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Cinesonic 2:
Cinema & the Sound of Music
FRANCOIS MUSY Creating Sound for GodardJean Luc Godard is one of the few directors in film history who have been extremely vocal about the role sound plays in the cinematic experience. His production company - Son/Image - was as much a polemical statement as a catchy name. While many of us are familiar with that 60s 'Godard effect' when the music or a sound atmosphere brutishly cuts in or cuts out of a scene like someone is randomly cutting-&-pasting the various tracks, little critical thought has been given to the way Godard has worked this effect from the 80s on.
Francois Musy has designed, edited and mixed most of Godard's films since his pioneering work on Godard's Passion in 1983. Numerous films have followed - including Hail Mary, Nouvelle Vague and Alas pour Moi - which collectively display the high degree of aural sophistication with which Musy details and enhances the supposedly naturalistic aura of these films' soundtracks. Based predominantly on the employment of location sound - a strategy refined to an art form in France yet frustratingly blocked by various post-production conventions in most Anglo countries - Musy's work hovers between the orchestration of musique concrete and the lush evocation of ambient soundscapes. They are integral to the audiovisual make-up of Godard's late cinema.
© Philip Brophy 1999
Referenced films: PASSION, HAIL MARY, NOUVELLE VAGUE, HELAS POUR MOI, SOIGNE TA DROITE, HISTOIRE DU CINEMA
DAVID SHEA Reinventing Film Scores
Satyricon Satyricon was originally written for large ensemble recorded and released as a cd in 97 is arranged here as a solo sampler and video work. Based on the Roman novel Satyricon and to a lesser degree the Fellini adaptation (Fellini's Satyricon). Written by Petronius a minister under Nero's reign the novel (or what still remains of it) looks at every level of roman society from mythological roots to the deepest decadence satirising evrything from the royal court to prostitution. The language of the novel combines the highest literary writing styles with multiple street language and dialects.
Originally written as a parody of the Iliad it chronicles the collapse of Roman society while maintaining a loving cynical humor. The novel also reads as something that could have been written a week ago with the parrallels to modern technological society from money obsession to gay rights to new age healers and a shocking amount of cuurent issues both spiritual and cultural. The music focused on this combinations of time periods following both the fragmented natyre of the book and the technological connections to our own time. The video was concieved after the music in the same mannner referencing literal epics made about the Roman empire to refernces made or suggested in the book or the much darker Fellini film adaptation. The performance is a combination of the scored music from musicians, synthesizers and film music quotes and the images of fragmented film clips constructed by myself and Lisa Dillilo. © David Shea 1999
The Red Chamber
Arranged for solo sampler, The Red Chamber is a solo arrangement of the extended ensemble work recorded in 94-95 as the cd The Tower of Mirrors. Based originally on the Chineese Buddhist novel Hsi-Yu Chi ('Journey to the West') written in the 16th century and the later novel written as a supplement, the Tower of Myriad Mirrors. The novel follows the travels of a Taoist priest who travel from Tang dynasty China to India to recieve scriptures from the Buddha to to introduce Buddhism to the Chineese. Protected and accompanied by the monkey king Sun Wu Kung with incredible magical powers the journey comprises 100 chapters. Part mythology, part history, part religious text the stories follow a path through space and time travel, through mutiple heavens and hells and encounter thousands of gods, demons and mystical territories.
Many of these stories formed the basis, directly or indirectly, of modern Hong Kong cinema particularly in its organic combination of the magical and spiritual with the natural and social world. The music follows the novel as a type of map traveling through references and tributes to various Hong Kong films and directors and creates a type of narrative through 'scenes' composed with scored music for various musicians, collaged records and combinations of the two. The piece is an independant work which lives both inside the novel and the film references and creates a seperate journey of its own. © David Shea 1999
RANDY THOM Designing a Movie for Sound
Using clips from a variety of films, I will illustrate how the true job of the Sound Designer is more about helping to design the movie for sound than about designing sounds for the movie. I will also describe my own approach to the day-to-day work of sound design for multi-channel films, tell lots of anecdotes, and even talk about ways to be more creative.
© Randy Thom 1999
Referenced films: APOCALYPSE NOW, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, ERASERHEAD, THE BLACK STALLION
T A L K S
Aphabetical author listing of the talks being given during the morning and afternoon sessions of the Conference.PHILIP BROPHY How Sound Floats on Land: The Suppression and Release of Folk & Indigenous Musics in the Cinematic Terrain
Analyses the cine-musicological effects of incorporating ethnographic musics into cinematic narratives. Discusses the textual consequences of employing folk models in a form which historically has privileged a High European operatic model of audio-visuality. Ventures a nomadic model of song as an atmospheric uncontainable in the cinematic apparatus.
Referenced films: KWAIDAN, BLACK RIVER, AN INDEPENDENT LIFE, MIX ME A PERSON
© Philip Brophy 1999
JOHN CONOMOS Sonic Darkness : Notes Towards an Aesthetic of Jazz in the American Film Noir
In my illustrated paper I will address some of the more salient aesthetic , cultural and musicological issues central to the jazz soundtrack in the classic American film noir. It will be argued that contra the late Romanticism of the traditional Hollywood film score, jazz was deployed to problematicise cinematic illusion and to make the spectator experience film noir as a distinctive modernist art work whose complex antecedental roots lie in German Expressionism, the gangster film, hard-boiled crime fiction, and Italian neo-realism.
Though jazz features in certain strands of American avant-garde and independent cinema, popular cartoon animation, and more recently ( since the seventies) in popular American film, it reached its peak for the Hollywood soundtrack during the fifties . In my discussion I will focus on the various high and low art representations of jazz to the film noir soundtrack, the cult of the white jazz artist,and the intricate relationships between jazz,the Method and psychoanalysis.
One of the more significant underpinnings informing my paper will be the vital role jazz performed in stressing film noir's moody stimmung of urban alienation, mystery and paranoia. In other words, the noir jazz soundtrack - despite its residual romantic elements - gave the spectator a critical angle of reflexive acoustic interpretation of the form's familiar thematic and formal architecture.
Referenced films: LAURA, FORCE OF EVIL, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
© John Conomos 1999
EVAN EISENBERG The World, Heard: Music, Nature, Film
Schopenhauer claimed that music is more than a language of human emotion: that it depicts the life of the cosmos itself, on a level ontologically prior to that of the many things we see (oaks, ants, chairs, people). In The Recording Angel, I argued that records, by occluding the human musician, free us to hear in music the rhythms and strivings of all things, not of humans alone. But if all music does, in this sense, depict nature, what happens when music accompanies specific images of nature, on film or video? Is there sometimes a consonance, sometimes a dissonance between the two depictions? What kinds of counterpoint arise when music accompanies scenes of cities, factories, and so on? Can music open even an indoor scene to the larger universe?
Referenced films: HAIL MARY, KOYAANISQATSI, THE MAGIC FLUTE, RAN, DEATH IN VENICE, TAMPOPO, FLYING DOWN TO RIO, 2001, INSPIRED BY BACH.
© Evan Eisenberg 1999
KODWO ESHUN The Microrhythmic Pneumacosm of Hype Williams
Using concepts extracted from Artaud's On the Balinese Theater, Lars Spuybroek's Motor Geometry, George Clinton, Dario Argento and Haus Rucker Co, this paper will examine the dynamic vectors between sound, vision and movement in the late 90s work of the video director Hype Williams, the producer Timbaland and the hiphop stars Missy Elliot and Busta Rhymes. The digital vision of Hype Williams is considered as a pneumacosm or a pneumatic cosmos of animatographic human-cartoons that shrinks and expands to magnify microengineeered rhythm and bodily tension.
Referenced videos: Missy Elliot - THE RAIN, BEEP ME 911, SOCK IT 2 ME, SHE'S A BITCH; Busta Rhymes - WOO HAH GOT YOU ALL IN CHECK, PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE MY EYES CAN SEE, GIMME SOME MORE; Busta Rhymes & Janet Jackson - WHAT'S IT GONNA BE?; Ginuine - WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT? (All directed by Hype Williams); Daft Punk - ALL AROUND THE WORLD (directed by Michel Gondry)
© Kodwo Eshun 1999
CLAUDIA GORBMAN Scoring the Other: Musical Codings of Indians in the Western
Where did Hollywood's tom-tom and modal-melody stereotypes for Indians come from, and what has happened to them? This lecture outlines the history of music to accompany Indians onscreen. Of particular interest is the "liberal western"--westerns that humanize the Indian--and some scoring choices made in several such films, from Broken Arrow (1950) to A Man Called Horse (1970) and Dances With Wolves (1990), to problematize the otherness of the Hollywood Indian.
Films referenced: STAGECOACH, BROKEN ARROW, A MAN CALLED HORSE, DANCES WITH WOLVES
© Claudia Gorbman 1999
ROGER HILLMAN The Original Ludwig Van (and others): Classical Music as Cultural Marker
In the 1970s, when (West) German films were gaining concerted international attention for the first time since the 1920s, most directors foregrounded issues of national identity. Beyond narratives and recycled images which explored this question, much use was made on the soundtrack of music belonging to the classical canon of the 19th century. This reflected a re-examination both of the hegemony of German music, and of its historical layering for contemporary ears, not least its overtones acquired through exploitation by the Nazi propaganda machine. Composers such as Beethoven, Mahler and inevitably Wagner offered a degree of continuity midst the discontinuities of 20th century German history. But their reception also bore the indelible imprint of the central event of German and world history of this century.
These and other composers were then used by directors like Fassbinder, Kluge and Syberberg as cultural markers, a quite different function to high brow mood music. In the context of the themes of many of these films, the use of music thus became a very powerful tool, not least in its capacity to suggest a simultaneity of three timeframes of reception (19th century original context, Nazi framing, and a contemporary synthesis of both which at the same time starts to head in the direction of world music).
For postwar Italian Cinema the quoting of the nation's musical heritage looked somewhat different, simply because, as a figure in the 1973 film La Villeggiatura (aka Black Holiday) put it: 'In Wagner there are too many irrational myths, but Verdi is ours.' When art music is used in Italian Cinema it is largely that of Verdi, a figure combining cultural and political identities in equal and unproblematic measure. While Wagner's reception via the Nazis signals a contested mix of aesthetic and political territories when he is cited in German film, Verdi as unassailed national icon has frequently served as political alibi in Italian Cinema. The wounds of postwar reestablishment have thereby been camouflaged by the appeal to a glorious 19th century era when (different) foreign occupiers were evicted as a prelude to national unification. Prominent among those Italian directors showing a nuanced approach to the dramatic, political and culturally resonant possibilities of Verdi's music have been Visconti and Bertolucci, but the later examples explored here from Black Holiday and The Night of San Lorenzo yield further angles on the phenomenon.
Referenced films: OUR HITLER, LILI MARLEEN, MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, THE PATRIOT, LESSONS OF DARKNESS, THE SPIDER'S STRATEGEM, BLACK HOLIDAY, NIGHT OF SAN LORENZO
© Roger Hillman 1999
JOSEPH LANZA My Aisles of Golden Dreams: The Beauty of Supermarket Soundtracks
By examining the role of movie music and the use of background music in modern life, Lanza proceeds to argue that a mere stroll through a supermarket aisle under the serenade of piped-in music reveals a great deal about the impact of film soundtracks on our daily lives.
1. Wheeling in the aisles - introduction; 2. The real industrial music - origins of the supermarket symphony; 3. Under-arrangement - an under-valued art; 4. Life in the multiground; 5. Comfort zone or twilight zone?; 6. Eat your 'schmaltz'!; 7. Don't Shoot the ceiling speaker! - piped scenes from GRAND HOTEL to THE STEPFORD WIVES; 8. "Mellow Yellow" in the bananas aisle - chance encounters ceiling serenade; 9. Meta-memory lane - original songs vs. elevator covers; 10. Designer background music - creeping cottage industry; 11. Pipe up! - conclusion
Referenced films: GRAND HOTEL, BEDAZZLED, ROME ADVENTURE, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, THE APARTMENT, THE STEPFORD WIVES, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
© Joseph Lanza 1999
ADRIAN MARTIN Intensity, Uncertainty & Dissimulation: Fritz Lang's Sound
Apart from a few cases (such as Welles or Lynch), few studies of a director's work have tried to define the distinctive 'sound' of that director's films, in the way that one routinely describes and explores a distinctive 'look' or visual style. The cinema of Fritz Lang presents a rich case for soundtrack study in an integrated, holistic sense. Lang (despite his bizarre protestations that he 'had no ear' for the talkies) approached all levels of sound (music, voices, noises) in an extremely material way. Furthermore, sound - its technology, transmission, implications, effects - became a central subject driving and underlying many of his fictions. Most importantly, Lang developed a complete dramaturgy of sound - a way of constructing scenes around sound cues, events, triggers and vectors; and this was already clear, in embryo, in his silent films! The logic underpinning both Lang's mise en scene and his narratives - a logic of "intensity, uncertainty and dissimulation", to use Alain Masson's phrase - can be extended to his use of sound. This paper will offer examples from the entire span of Lang's German and American career, concentrating on a set-piece from HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950), and the overall system of sounds within the complexly ironic SCARLET STREET (1945), including its ingenious use of the pop standard "My Melancholy Baby".
Referenced films: HOUSE BY THE RIVER, SCARLET STREET.
FRANCOIS THOMAS Orson Welle's Turn From Live Recording to Post-Synchronization: A Technical & Aesthetic Revolution
After several years devoted to live performing arts (theatre ,led radio drama), it was only logical that Welles, turned film director, would consider real sound as self evident. However, after he mainly used production sound in Citizen Kane, he tried in several of his Hollywood films, Macbeth especially, to prerecord the dialogue and have it played back on the set. Above all, in his whole European career, he post synchronised almost every line of dialogue from his films. This paper will attempt to sum up why Welles turned towards postsynchronisation and what aesthetic changes this technical evolution entails.
Referenced films: CITIZEN KANE, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, OTHELLO
© Francois Thomas 1999
A U S T R A L I A N - I N D U S T R Y - P A N E L S Special industry panels.
CRAIG CARTER, SAM PETTY & GARETH VANDERHOPE Designing Sound for Film
A panel showcasing contemporary perspectives on working within the Australian film industry. Sound designers talk about recent and/or current projects on which they have worked, discussing their ideas and thoughts on the current state of sound design in Australia.
MARTIN ARMIGER, BURKHARD DALLWITZ & PAUL GRABOWSKY Composing Music for Film
A panel showcasing contemporary perspectives on working within the Australian film industry. Film composers talk about recent and/or current projects on which they have worked, discussing their ideas and thoughts on the current state of film scores in Australia.
S A T E L L I T E - E V E N T S Chronological listing of satellite events being staged concurrently with the Conference.
BUCKETRIDER, TIM CATLIN & THOMAS COUZINIER SCREEN NOISE 2
The core of Lazy - Dave Brown (current MA in Media Arts) and friendly neighbourhood anarchist Sean Baxter - also blasts its wares in the ubiqutous Bucketrider. A band of many incarnations over the years, two Bucketrider models persist in a cacophonic rapture of chrome, brass and rubber. Each is resplendent in the aura of Jazz Rock that is guaranteed to turn your beard into a mass of pubic hair. (Think about it.) Hear tracks from their new CDs out now through Doctor Jim's Records.
Tim Catlin runs the ECHO CHAMBER show on 3CR and is a current undergraduate in Media Arts. Tim will be performing a live solo set with his amazing sheets of endless drones derived from harmonic manipulations of re-tuned E-Bow guitars - most recently heard as part of the Immersion programme. After attempting to play his unique music in a range of 'chill-out rooms' he is not in any mood for cruddy hippy shit, so don't give him a hard time because he will kill you.
Thomas Couzinier hails from Paris and is a current MA in Media Arts. his work was also heard in Immersion, and you may have seen him playing live with Atomic Fuzz and his brother Gregoire. For SCREEN NOISE 2, he embarks on a solo journey to see what fish lie deep in that ocean.
© Philip Brophy 1999
PhONEYSMACk & 2-STROKE SONS & DAUGHTERS OF THE TWEAK FREAK
2-Stroke is Adam Milburn & Simon Walbrook - both current undergraduates in Media Arts. While they have matured with the prerequisite facial hair, do not let this distract you from their amazing amalgam of blunted beats, squeaking synths and heavenly harmonies. It's the hip with the hop, plus some occasional hippity-hop which clearly does not stop the rock.
Ph2 is a live surround sound project by Philip Brophy & Philip Samartzis, both lecturers in Media Arts. Ph2 will be releasing their set - "Bionic Blue Bubblegum Slurpee" - shortly on Sound Punch Records. Honeysmack is Dave Haberfeld - a Media Arts MA graduate and director of Smelly Records. A lonely boy since his mother dropped him off the edge of a velour couch, Dave has been trying to be popular with releases like the current smash CD "Flick Bubble".
RETURN OF THE TWEAK FREAK sees the unveiling of a new mutation - Phoneysmack - as Ph2 take their new set and fuse it with the abdominal bubbling of Honeysmack. The resultant fusion is designed to eradicate the world totally of all form of drugs so as to get high on frequency vibrations, man. Influenced by Simon Townsend's WONDERWORLD!; constructed with Valvoline; and dedicated to Christopher George in WILD IN THE STREETS. And remember: if you like any STAR WARS movie - you're a dickhead. Please take that personally.
© Philip Brophy 1999 - so sue me.
Contents of this page © Philip Brophy unless otherwise specified