Sound Design is the New Score

When composer Carter Burwell, most famous for his collaboration with the Coen Brothers, said: 'I like to try to put as little music as I can in the films that I work on, and convince directors of that' (2003: 196), he possibly didn't imagine being credited in a film as musically bare as No Country for Old Men (2007), but he certainly expressed the attitude of many other composers who constantly find themselves under pressure to underscore and interpret aspects of film content that need neither emphasis nor explanation.

Music in film is trying too hard these days, and even those who are not film music specialists are starting to notice it. This can be felt not only in the inevitability of scoring every action/transition/emotional/suspense scene, but also in the stubborn determination to fire all of the musical weapons all the time. So no wonder that an increasing number of composers are trying to resist this trend and convince directors to use less music in their films, knowing instinctively that this will not only benefit the film itself but also their own efforts to create effective scores.

At the same time, not having music in a film does not necessarily mean condemning it to islands of dialogue surrounded by silence (not that there is anything wrong with this either, as Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke and many others have proved); it can also mean further expanding the approach initiated by Walter Murch, Alan Splet, David Lynch and other sound mavericks who have created imaginative, suggestive and evocative soundscapes by subverting Hollywood rules of postproduction, availing themselves of the plethora of expressive possibilities provided by an elaborate sound design. It is telling, though, that in most cases this practice has been inspired by music itself and is related to an approach to film which recognises the musical potential in the rhythmic, kinetic and affective features of a number of film's constituent elements - structuring, editing, camera movement, movement in the diegesis, speech, etc. - and which deploys them with the intention of utilising their 'musical' properties. In the context of this approach, sound has a special place not only because it carries the strongest musical potential but is also most capable of bringing out and realising this potential from film's visual components. I will illustrate this point with examples from films by Gus Van Sant and Darren Aronofsky, representative of both sides of the aesthetic divide between the shot and the cut.¹

Terminating his flirtation with the mainstream, Gus Van Sant's last four films were inspired by the work of European 'transcendentalist' Béla Tarr, and are driven by aesthetic adventurousness as much as by existential angst. Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2004) and Paranoid Park (2007) address problems of cinematic space, time and movement in different ways, but they all have one thing in common: a contentment with cinematic 'nowness' (as opposed to a build-up to 'what comes next'). This quality inevitably reveals another dimension of the cinematic presence embodied in the 'music of here' - the sound of a place and moment which envelops and opens itself to the characters in their stillness or continuous movement.

Generally more kinetic than the transcendental style usually displays,² and thus more attentive to the array of sounds produced by or discovered through movement, Van Sant's approach often results in a particular type of audio-visual musique concrète. The most striking example of an audio-visual musical effect achieved without using any actual music happens in Gerry, in a four-minute-long scene in which Matt Damon's and Casey Affleck's characters (both called Gerry) walk beside each other through the desert, their heads bouncing in the frame, in phase, out of phase, in phase again, while the visual rhythm of their movement is accentuated by the crackling sound their boots make on the ground. It is clearly a homage to two similar scenes in Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), but condenses their respective visual and sonic emphases into audio-visual music of continuous, rhythmic and deeply mesmerising...