FILM AND TELEVISION

"The Sound of Silence"

The film, TV and advertising industries manage to sell lots of CDs - sometimes even prompting the re-issue of a set of classical extracts and other times leading to the re-release of an old track which didn't quite make it first time around.  Many recent film soundtracks consist of entire songs, with a decreasing emphasis on the 'incidental' music or those silences which punctuate and underline the images.  Even in the so-called silent era, the pre-talkie films were rarely silent, music being a vital accompaniment to the drama happening on screen.  Silence is a key tone in the film composer's palette.  Bernard Herrmann aptly deployed it to intensify the suspense as the heroine of Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) robs her employer's safe, for example.

Herrmann, whose career began with his score for Citizen Kane and ended with Taxi Driver, was also tuned in to the eerie, weird potential of the theremin - an instrument played by waving a hand over an electronic field - in his strange and compelling soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).  Music's role in the cinema continues to flourish as past eras' popular melodies are replayed, such as Neil Jordan's harnessing of The Crying Game for that film's narrative of politics and sexuality; the subversion achieved by using the title track of Blue Velvet, for that film's probing beneath the surfaces of middle-class America;  right through to Pulp Fiction and the recent spate of disco movies. 

Many of cinema's recent music tracks consist of music which has had a previous life, music with in-built, off-the-shelf associations and connections to other times and places - the less subtle looking like a feature-length chunk of MTV.  This was not the route taken by Herrmann, who scored many of Hitchcock's greatest films.  Often overlooked in critical discussion of cinema, a recent installation by Douglas Gordon, at the Atlantis Gallery in East London, refocuses attention on sound, in this case using Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo for his Feature Film.

Replacing Hitchcock's images with his own film of James Conlon conducting an orchestra in a new recording of Herrmann's score, Gordon's camera concentrates on the conductor's face, his gestures, sometimes tightening in on a close-up on the conductor's eyes - recalling for us the opening images of Vertigo.  Projected in a large, dark space, Herrmann's swirling music swells in the darkened space and envelops with its eerie fusion of plaintive motifs, wailing intensity and deep throbbing tones.  A gradual awareness of other dark shadowy figures watching a silent version of Vertigo, projected on a smaller screen on a side wall, creates a divided loyalty, splitting the focus between the two screens, oscillating between different attractions. 

Gordon's re-entry into Vertigo's textures, through separating out the sound and the image, fracturing the familiar seamlessness of the cinema experience which fuses the two, adds to the impact of both systems.  This act of creative recall shocks us into a recognition of how sound and image operate.  It's about disconnecting to make new connections.  In contrast to Gus Van Sant's irritating and plodding re-make of Psycho, Gordon's installation is a deconstructive and seductive re-interpretation for Hitchcock's centenary.

Stephanie McBride