Mr. Bean IIThe Modern Soundtrack
April 9th 2008 02:04
I don't have any brand new content for this blog at the moment, (although hopefully I'll get some pieces done on the V Festival and Swedish Avalanches-esque indie pop soon, and maybe a Rowland S. Howard gig review) so instead here's something I wrote for uni last year. It was for a great subject called the Modern Soundtrack, whose lecturer Philip Brophy was the director of the fantastic Body Melt, godfather of the Media Arts course, and a post-punk veteran. Here we go:
Christiane F. (1981)
After silent credits, the first sound is Christiane's voiceover over an extreme closeup of her blank face. Her lips don't move but we assume the voice belongs to the face. She describes the filthy environment she lives in, but the background is dark and all we can see is her face. Next we see the environment. It is empty and the soundtrack is sparse, with nothing but a skateboard and her narration. She sees posters for a club she wants to go to to escape. The camera then scrolls past a nighttime cityscape, as we hear a train. A Krautrock-influenced David Bowie song fades in ('V2 Schneider, from Heroes, I think?), its motorik rhythm blending with the train. Then finally we see the train track and station, from the driver's point of view. As the more conventional rock part of the song starts, the camera cuts away to Christiane and her friend going to the club. The camera continues to track, following them through a group of bikies whose engines roar, and into the club. The Bowie song fades out as we hear the bikes, but in the club another one fades in, this time worldized and diegetic. The long tracking shot continues, and the song gets louder and clearer.
The effect of this whole sequence is thrilling, evoking the youthful excitement of embarking upon a big night out, ripe with the promise of new experiences and adventures. Christiane goes into a cinema within the club, where Night of the Living Dead is playing, dubbed in German! To the sound of screams and scary music, Christiane's friends enact a real life horror movie by popping pills and trips, and a boy sleazes onto her. The matricidal child zombie on the screen foreshadows the child junky that Christiane will become.
The first half of Christiane F is like a big ad for Bowie. Christiane's mother's boyfriend gives her ChangesOne as a gift but she already has a copy, then later she listens to it really loud, and then much later she tries to sell it for drug money. One scene is like a music video: as 'Heroes' plays, a bunch of kids run around a shopping arcade, roll on the floor, steal money from a machine, and run away from the cops. As he sings "we're lovers and that is a fact", Christiane and a boy join hands and run to an elevator to the roof. We hear 'Heroes' in both English and German in the film. In another club scene, two Bowie songs are played at the same time! One is the worldized 'Station to Station', which emanates from the club sound system and changes its volume and acoustic quality as Christiane enters different rooms, and the other is the non-diegetic instrumental 'Warszawa', which expresses Christiane's psychic state as she realises that all her friends are doing heroin.
The Bowie concert that Christiane attends begins with a huge phased accelerating chugging sound like a locomotive. (The sound of trains and other transport white noise is a sonic motif of both Bowie and the film. Like in The Wrong Man it is used at crucial moments for dramatic effect) When she does heroin for the first time in the carpark outside the concert, we hear the sound again, with a crowd cheering, and then the car starts moving and the camera cuts to an out-of-context zoom through a tunnel. The sound is preceded by silence, so it is more likely going on in her head than in the background.
A minor key triple time synth tune plays a few times throughout the film. In at least two of these times, Christiane and her boyfriend say that they must stop shooting up. The sad melody seems to represent hopelessness.
When Christiane gives a man a hand job for drug money, she sees a bus appearing outside in the dark rainy night. It's quiet at first but then fades in over the man's orgasmic moans. A faint angelic synth chord represents her excitement at her chance of escape. She's already been paid so she runs for it.
Morvern Callar (2002) is the story of a young woman's reaction to her boyfriend's suicide. Morvern shows no grief - on the contrary: she exploits the event as much as she can - but she is affected by it in some mysterious way. There are no emotional music cues to give us clues as to how she feels. In fact, there is no score at all, only songs, and with the exception of a reggae track in a sex scene, all of these songs are part of the diegesis, most of them from the cassette that her boyfriend left her as a Christmas present, and others at parties.
Morvern doesn't talk much, and when she does, her communication skills seem dysfunctional. She appears to be disconnected from the world of people, not responding to what they say, and even abandoning her best friend in the middle of nowhere. Instead of expressing and communicating (and perhaps also, by implication, instead of thinking and feeling), she only experiences sights and sounds. While her friend only wants to travel so that she can dance and meet men, Morvern wants to experience the world. She listens to a bug crawling across the floor, to buzzing Christmas tree lights, to birds, to a car alarm. Only the hum of a computer accompanies her reading of the suicide note. The way that Morvern makes sounds herself - by typing, lighting a cigarette, unbuttoning, unzipping, knocking on a door - is slow, repetitive, careful and precise, proving that she listens attentively.
Throughout the film she often listens to the cassette on her walkman, and the soundtrack often fades from objective tinny headphone sound to subjective hi-fi and back again. When we hear 'Some Velvet Morning' in a supermarket, we are in Morvern's private exotic world, and then when the bass drops out we are reminded of how alone she is. The very last scene is a repeat of an earlier scene set in a rave, only instead of hardcore techno, we hear a folk-pop love song. As the credits begin, it fades into tinniness. Morvern has just decided to leave her friend and her home again, and go away on her own.
Wolf Creek (2005) is another movie about death and young British tourists, so like Morvern Callar, its first half contains party scenes with loud music mixed with scenes of eerie ambience. Everyone watching this knows it's a horror film and is used to seeing "deceptively" carefree scenes of fun and decadence. While songs like 'Eagle Rock' maintain this flimsy facade, the quiet eerie score and the unsettling white noise of wind, water and the car engine give us a subtle hint of what's to come. The latter don't seem to have much to do with how the happy-go-lucky characters are feeling - the dark elements of the soundtrack represent what we know and they don't.
When the real deal finally begins, it doesn't go off with a bang. There are no Psycho string stabs or anything - what we see speaks for itself. The first time that the score actually sticks out and draws a bit of attention to itself is when one of the girls stops frantically trying to escape and stumbles upon the killer's collection of his previous victims' belongings. Up until then there has been no time to think, and now she finally stops for a moment to reflect on the horror of the situation. A fatal mistake of course!
In Hitchcock's gritty realist film noir The Wrong Man (1956) Henry Fonda plays Manny, a falsely accused struggling musician with a wife and kids. At the beginning, Hitchcock himself tells us that unlike most of his stories, this one is true. This implies that this film is not about a heroic or evil figure, nor an exceptional or fantastic character, but a common man like you or I who happened to be caught up in a dramatic situation by accident. The film's sound design, with prominent and frequent background noise - trains, traffic, sirens - emphasises this by creating a realistic sense of urban environment, but it is also used in more artificial ways, for dramatic and pychological effect. At crucial moments, sound effects are used instead of dramatic orchestral cues. Sometimes the sounds are accompanied by an eerie, quiet minimal drone. This seems very unusual for a fifties Hollywood movie. On the bus to the prison, an irritating rattling evokes Manny's agitated mental state. Later, when it becomes apparent that his wife is losing her mind, the sound of a train surges as she stares into space. Also, traffic and train sounds often surge in transitions between scenes.
Diegetic music is used on a few occasions to add to the film's realistic feel. When we first see Manny at home in the kitchen with his wife, discussing their dire financial situation, cute naive-sounding piano and harmonica music, which at first seems to be part of the film's score, is interrupted by a loud discord and the sound of children arguing. It turns out that the kids have been practising their instruments in the background. The effect is a sense of domestic bliss being shattered. Since Manny is a double bassist in a band, his music is heard a few times throughout the film, and Bernard Herrman's score uses similar instrumentation. When there is a scene change from a bar where the band is playing to somewhere else, the music suddenly stops on a long chord, the diegetic music transforming into a cue. This is particularly noticeable because Manny has just put down his bass and left the band. Of course, the sound of the bass stops when he stops playing it, grounding the music within the story, but right after this the music seems to leave the realistic filmic universe and comment on it from the outside.
The most unrealistic moment in the film is the most psychological: when Manny has been put in a cell and not allowed to go home to his family, the camera starts circling around his face, and the sparse atonal music goes from a 6/4 time signature to 5/4 to 3/4 to 2/4 (so it feels like an accelerando only with a regular pulse), then syncopates and builds. The music is closing in on itself, like a shrinking dungeon.
Everything on the soundtrack of The Proposition (2005) tells us that something's amiss: the flies, bugs, birds, horses, mumbling, heavy breathing, chewing, wind, thunder, crackling fire, trickling water, rustling trees and clothes, ticking clocks, clinking cutlery and glasses all blend in with the drones, percussion, shrieking violins and tinkling piano to create one huge cloud of tension, unease and quiet anticipation of violence. When violence does occur, it is often unaccompanied and horrifically matter-of-fact, out-of-the-blue but without the impact of a shock. Sometimes, the score is suddenly cut short by a gun being cocked or shot. In one scene, Emily Watson innocently walks through the town while the score spells out doom and gloom. Echoing the film's violent scenes, the music is cut short by a butcher's knife. Watson asks the butcher "Is everything alright?" and the answer has been made pretty obvious. In a blatantly ironic and perhaps cliched juxtaposition, a flogging is accompanied by a sweet Irish folk song sung by a murderer and rapist. The character is not present at the flogging but his voice continues on the soundtrack as we witness it. Then later, he sings again as he rapes. Also during the flogging, 'Rule of Britannia' is sung, sounding pathetic and miserable in counterpoint with Ellis and Cave's ominous non-diegetic accompaniment.
The Dust Brothers' score for Fight Club (1999) is, like that of The Matrix and other hip Hollywood films of that era, pretty dated. Their electro/big beat/trip-hop/whatever works pretty well for the sterile scenes with Edward Norton at work, on a plane and in his apartment browsing his Ikea catalogue, but it seems too slick for the dirty noirish parts of the film. The sound design is much more interesting. There's a lot of eerie echoed background noises - there's sirens, trains, dripping water and thunder, but much more effective are the background voices. The acoustics of the film's locations - Brad Pitt's house, the hospital and the support group room - suggest that they are huge and empty, but not totally empty because there's always eerie voices coming from other rooms with heaps of echo. When Edward Norton hugs Meatloaf and cries, we can hear what sounds like monks singing. Obviously this represents his feeling of spiritual catharsis, but the acoustics suggest that the monks are actually in a nearby room or church. Children can sometimes be heard too. Just before Helena Bonham-Carter's character first appears, we hear loud echoed footsteps, signalling that someone's about to come and change things. As the film goes on, background sounds intrude more and more into the foreground. Edward Norton keeps hearing Brad Pitt, i.e. hearing himself, doing things in other rooms: having sex, using powertools, banging and clanging.
While the Dust Brothers fail to complement this "in the other room" sonic aesthetic (unlike Ellis and Cave who perfectly complement The Proposition's sound design), one song on Fight Club's soundtrack seems right at home: 'Going Out West' by Tom Waits, who also wrote 'What's He Building In There?', the ultimate "in the other room" song.
Christiane F. (1981)
After silent credits, the first sound is Christiane's voiceover over an extreme closeup of her blank face. Her lips don't move but we assume the voice belongs to the face. She describes the filthy environment she lives in, but the background is dark and all we can see is her face. Next we see the environment. It is empty and the soundtrack is sparse, with nothing but a skateboard and her narration. She sees posters for a club she wants to go to to escape. The camera then scrolls past a nighttime cityscape, as we hear a train. A Krautrock-influenced David Bowie song fades in ('V2 Schneider, from Heroes, I think?), its motorik rhythm blending with the train. Then finally we see the train track and station, from the driver's point of view. As the more conventional rock part of the song starts, the camera cuts away to Christiane and her friend going to the club. The camera continues to track, following them through a group of bikies whose engines roar, and into the club. The Bowie song fades out as we hear the bikes, but in the club another one fades in, this time worldized and diegetic. The long tracking shot continues, and the song gets louder and clearer.
The effect of this whole sequence is thrilling, evoking the youthful excitement of embarking upon a big night out, ripe with the promise of new experiences and adventures. Christiane goes into a cinema within the club, where Night of the Living Dead is playing, dubbed in German! To the sound of screams and scary music, Christiane's friends enact a real life horror movie by popping pills and trips, and a boy sleazes onto her. The matricidal child zombie on the screen foreshadows the child junky that Christiane will become.
The first half of Christiane F is like a big ad for Bowie. Christiane's mother's boyfriend gives her ChangesOne as a gift but she already has a copy, then later she listens to it really loud, and then much later she tries to sell it for drug money. One scene is like a music video: as 'Heroes' plays, a bunch of kids run around a shopping arcade, roll on the floor, steal money from a machine, and run away from the cops. As he sings "we're lovers and that is a fact", Christiane and a boy join hands and run to an elevator to the roof. We hear 'Heroes' in both English and German in the film. In another club scene, two Bowie songs are played at the same time! One is the worldized 'Station to Station', which emanates from the club sound system and changes its volume and acoustic quality as Christiane enters different rooms, and the other is the non-diegetic instrumental 'Warszawa', which expresses Christiane's psychic state as she realises that all her friends are doing heroin.
The Bowie concert that Christiane attends begins with a huge phased accelerating chugging sound like a locomotive. (The sound of trains and other transport white noise is a sonic motif of both Bowie and the film. Like in The Wrong Man it is used at crucial moments for dramatic effect) When she does heroin for the first time in the carpark outside the concert, we hear the sound again, with a crowd cheering, and then the car starts moving and the camera cuts to an out-of-context zoom through a tunnel. The sound is preceded by silence, so it is more likely going on in her head than in the background.
A minor key triple time synth tune plays a few times throughout the film. In at least two of these times, Christiane and her boyfriend say that they must stop shooting up. The sad melody seems to represent hopelessness.
When Christiane gives a man a hand job for drug money, she sees a bus appearing outside in the dark rainy night. It's quiet at first but then fades in over the man's orgasmic moans. A faint angelic synth chord represents her excitement at her chance of escape. She's already been paid so she runs for it.
Morvern Callar (2002) is the story of a young woman's reaction to her boyfriend's suicide. Morvern shows no grief - on the contrary: she exploits the event as much as she can - but she is affected by it in some mysterious way. There are no emotional music cues to give us clues as to how she feels. In fact, there is no score at all, only songs, and with the exception of a reggae track in a sex scene, all of these songs are part of the diegesis, most of them from the cassette that her boyfriend left her as a Christmas present, and others at parties.
Morvern doesn't talk much, and when she does, her communication skills seem dysfunctional. She appears to be disconnected from the world of people, not responding to what they say, and even abandoning her best friend in the middle of nowhere. Instead of expressing and communicating (and perhaps also, by implication, instead of thinking and feeling), she only experiences sights and sounds. While her friend only wants to travel so that she can dance and meet men, Morvern wants to experience the world. She listens to a bug crawling across the floor, to buzzing Christmas tree lights, to birds, to a car alarm. Only the hum of a computer accompanies her reading of the suicide note. The way that Morvern makes sounds herself - by typing, lighting a cigarette, unbuttoning, unzipping, knocking on a door - is slow, repetitive, careful and precise, proving that she listens attentively.
Throughout the film she often listens to the cassette on her walkman, and the soundtrack often fades from objective tinny headphone sound to subjective hi-fi and back again. When we hear 'Some Velvet Morning' in a supermarket, we are in Morvern's private exotic world, and then when the bass drops out we are reminded of how alone she is. The very last scene is a repeat of an earlier scene set in a rave, only instead of hardcore techno, we hear a folk-pop love song. As the credits begin, it fades into tinniness. Morvern has just decided to leave her friend and her home again, and go away on her own.
Wolf Creek (2005) is another movie about death and young British tourists, so like Morvern Callar, its first half contains party scenes with loud music mixed with scenes of eerie ambience. Everyone watching this knows it's a horror film and is used to seeing "deceptively" carefree scenes of fun and decadence. While songs like 'Eagle Rock' maintain this flimsy facade, the quiet eerie score and the unsettling white noise of wind, water and the car engine give us a subtle hint of what's to come. The latter don't seem to have much to do with how the happy-go-lucky characters are feeling - the dark elements of the soundtrack represent what we know and they don't.
When the real deal finally begins, it doesn't go off with a bang. There are no Psycho string stabs or anything - what we see speaks for itself. The first time that the score actually sticks out and draws a bit of attention to itself is when one of the girls stops frantically trying to escape and stumbles upon the killer's collection of his previous victims' belongings. Up until then there has been no time to think, and now she finally stops for a moment to reflect on the horror of the situation. A fatal mistake of course!
In Hitchcock's gritty realist film noir The Wrong Man (1956) Henry Fonda plays Manny, a falsely accused struggling musician with a wife and kids. At the beginning, Hitchcock himself tells us that unlike most of his stories, this one is true. This implies that this film is not about a heroic or evil figure, nor an exceptional or fantastic character, but a common man like you or I who happened to be caught up in a dramatic situation by accident. The film's sound design, with prominent and frequent background noise - trains, traffic, sirens - emphasises this by creating a realistic sense of urban environment, but it is also used in more artificial ways, for dramatic and pychological effect. At crucial moments, sound effects are used instead of dramatic orchestral cues. Sometimes the sounds are accompanied by an eerie, quiet minimal drone. This seems very unusual for a fifties Hollywood movie. On the bus to the prison, an irritating rattling evokes Manny's agitated mental state. Later, when it becomes apparent that his wife is losing her mind, the sound of a train surges as she stares into space. Also, traffic and train sounds often surge in transitions between scenes.
Diegetic music is used on a few occasions to add to the film's realistic feel. When we first see Manny at home in the kitchen with his wife, discussing their dire financial situation, cute naive-sounding piano and harmonica music, which at first seems to be part of the film's score, is interrupted by a loud discord and the sound of children arguing. It turns out that the kids have been practising their instruments in the background. The effect is a sense of domestic bliss being shattered. Since Manny is a double bassist in a band, his music is heard a few times throughout the film, and Bernard Herrman's score uses similar instrumentation. When there is a scene change from a bar where the band is playing to somewhere else, the music suddenly stops on a long chord, the diegetic music transforming into a cue. This is particularly noticeable because Manny has just put down his bass and left the band. Of course, the sound of the bass stops when he stops playing it, grounding the music within the story, but right after this the music seems to leave the realistic filmic universe and comment on it from the outside.
The most unrealistic moment in the film is the most psychological: when Manny has been put in a cell and not allowed to go home to his family, the camera starts circling around his face, and the sparse atonal music goes from a 6/4 time signature to 5/4 to 3/4 to 2/4 (so it feels like an accelerando only with a regular pulse), then syncopates and builds. The music is closing in on itself, like a shrinking dungeon.
Everything on the soundtrack of The Proposition (2005) tells us that something's amiss: the flies, bugs, birds, horses, mumbling, heavy breathing, chewing, wind, thunder, crackling fire, trickling water, rustling trees and clothes, ticking clocks, clinking cutlery and glasses all blend in with the drones, percussion, shrieking violins and tinkling piano to create one huge cloud of tension, unease and quiet anticipation of violence. When violence does occur, it is often unaccompanied and horrifically matter-of-fact, out-of-the-blue but without the impact of a shock. Sometimes, the score is suddenly cut short by a gun being cocked or shot. In one scene, Emily Watson innocently walks through the town while the score spells out doom and gloom. Echoing the film's violent scenes, the music is cut short by a butcher's knife. Watson asks the butcher "Is everything alright?" and the answer has been made pretty obvious. In a blatantly ironic and perhaps cliched juxtaposition, a flogging is accompanied by a sweet Irish folk song sung by a murderer and rapist. The character is not present at the flogging but his voice continues on the soundtrack as we witness it. Then later, he sings again as he rapes. Also during the flogging, 'Rule of Britannia' is sung, sounding pathetic and miserable in counterpoint with Ellis and Cave's ominous non-diegetic accompaniment.
The Dust Brothers' score for Fight Club (1999) is, like that of The Matrix and other hip Hollywood films of that era, pretty dated. Their electro/big beat/trip-hop/whatever works pretty well for the sterile scenes with Edward Norton at work, on a plane and in his apartment browsing his Ikea catalogue, but it seems too slick for the dirty noirish parts of the film. The sound design is much more interesting. There's a lot of eerie echoed background noises - there's sirens, trains, dripping water and thunder, but much more effective are the background voices. The acoustics of the film's locations - Brad Pitt's house, the hospital and the support group room - suggest that they are huge and empty, but not totally empty because there's always eerie voices coming from other rooms with heaps of echo. When Edward Norton hugs Meatloaf and cries, we can hear what sounds like monks singing. Obviously this represents his feeling of spiritual catharsis, but the acoustics suggest that the monks are actually in a nearby room or church. Children can sometimes be heard too. Just before Helena Bonham-Carter's character first appears, we hear loud echoed footsteps, signalling that someone's about to come and change things. As the film goes on, background sounds intrude more and more into the foreground. Edward Norton keeps hearing Brad Pitt, i.e. hearing himself, doing things in other rooms: having sex, using powertools, banging and clanging.
While the Dust Brothers fail to complement this "in the other room" sonic aesthetic (unlike Ellis and Cave who perfectly complement The Proposition's sound design), one song on Fight Club's soundtrack seems right at home: 'Going Out West' by Tom Waits, who also wrote 'What's He Building In There?', the ultimate "in the other room" song.
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