Sonic
Cinema - Vol.1
Aural Excitement on the Modern Soundtrack
Proposed outline for book, 2000 >>
Snapshot
Sonic
Cinema is a complex and thought-provoking overview
of that most neglected component of cinema: the soundtrack.
Everything from a nuclear bomb blast to a single water drop,
from a symphonic overture to a last dying breath –
this is the beautiful noise of cinema that is half music,
half sound, all soundtrack. Forget the arcana of filmdom
– its literary origins, theatrical staging and photographic
allure. Become conscious of the extremities of audio-visual
effect. Be born into the sound of cinema.
Sonic Cinema is not solely an intellectual
text, introductory history, or technical production manual.
Nor is its scope restricted by the dry aim to be curriculum
support material. The information & critical insight
it contains result from many moist years of author Philip
Brophy's intellectual and material analysis of film scores,
sound design and sound post-production, plus his experience
in composing and sound designing for films, videos and installations.
The incisive text voices theoretical and practical concerns,
and is aimed at: (i) those with a voracious media appetite
(movie goers, music collectors, cinephiles, amateurs); and
(ii) those with keen and developing aural sensibilities
(composers, producers, mixers, musicians, DJs). Exploiting
the undying hipness of movie soundtracks, the book targets
celebrated films to expand the reader's perceptual awareness
of the cine-listening experience. A key strategy of the
book is to then introduce a range of radical, bizarre &
unconventional movies to demonstrate the inventiveness which
can mark film sound as a truly awesome multi-media phenomenon.
The book's ultimate aim is to posit an entirely new critical
view: that the more interesting & engrossing films are
not those with weighty themes, social relevance, psychoanalytic
complexity or sumptuous cinematography, but those whose
soundtracks psychologically excite the auditory membrane.
Words 162,000
Format text only
54 films analyzed (6 films per chapter)
9 chapters @ 27,000 (average 3,000 words per film)
bibliography
filmographies
discographies
Categories cinema, music, sound, media, technology.
Pitch
Sonic
beings at our deepest & most unconscious level, we are
shaped by sonar and aquatic sensations well before we hit
the piercing dryness of air and the blaze of light that
accompanies the doctor's slap on our behind. The sensorium
of the womb is our primary induction into the nature of
sound – its encompassing & multi-directional matrix
of acoustic events, its liquefying ambience. The curvaceous
film theatre returns us directly to a psycho-physical zone
of uterine impressions: deep rumbles, pink noise, shifting
timbres, spatial reflections, swelling rhythms. Much has
been made of the cinema as some sort of primordial social
cave for storytelling. Wrong. The cinema is a womb where
the sonic prevails.
We
say we watch movies - but the cinesonic experience is far
more than a mere optical event. Try watching a film with
no sound. Gone is its power, emotion, drama, vitality. Shut
your eyes & listen to the soundtrack, and through the
blackness one can be aurally excited by the fundamentality
of sound. Sudden gunshots, soaring violins, distant footsteps,
cracked bones, howling winds, fuzzed guitars, baby gurgles,
screaming synthesizers and the burst of a single saliva
bubble. Through the orchestration of voices, atmospheres,
effects and music, the sonic engulfs us, massaging our liver,
rattling our skull, stinging our temples. Nerves, muscles,
bones and speeding bodily fluids dance in a frenzy to the
unfolding audio visual carnival that is the cinema. Yet
like a mysterious hieroglyphic stream, those squiggly white
lines to the left of the celluloid film strip lay silent
even to the inquiring the eye. Once decoded and replayed
in the auditorium, time & space are sculptured and realigned
into a dimensional, tactile, electric realm. This is the
transformative power of the film soundtrack. Under-theorised,
presumed unimportant, yet vital to the contemporary audio-visual
experience and integral to technological advances in the
entertainment industries over the past twenty-five years.
You
know this without realizing it. Thanks to years of optical
eye-washing and literal indoctrination, you articulate experience
through words which use visual metaphors, as if the world
is solely comprised of data beamed at those round reflective
discs you call eyes. But after a few simple pointers about
how sound works – how it immerses you in its density,
how it manipulates your sense of time & space, how it
entrains & seduces you – the most complex issues
of aural dispersion & psychoacoustic entrancement can
become remarkably evident when one is guided through the
audio-visual layering of a film. From Albert Einstein's
assertion of music being the purest art, to Fritz Lang's
regret of thinking primarily in images, to George Lucas'
obsessive pursuit of hi-fidelity in the making of movies,
the sonic has long been acknowledged as a key factor which
shapes our experience of the world and its myriad reproductive
technologies. Night clubs, the ocean, tunnels, elevator
muzak, stadium concerts, shopping malls, Walkmans, home
theatres, subway PAs, forests, freeways, televisions in
the next room while we eat breakfast - we are surrounded
by sonic spaces. You have experienced all this - but so
little has been said about it; so little has been written
about how cinema touches upon these temperate aural realities
which direct your everyday momentum.
Now
more than ever, a book is needed that reveals this core
meld of the outside aural world with the internal sonic
dimension of the cinema. Sonic Cinema is
the first book to put into evocative and illustrative prose
the scintillating mechanisms of film sound & the means
by which music, voice & noise communicate dense narrative
meaning. Grouped into 9 non-sequential chapters –
each containing detailed essays on 6 key films – expert,
novice & innocent alike can select the films with which
they are already familiar. Readers can then map their own
explorative trail through the titles, discovering different
aspects & issues of sound reproduction & how they
contribute to one's understanding & enjoyment of a film.
An informative journey through films from USA, UK, Canada,
India, Australia, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong,
Japan & Hungary, spreading from the early 40s to the
late 90s. Sonic Cinema is geared to mentally
stimulate & aurally excite.
Pedagogical
anxiety? Some might infer there is no apparent purpose,
motive or point in SONIC CINEMA’s trawl through the
20th Century soundrack. I claim there is a key methodological
approach used through the book’s fragmented and contantenated
folds. This approach disavows structural models of meaning
in favour of flow charts of effects. Following the liquefied
and voluminous ways in which sound and music become manifest
– born into the thickness of invisible air yet entirely
present and accountable – every film covered in the
book is treated primarily as a spatio-temporal event whose
movement, denouement and performance is cited and noted
for its audiovsual impact. Films are thus encountered as
‘played recordings’ enlivening the loungeroom
in one's head, rather than excavated as architectural forms
anchoring the classroom of the mind. Fundamentally, this
requires a mode of writing whose ‘flow’ is more
important in its capture, replay and rendering of a film’s
momentum, than it is in summarizing, reducing or even encapsulating
a film’s signifying skeleton. As if literature never
happened? Precisely. As if photography was not our grand
metaphor for the cinema? Exactly. As if we had to wake up
to the totally debilitating reliance on visual language
which novelizes cinema as mirror to our selves and a window
to the world? Yes. In its avoidance of the many sanctioned
ways of pedagogically analyzing film, SONIC CINEMA cannot
but embrace a critical miceganation which crossbreeds psychoacoustic
rumination with musicological mapping with semiotic schema
with textual analysis. Boldly stated, the ultimate aim of
SONIC CINEMA is to alter the reader’s critical perception
by inducing a consicousness of how the soundtrack operates
on what we presume to be our perceptual facilities for comprehending
film.
Breakdown
Part
1: The Rapture of Melody - song, dance, pulsation
FANTASIA (1941) - the production of music for animation
and its symbiotic effects; relations between architectural
progression and harmonic logic; notions of fluidity, channeling
and flow in musical discourse; Disney's project of Romantic
idyllicism in pre-war America.
WEST SIDE STORY (1961) - the street as stage; the non-space
of music in musicals; physical energy and its effect upon
body movement and choreography; territory, demarcation and
isolation in the mapping of musical zones; the influence
of Robert Wise's transposition from Broadway stage to Manhattan
locales.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1966) - the effect of absenting
prose dialogue in the cinematic text; theatricalization
of the cine-photographic world and its ramifications for
production design; musical motifs and their role as memory
triggers; Jacques Demy's Euro-reworking of the classical
Hollywood musical.
MOSES & AARON (1976) - synchronous sound and the documentary
effect upon location musical staging; the dilemma of the
simulacra and its bearing on musical visualization; religious
dogma of iconography and governing factors in image/music
relationships; Jean Marie Straub's approach to recording
sound & music.
ONE FROM THE HEART (1983) - coding operatic style under
frontier principles of Las Vegas architecture; generating
narrative momentum through voice-over chorus singing; artifice,
simulation and restaging of the staged; Francis Ford Coppola's
predilection toward operatic excessiveness.
BLACK RIVER (1988) - the political collision between Australian
indigenous themes & European High Art orchestration;
terrain, colonialism & the space of musical occupation;
vocalising oppression and the instrumentality of the law.
Other possibilities
A CHORUS LINE
THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES
THE VILLAIN
THE RED SHOES
Part
2: The Mania of Music - composers, musicians, demons
HANGOVER SQUARE (1948) - psychoses, neuroses and their sonic
triggers; the tyranny of harmony and the obsession of composers;
the descent from music into noise; harmonic resonance and
the internal tones of bells; the atonal legacy of Bernard
Herrmann.
THE WRONG MAN (1959) - bass, depression and fatalism; Bernard
Herrmann’s dissolution of jazz; subjective viewpoints
& aural impressions through timbrel modification; working
relationships between Herrmann & Alfred Hitchcock.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1971) - exposing the recording studio
apparatus; deconstructing the composition and production
of music; microphone placement, multi-tracking and fold
back, and their effect upon filmic narrative; Jean Luc Godard's
collaging of direct sound.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) - the subversion of romanticism
through alienation; misreading musical content; the result
of employing an eclectic, polyglottic and contradictory
range of music tracks; fascism and the orchestral academy;
the dialogue between Wendy Carlos & Stanley Kubrick.
FINGERS (1977) - the viral properties of pop music and their
seepage into social environments; schizophrenia and cultural
difference in music styles; melding the consumption &
production of music; the duality of hands in the making
of music.
GEORGIA (1992) - soul, heart, spirit and other specious
myths about music; the terror of beauty and the passion
of the dispossessed; character contrast through vocal abilities;
the fine line between singing badly and acting it.
(A partial analysis of this film's sound design has been
published in THE WORLD OF SOUND IN FILM & is available.)
Other possibilities
KEEP UP YOUR RIGHT
Part 3: The Nature of Sound - technology, reproduction,
fidelity
PLAYTIME (1970) - order, precision & the controlling
power of sono-industrial design; the role of sound in the
suburban techno-topia; lack in the interfacing between acoustic
design and urban planning; the fetishism of sound effects
and other erotic moments; Jacques Tati's perspective on
the role of sound post-production.
THE EXORCIST (1971) - innocence, virginity and untampered
vocal chords; the body as vessel and voice as instrument;
possession, rape and corporeal invasion; the powers of written
and spoken words; terror through sound editing.
THE CONVERSATION (1972) - alienation, existentialism and
the shaping of one's self through sound; personal space
and private aural zones; the drive to comprehend the unheard;
recording processes and their attendant doctoring; frequency
separation and noise suppression; the microphone as instrument
of death.
BLOW OUT (1978) - the truth of sound and the lie of image;
audio-visual instability in perverse narratives; the focal
perspectives of sound recordists, post-dubbers and audio
engineers; multiplicity of meaning in the abstraction of
sound effects.
TALK RADIO (1987) - the ether sphere of broadcast space
and the zoning of radio; telephones, communication and the
forming of live interplay; the power of the media voice
and its microphonic aura; personal loss and public persona.
FACE OFF (1997) - Peking Opera, Chinese fireworks and other
sonic aspects of Hong Kong cinema; the void between jump-cuts
and the aural stretching of real time sound; spatial orchestration
and pyrotechnic kinetics.
Additional possibilities
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (remake)
Part 4: The Bombast of Effects - animism, resonance,
bodily presence
Warner Bros. cartoons (1945-55) - cacophony as an apposite
to symphony; postwar metallica and the love of machine noise;
quantum physics and the warping of space through speed;
the obliteration of music in the name of noise; working
relationships between Tregg Brown and Carl Stalling.
THE BIRDS (1963)
- the revenge of animal clusters against human order; the
impenetrability of non-human vocal communication; sheets
of noise and their signifying presence; musique concrete
and its interference of sound/music distinctions; multiple
layers of mimetic codes on the film soundtrack.
WAY OF THE DRAGON (1972) - bodily perspectives and the sound
of exertion; energy, mass, weight and scale, and their aural
direction on the and decay.
BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA VIXEN (1979) - unreality
in sonic accompaniment; grotesqueries and vagaries in the
depiction of sound; the noise of the human engine; stylization
of sound and the ensuing depiction of the world; the influence
of cartoon sound on live action cinema.
APOCALYPSE NOW (1980) - complexity in sonic construction;
levels of realism, reality and realization in the design
of film sound; disorientation through non-urban soundscapes;
hallucination and quadraphonic sound; the importance of
Walter Murch.
HAIL MARY (1985) - savagery, violence and chaos in the montage
of sound; the sonorum of nature and the space of its aura;
multiple dimensions of mystical energy and the networking
of sonic realms; the contrapuntal continuum of sound against
image.
Additional possibilities
ANGEL DUST
Part 5: The Marvel of Space - atmospheres, environments,
aural zones
COLORS (1987) - the dimension of bass as the film soundtrack's
final frontier; deep space, threatening foregrounds and
the spectre of off-screen sound; music as territorial marker;
acoustic zones as governed by playback systems; the urban
jungle and its sonar logic; the sonic assault of Hip Hop.
HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1954) - memory, guilt and the inescapability
of sonic occurrences; on-screen rendering of invisible actions
through the presence of sound; the phonograph as symbolic
narrative device; the effect of silence.
CONTACT (1997) - hyperspace and surround sound activity;
dimensional transgression and the transformation of the
auditorium; radar and sonar activity, and their narratological
import; the hidden talents of Randy Thom.
(A review of this film's sound design has been published
in REAL TIME & is available.)
TRON (1982) - problematics in sounding the virtual world;
markers of distinction through pitch, timbre & effect;
the textual morphing between orchestra and synthesizer,
and their indented replication of the other; matching sound
to computer generated imagery.
FIELD OF DREAMS (1989) - angels, ghosts & other ethereal
voices; spatial recreation & auditory superimposition;
sensurround tactility and the floating of space.
LOST HIGHWAY (1997) - rumbles, sub-sonic swells and densely
timbrel atmospheres; the defunctioning of music in the face
of sound; emotional removal through the horizontal planing
of aural textures; the psychoacoustic precision of frequency
arrangement; David Lynch and Alan Splet's love of noise.
Additional possibilities
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
THE ELEPHANT MAN
THE STRAIGHT STORY
Part 6: The Collapse of the Orchestra - accompaniment,
synaesthesia, interiorization
PSYCHO (1960) - ulteriority, psychic displacement and auditory
transference; atonality and its figuring of the Other; voicing
aberrant behaviour and morbid fixation; inverting the paradigm
of nature/beauty/truth in the design of the violin; Bernard
Herrmann’s application and interrogation of the orchestra
as a semantic and textual machine.
KWAIDAN (1963) - the sound of the western soundtrack turned
inside out; asynchronism and its siding with psychological
displacement; the corruption of musicality and the sublime
presence of sound; the alien perspective of Toru Takemitsu.
TAXI DRIVER (1976) - the orchestra as organism and the city
as living entity; more on Herrmann’s dissolution of
jazz; the musicalization of ambience and the orchestration
of pressure; syncing voice-over rhythms to the breathing
of an orchestra.
THE SHINING (1980) - first degree sourcing of 20th century
avant garde music for the cinema; the shrinking of consciousness,
the dissolving of rationalism and the disappearance of harmony;
the sound of music as abject terror; Stanley Kubrick's musicological
sense.
ONIMARU (1992) - inverting atmosphere recordings and orchestral
scoring; the sound of inside versus the sound of outside;
walls of paper, volcanic mountains and other containers
of sound; the tonality of land and the tuning of wind.
HEAT (1994) - Hovering chords, impressions of instruments
& transparent sonic textures; fusing musical styles
in a single score; monolithicism and the engineering of
orchestral energy; Michael Mann and the dialectic of Pop
music.
Additional possibilities
VAGABOND
THE CONVENT
Part 7: The Rise of Electricity - guitars, synthesizers,
volume
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1954) - geotextual and aquasonic aspects
of interplanetary acoustics; electronica and its voicing
of the repressed; the disappearance of the orchestra; absenting
sonic realism.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) - rewriting the western
through the sound of electricity; obsession, memory &
haunting melodies; instruments of death and instruments
of song; the song craft of Ennio Morricone and the aural
sensitivity of Sergio Leone.
SUSPIRIA (1977) - the violence of volume and the terror
of music; visceral sound and bodily noise; hysterical forms
of audio-visual narration; hyper-opera and the acidic shared
vision of Dario Argento with Goblin.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) - the pulse of the dying urban
metropolis; tension through drones and monophonic ambience;
the grain of analogue synthesis; underground and overground
sonics; acknowledging the electro-minimalist style of John
Carpenter.
KOYANISQUAATSI (1983) - hysteria, apocalyptica and choral
overload; the end of the world and the death of European
High Art; singing angels of conscious and the demonic sound
of progress; imperialist and colonialist film scoring; minimalism
and its oppositional recourse to drama.
METROPOLIS (1983) - questioning the sanctity of the ontological
status of silent cinema; reconstructing narrative through
musical rescoring; simultaneity in subtitles, title cards
and song lyrics; the MTV effect and Giorgio Moroder's pop
scoring.
Additional possibilities
THE KEEP
SHAFT
KID CREOLE
Part 8: The Fabric of Song - rhizomes, radio, pop
AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1972) - the advent of 'worldizing' sound
for on-screen spatial environments; radio broadcast and
its role in establishing real-time narration; multiple locations
and narrative continuity through song.
SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL (1985) - the energy of youth &
the consumption of song; drumming , passion & emotional
release; the notoriety of teen movies and John Hughes' musical
sensibility.
STAND BY ME (1987) - nostalgia, memory, allegory and their
evocation through songs from the past; re-orchestrating
songs as a form of voice-over narration; the role of a theme
song and its framing effect on cinematic narrative; radio
as textual construct.
DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) - the aesthetics and politics
of blackness on the film soundtrack; reclaiming blues idioms
in New World Americana scores; racial tension through invading
space with radio; the texture of Hip Hop and the sound of
the street; Spike Lee's musicological agenda.
AN INDEPENDENT LIFE (1991) - transience, ephemera and the
rhyzomatic drift of European folk music; musical journeys
& mapped narratives; mythological weaving and oral tradition.
(A partial analysis of this film's sound design has been
published in CINEMA & THE SOUND OF MUSIC & is available.)
GOOD FELLAS (1992) - hyper ellipsis & radical sound
editing; the voice as orchestrator and conductor of narrative
rhythm; incorporating musical recording space into on-screen
spaces; the mania for song in Martin Scorsese’s cinema.
Additional possibilities
RED PSALM
BOOGIE NIGHTS
MAGNOLIA
Part 9: The Grain of The Voice - screams, breaths,
silence
CITIZEN KANE
(1941) - the power of the mediated voice & the amplification
of the media; control through oral dominance; character,
identity and persona in vocal performance; the act of speaking;
gender dynamics & gendered voices; Orson Welles' radio
textuality.
A LETTER TO THREE WIVES (1949) - multiplicity in voice over
narration; narrative and narrational overlapping in melodrama;
the closure of feminine discourse through voicing the unspoken
and silencing the written.
LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1960) - the hysterical symbiosis
of sound and image; voices from nowhere and texts form elsewhere;
harmonic improvization, chromatic chord progressions and
the generation of vertiginous narratives; truth, documentation
and the lie of photography.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) - loquaciousness, garrulity and
vocal type in star personae; deafening silence and talking
about nothing; psychological tropes in vocal activity; the
vociferous revolution of Robert Altman's live multi-track
recording of improvised dialogue.
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1981) - the abjection of sound and
the absence of music; the silent forest and the erasure
of social norms; the unheard cry of rape and the silencing
of women; breathing, screaming, gasping and other bodily
expulsions.
CRASH (1996) - separating vocal presence from emotional
projection; post-dubbing and the alienation effect; pornographic
texturing through close-mic voices; the erotic sigh and
its poetic lineage.
Additional possibilities
IN THE NAME OF THE ROSE
THE MAN WHO LIED
DOCTOR DOLITTLE (remake).
