA
- born from a comic strip and made flesh by the genes of the Fonda
family - evidences the critical grey areas that arise when the
avant garde and pop culture are cauterized in the creation of
a film soundtrack. Artistic purity may be nullified, but transcultural
germs spread like a glorious musical plague.
The
influence of this meld can be heard in countless late sixties
and early seventies easy listening albums where the latent/repressed
sexuality of white jazz is massaged and cajoled by viscous, anti-gravitational
synth tones. The effect is one of a cerebral and physical weightlessness
- urging one to go with the flow, intake now-generation aphrodisiacs
and swing with the suburban set. 'Revolutionary' sexuality seemed
to require an audio-visual copulation between electronics and
erotics. Spacey sexy synths and pseudo-theremin glides appear
in Curtis Harrington's QUEEN OF BLOOD (66, score by Leonard Morand);
Roger Corman's THE TRIP (67, music by An American Band); Otto
Premiger's SKIDOO (68, score by Harry Nilsson); William Rostler's
MANTIS IN LACE (68, score uncredited); ALICE IN ACID LAND (c.69,
uncredited muzak tracks); Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE
DOLLS (70, score by Stu Phillips); Nicholas Roeg's PERFORMANCE
(71, music supervised by Jack Nietzsche); Michael Crichton's WESTWORLD
(73, score by Fred Karlin).
Across
thirty years, synthesizers in film soundtracks had shifted from
a fifties' space age utopia through a sixties sexual cornucopia
to a seventies erotic suburbia. Perhaps this is why only now can
the retro-concept of 'space age bachelor pad muzak' be so obviously
pleasurable. Yet while synthesizers have attained the so-square-they're-cool
status in pop/rock/dance music, the technical and formal balance
between digital construction and analogue electronica since the
70s has affected and influenced film scores and sound design profoundly.
And it is within this terrain that synthesizers are no longer
weird: they become perversely futuristic, timbrally pornographic
and radically dimensional.
