Introduction/ Screen Sound Theory – S4S : Week 1

Vertov and sound montage

Institutional Mode of Representation : subservience of cinematic technique to narrative

We looked at ‘You Were Never Really Here’ last year and its use of syncretic sound, we also improvised a score and I later re-constructed it as seen in this blog post : https://benthorn.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/05/29/sound-for-screen/

Clarify for me the role of re-recording mixer versus the role of sound designer.
You’re credited as doing both tasks .
It’s a nebulous area. The origin of the term “sound designer” goes back to Apocalypse Now when I was trying to come up with what I had actually done on the film. Because Francis had wanted to do the film in this quadraphonic format, which had never been done before, that seemed to require from me an analysis of the design of the film in a three-dimensional space of the sound. I thought, “Well, if an interior designer can go into an architectural space and decorate it interestingly, that’s sort of what I am doing in the theater. I’m taking the three- dimensional space of the theater and decorating it with sound.” I had to come up with an approach, specifically for Apocalypse Now, that would make that work coherently. In my case, that was where “sound designer,” the word, came from.

Later on, people appropriated it, which is certainly their prerogative, but it also has become known as the person who designs interesting, unique sounds. So if you have a sound that you can’t get from a library, that you can’t go out and record yourself, but that you have to concoct out of a different number of contributing sounds, then that becomes what the sound designer does. For instance, the sound of the flashbulbs in Raging Bull that Frank Warner came up with and the sound of the punches that he came up with in Raging Bull were unique. They were not simply punches or flashbulbs. They had a strong emotional component to them. So in that sense he was a sound designer, although he’s the last person in the world to use that term. But that’s what he was doing.

Walter Murch on the term and history of ‘Sound Designer’ and how its changed.

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

Tarkovsky

I watched the The Color of Pomegranates last year and only recently found out that the musician Nicolas Jaar made an unofficial alternative soundtrack what I need to listen to.