Seeing Sound in Film
- engaging, analyzing, discussing, and interviewing leading directors, writers, sound designers, and engineers who make the decisions
“Most of the time, people experience the music in a film as a subconscious suggestion… In other words, music manages to show what is not visible, to work against the dialogue or, even more, tell a story that the images do not reveal”.
- Ennio Morricone
Music in film seizes our emotions and inspires our imagination – energy, space, and time communicated by the sound and music layer is often invisible and will be revealed through this newsletter.
We can learn to “see” this invisible layer in a film by engaging, analyzing, discussing, and interviewing leading directors, writers, sound designers and engineers who make the decisions that create it. Going back to the literary source, line, story, poem or moment inspiring the filmic storyline is part of this process.
We can see a great example in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Listen to the dark sinister bells from the Dies irae movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique: in this autobiographical symphony, the composer imagines himself as the rejected lover who kills his beloved, descends into madness, and dies a tortured death. Kubrick recognized the rhetorical power of this music, using it to shape his masterpiece of the macabre.
Later in the film, when Jack Nicholson’s character (Heeeere’s Johnny!”) madly chases after his family with an axe through the Overlook Hotel, Kubrick’s choice of Dies irae or “Day of Wrath” not only reveals the power of Berlioz’s symphony but the essence of the musical storyline itself.
With each newsletter, we’ll look at a classic film or a recent film and analyze how music shapes, extends and gives meaning to stories told through the medium. We will concentrate on directors, films, genres, tropes, themes, and the technology that brings the director’s vision to life. Interviews with film luminaries will also be included.
Background
This newsletter stems from a course I taught at Stanford, building on my literary and film work at Oxford and the Sorbonne, extending into my current writing for Exterminating Angel Press.
Why
In the course of reading this newsletter, you will have the ability to listen with a more educated ear when you watch and hear a film.
Why Now
Stories are essential to our human life, personally and collectively. We read them, hear them, see them, tell them, create them – they are ever-evolving.
An immersive story experience matters more than ever in light of the revised cultural structures brought on by COVID-19. With this structure fast becoming our new reality, how we consume content is evolving rapidly.
How we consume film in the COVID-19 era and beyond will change—location shooting is on pause and may soon become a thing of the past. As directors and writers rethink storylines, the sound layer becomes more essential than ever in expanding and stretching the visual: enabling the mind to see.
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