FilmStack Challenge Of The Month #4: my consideration on effective uses of sound in cinema.

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where do we go from here?

June ended. You know what that means here in FilmStackLand?

Another month, another challenge. FILMSTACKOFTHEMONTHCHALLENGE! Together we are doing deep dives. We are writing the books. We are doing a consideration on how to make it all better. We are making this scenius hum. The Think Tank is banging the drum. You can dance along. We are marching on.

There is now a regular changing of the curators of FSOTMC. Swabreen Bakr had the baton tossed to her from Sophie whom I had tossed the baton to prior. On and on it will go. Each curator has their stamp. I hope it stays that way and we avoid the ruts or grooves.

Swabreen put out yesterday:

“For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.”

“This challenge is designed to get you to think about an element in film that is invisible—but sound shapes the image as much as the image shapes sound.”

I like the idea of the FilmStack Challenge Of The Month being a sprint. We should move fast to answer it. It should not be labor but a burst of joy. Or at least that is my attitude. You can do yours however you want of course.

They are prompts. The things we look at, contemplate, and release in a single sitting. Yesterday didn’t work for me as once my day begins, I never get it back. Today, we share coffee and share the challenge.

I have to confess. I don’t think about sound that much. Or I tend to think about it when there is something wrong. I saw SINNERS at AMC theater and the left front speaker that was supposed to supply the bass had a rattle. It made me angry, but no one else was paying attention to the sound because of the fun they were having looking at the screen. We look more than we listen.

I’d like to think about sound and cinema in different ways than I do. I know I have room to grow there. But it is rare that a film demands me to reconsider my relationship to what I hear. They do it with structure. They do it with life — my relationship to the world and other people. They do it with image and framing and composition. They do it with style and design. But they do they do it with sound? Not much.

I have to confess again. I saw DUNE 2 on the plane. I was angry with DUNE 1, so that was my rebel action. To watch such a deliberate big screen extravaganza on the worst screen possible. Now ain’t that radical? But it made me then go see it on an Imax screen so I could be immersed in it all, but particularly the sound. The film worked better for me to treat it as an art object and let the narrative go. I just wanted to look and listen and forget what it was saying, or trying to say. It made me think about the sound, and I was grateful for that. But I don’t think DUNE 2 actually wanted us to think about sound. It wanted to impress us. It wanted to impress us with their use of… everything. That is something different.

Godard has always asked us to think about sound. To think about the choices he is making. To think about what we think is normal or different and why it is so. And he does it generally in a fun way. At least early period JLG does.

In film school, as I was cycling through my crisis of faith in cinema (I was only there for about 18 months), as I was moving from narrative to documentary to experimental, my teacher in that experimental time, Abigail Child, encouraged us all to check out Russ Meyers films for his use of sound, or rather his use of the sound of his own farts for the sound of fucking. And yeah, that rewired me a bit, but I was glad to have the excuse. And even gladder to have Film Forum to program them all.

My early attitude to sound in movies was just identifying the obvious.

Voiceover — thank you Terry Malick for DAYS OF HEAVEN — and the power of reflection. Does anything convey authorship as much voiceover? I had such a good experience first encountering that film. I was young, maybe 15, and in love with cinema, but couldn’t yet confess it. I saw it with my Mom and Stepdad — and it was rare that I did anything with just the two of them. We saw it in a beautiful cinema and we sat in the balcony. Perhaps I had never sat in the balcony of a movie theater before. And what a beautiful movie. And what a great voiceover. I now of course compare and contrast it all to that, and nothing measures up.

Source Music or soundtrack cues. It meant so much to hear the rock and roll I loved in films. Jumping Jack Flash by the Stones in MEAN STREETS. Born To Be Wild in EASY RIDER. In the beginning it felt authentic and an important signifier that the movie was for me. But it quickly became the opposite. With SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER it felt to me that the movies were advertising for the music, even if it was the other way around. THE BIG CHILL killed Motown for me, locking that white middle class cast with that music. Source music may make us feel good when we recognize it in a movie, but I was a bit more ambitious. I knew I wanted something different when I would get to do my own films.

Score. I think I saw CLOCKWORK ORANGE soon after DAYS OF HEAVEN. It gave a different context to the way the music worked with the narrative. Of course, that is something Kubrick generally did and now with certain compositions — Beethoven’s Ninth and Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra — it is his images I see when I hear. In that same period I experienced TAXI DRIVER for the first time and it tuned me towards film composers, particularly Bernard Herrmann.

Sound design. Sorry I had to mention Russ Meyer’s farts earlier, but that is what I learned through my official education. I was done with film school by the time I thought of sound design. I loved that both ERASERHEAD and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER made me ill by design. Sure, it was also the image and narrative, but sound was the element that pushed me over the edge each time.

It took awhile longer for me to contemplate how score and design together can change how I enter or hold a film. Both RUN LOLA RUN and then much later GOOD TIME woke me to a more confrontational embrace, with score and design meshing together.

I didn’t start thinking of the mix until I got to be the mixing studio. When I worked in New Line’s mailroom I got to drop something off to Wes Craven when he was mixing something (I am not sure what it was) but it was sort of thrilling to hear. Once I got in there on my own films, I initially played it as a puzzle — what’s missing — then as the opposite sort — what’s too much or cliched — and ultimately focused mostly on the continuum — what is the ebb and flow.

To recognize how little we asked to think about sound, I don’t think anyone has ever asked me what is my favorite sound design, score, or source music in any of my films. For that matter, and although it is not what Swabreen asked, no one has ever asked me that in general. I am glad there is a never ending supply of things to think about.

I think the favorite source cue in any of the films I’ve helped is in Hal Hartley’s SIMPLE MEN. I produced that film, but I was also the music supervisor and post supervisor. I did all the licensing of music cues and really enjoyed it. Hal wanted Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing for the dance sequence and we got it. And yeah, that sequence was a homage to Godard’s dance sequence in A Band Apart.

It is hard to say what is the best soundtrack for a film I did. I pretty much love everything about AMERICAN SPLENDOR. The source cues were essentially picked by Harvey Pekar. We never thought we’d get any of them because we didn’t have the budget, but we put in the cues Harvey loved. And then Colin Callender at HBO said license them. And we got to have Marc Anthony Thompson cover “Ain’t It Peculiar “ for the end credit. And Mark Suozzo’s score is such a perfect fit. Linda Cohen was the music supervisor/

ADVENTURELAND is chock full of some of the great songs of its period. And it has fun with the selection. And yeah, Yo La Tengo did the score. Although no one really has seen LOVE GOD outside of its audience at midnight when it played Sundance the 60+ Lubricated Goat cues are a perfect fit with the film. Tracy McKnight was the music supervisor on both.

These all had great soundtracks.

Check out Frank Grow’s LOVE GOD on YouTube.