If the camera is the eyes of the film, then surely the soundtrack is its voice. Overshadowed for so long by film stars, directors and cinematography, the film soundtrack is finally starting to be heralded by film fans everywhere. Whilst names like Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone have been hot on the lips of film fans around the world for years, names like Jonny Greenwood, Harry Escott and Daniel Hart are just starting to make the rounds. In tentative whispers, of course. Nevertheless, it seems that as the detritus left by the golden era composers has finally settled, people are starting to pay attention once more to things a little more musical in film.
More than ever, it is the moment for the film soundtrack, or score. The interest surrounding so many films at the moment is wrapped up around its director, stars and composer in equal measure. And with the early release of film soundtracks, we are able to take a part of the movie memory home with us much sooner than we can the film DVD. When we listen to the music from specific movie scenes, we are able to relive a part of the story, to feel the world around us slipping away and find ourselves in a place altogether different. Despite the altogether experimental nature of modern film soundtracks, it seems that it is not enough for modern audiences. We want more and expect musicians to be a lot more creative in their musical choices. We expect to be hooked to films in increasingly different ways and are looking to their scores to facilitate this need. And the musicians are more than happy to comply.
Our experiences with film are predominantly coloured by sound, musical or otherwise. How a scene is scored or notated by noise directly affects the way in which we perceive it. If we see a happy couple smiling at each other, we take the scene as we see it. However, if we watch the scene underscored by a sinister, brooding string section, then we read much more into the action. Music says what images cannot tell us. It allows us to enter into the mind frame of the characters and understand better their intentions.
Filmmakers and musicians have started to play with music and sound in order to allow us to reenact our favourite films in altogether different ways. Alfonso Cuaron’s space epic Gravity is being re-released without Steven Price’s huge score, allowing viewers to experience the terror and vastness of space in a way more true to reality. Viewing Sandra Bullock hurtling through the empty blackness in complete silence is a thing far more terrifying than with accompanying music telling us how to feel. The scenes will be rooted much more firmly in reality; they will be all the more frightening because they will feel more valid.
On the other side of things, Nicolas Winding Refn’s critically acclaimed Drive was recently rescored as part of a project by BBC Radio 1. Whilst Cliff Martinez’s synth score was almost as iconic as the film itself, a number of musicians took it upon themselves to rescore the film’s narrative. Announced to what seemed like public outcry, Refn backed the project, claiming that “you can’t own creativity”. Quite. The soundtrack was received with similar praise to the ‘80s inspired pop original, never getting in the way of the film’s narrative. Whilst the experiment in this sense was a success, the whole point of a rescoring is to give the film something new, to shed light on the narrative in an alternate way and allow the audience to perceive things not present in the original.
The whole Drive and Gravity things really got me thinking. If we were to take classic scores and mix them up, what would happen? Would our favourite films remain the same or we would view cinema in a much different light? And, if film music became interchangeable, could we ever claim ‘one’ film to be the best of a certain genre? Or would it not be more appropriate to view films on a sliding scale, to interpret and reinterpret them according to our musical tastes?
We all know that David Lynch looks at things in a way a little different to the rest of us. That differentiation runs right down to his musical choices. Whilst his composer of choice, Angelo Badalamenti, was responsible for scoring a large number of Lynch’s films, the director also had a lot of creative input in the process, stamping his brand on the musicality. In films like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, we can hear the specific brand of Lynchian strangeness, manifested in the late night blues and brooding synth numbers. But what if we were to shake things up a little bit? Lynch’s film world is undoubtedly one of the strangest in cinema and could be even more offbeat when accompanied by something as upbeat as the Benny Hill soundtrack. Whilst the artificial joviality of the music would no doubt highlight a ridiculousness in Lynch’s work, it could make his underworlds all the more strange.
Whilst making Lynch’s films farcical may seem ridiculous, some films could genuinely benefit from a change in sound. Horror films like The Conjuring, A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween frighten us because they contain a lot of sudden loud noises. Were we to take the music away completely, we would find the films which were genuinely frightening and sort through those which were not. The removal of music would spotlight the film narrative and cinematographic mastery. We would no longer be slave to inexplicably draughty houses.
The adaptation or removal of music from a film is an incredibly evocative act. Repositioning our perception of the narrative arc, it can turn a good film into a great film, or a great film into a stinker. When we think about film, we should not just focus on what is in front of our eyes but also, what enters our ears. More than ever, it controls our relationship with cinema.