FILM sound

Having just completed an online film course which included doing some practical exercises on adding soundtrack, and coincidentally watching Takovsky’s The Sacrifice for the first time, it seemed a good time to collect together a few links to film sound. This is both how sound is used in film and films that have sound themes like Coppola’s The Conversation. The links centre on Coppola’s The Conversation and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.

* Sound Upon Sound: The Conversation

Clair Norelli, PopOptiq, 10 Jan 2011

This is the work of Walter Murch editor and sound designer. Just re-watched it for about the 8th time and the more you watch it the more you see things, or see things you’ve had pointed out..

* “He’d Kill Us If He Had The Chance”: Coppola’s The Conversation and Film Sound

Post from Phillip Brophy, The Seventh Art, 11 Feb 2008

* The Conversation 1972 Francis Ford Coppola
– under the category of : Distortion and Misperception

He’s done a set of film sound posts on different sound themes, which can be found here:

* Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

* Listening to The Conversation

David C Ryan, Identity Theory, 10 March 2012

An essay on The Conversation which does not deal how sound is used in the film, but here just the same.

* The Sound Film Man

FilmSound.0rg does Walter Murch

* With The Conversation, Walter Murch made the editor the author

Charles Bramesco, The Dissolve, 20 April 2015

Which links to other The Conversation posts and a forum discussion on The conversation’s “…sound, music, timing, and more.”

* The Power of Sound and Editing (The Conversation and Psycho)

Wael Khairy, The Cinephile Fix, 17 Nov 2009

* The Act of Listening #16: Tarkovsky and mystery

Rob Szeliga, Sound designer, 17 December 2016

* Sound in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice

Interview with Owe Svensson, Swedish Sound mixer

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Musical offering: the law of quotation

Julia Shpinitskaya, Proceedings of the World Congress of International Association for Semiotics, 2014

* Essay by filmmaker Dimitar Kutmanov on how the use of sound creates narrative space

* Compositions of Crisis: Sound and Silence in the Films of Bergman and Tarkovsky
Phoebe Pua, August 2013

Thesis, 145 pp.

Abstract

This thesis examines seven films from the cinemas of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei
Tarkovsky—Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961),
Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963), and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979),
Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986).

These films were chosen as they represent the deepest periods of two directors’
engagements with the possible death of God and the subsequent loss of intrinsic
existential meaning—topics with which this thesis is principally concerned.

As a starting point, this thesis argues that the films present the silence of God as the primary indicator of God’s absence from the human world. Becoming aware of this silence thus causes one to interrogate religious certainties which have hitherto been taken to be timeless and true. This thesis then contends that, when faced with this silence and its implications, Bergman desperately sought evidence of God’s existence while Tarkovsky unyieldingly maintained an attitude of faith.

The directors’ progressions toward these contrasting positions are evident through the uses of sound elements in their films. As Bergman unsuccessfully pursued evidence of God’s existence, the soundscapes in his four films become increasingly minimal. The sparse use of sound reveals Bergman’s conception of a Godless void. On the other hand, metaphysical silence in Tarkovsky’s films was not perceived as emptiness. Instead, “silence” in his films was, paradoxically, often depicted through complex layers of sounds. Presented as manifestations of the metaphysical, the sounds of “silence” in Tarkovsky’s films consequently become affirmations of faith.

Through this sound-based approach to film analysis, this thesis sets out to explain why Bergman and Tarkovsky understood metaphysical silence so differently by examining how they portrayed literal silences.

PHOTOGRAPHY topology meets typology

The Topography of Tears: A Stunning Aerial Tour of the Landscape of Human Emotion Through an Optical Microscope


~ From Blake to biochemistry, “proof that we cannot put our feelings in one place and our thoughts in another.”


* Maria Popova in Brainpickings takes a look at Rose-Lynn Fisher’s The Topography of Tears.


Does a photographic topology come under typology? Topology meets typology?


There are a couple of previous post on typology written when I first came across the subject in 2009: various links. The names to look out for are Karl Blossfedt and Bernd and Hilla Becher, mentioned in Typology {1} Links to their work in there.