This is one of the suggestions I make to directors: if you think of sound when you’re writing the script, then you’ve really integrated it into your movie. It’s easy to do that since sound is so suggestive and so capable of creating imagery. It’s also a lot cheaper than a complicated shot; not that you can replace a complicated shot, but it’s really best to integrate sound in the beginning. When Pudovkin found out about talking pictures, he said it would be the end of cinema. He thought films would become theatrical. In a way, he’s right, in that that’s a very normal use of sound: to take dialogue and make a stageplay, not have anything going off in a different direction…. I think what happens with Gus’s films and other films we talked about is that you take a sound that’s a complete juxtaposition of what’s going on in the image and it forces you to listen — you have to look to the sound for the cues of what’s going on. Even if the sound doesn’t give you a specific direction, it gives you a sort of broader experience than if it was just the dialogue being repeated over and over again. I think that filmmakers are having trouble making this break. They think of film as a visual medium. I’ve worked with a director recently who said, “I want a soundtrack like Elephant.” I said, “Fine, but you gotta be ready for what that means.” This was a studio film, and I thought, the studio isn’t going to go for this. Sure enough, they didn’t.
FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - # 1 - Sound Auteur
Posted 1 year ago
