FilmStack Challenge of the Month #4

Some thoughts on sound.

I’m sitting at the airport catching up on all my Substack newsletters, as one does, and

Swabreen Bakr

’s FilmStack Challenge of the Month made me want to put out a quick little extra post this week.

What’s a FilmStack and/or a Challenge of the Month, you ask?

Read on for Swabreen’s description and challenge:

There's a growing community here on Substack of people who are creating and developing new ways of making and engaging with film, the business of filmmaking, exhibition, and distribution.

Ted Hope launched the concept of a monthly FilmStack Challenge as a way for film writers and enthusiasts across Substack to collaborate on solutions for cinema's future. See Challenge #1 and Challenge #2 here. Last month Sophie built upon her concept of a Cultural Gym for Challenge #3.

The concept is simple: writers, like you, respond to the monthly prompt on their own newsletters, creating a decentralized brainstorming session. You can participate by posting on your own Substack, in the comments here, or anywhere else (just link back so others can find all the responses).

For this month's challenge, I've been thinking a lot about sound in film.

For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.

I love this challenge. Sound design is vital to a film, yet somehow often overlooked. When it’s done well, it creates an immersive and hypnotic experience, transforming the moving image into something else entirely — it’s a kind of alchemy.

Ted Hope

has a good take on these FilmStack Challenges:

I like the idea of the FilmStack Challenge Of The Month being a sprint. We should move fast to answer it. It should not be labor but a burst of joy.

I’m going to take his advice. Here are a few films that immediately jumped to mind when considering epic sound/sound design in film.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria.

This is an entire film built around a peculiar sound. Tilda Swinton plays a woman who’s woken up one night by a strange metallic bang, and then becomes borderline obsessed with trying to replicate it, enlisting the help of a sound engineer.

The sound feels primal, mystical even, and hearing it seems to lead Swinton’s character to cross some kind of threshold where she’s able to experience time and memory in unusual ways.

For the first two hours of the film, I was convinced the noise she’d heard was the/a Big Bang, a cosmic creation sound that had caused a rip in the fabric of time. But then — no spoilers — something happens at the end that made me rethink it (note to self: maybe explore this more in an essay.)

It’s a lyrical and enigmatic film, one that I absolutely need to see again. I’ve only seen it once, in a theater with — sadly and ironically — a terrible sound system.

Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout.

This is another great strange one.

It opens with the sounds of a radio, then a didgeridoo over office buildings and office workers; white schoolchildren breathe in unison, then chant vowel sounds. It’s a film about colonization, the loss of innocence, and the power of nature.

The sounds of the Australian outback become sinister. The primordial drone of cicadas, the hissing of snakes. Roeg turns the soundscape into its own kind of language, one that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the nervous system.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.

The entire film is gorgeous, but I was completely transfixed by the beach scene, with the rhythmic sound of the waves getting louder and more ominous as Cleo rushes into the water after the children, until the viewer is completely enveloped by the sound (when you see it in a theater.)

The sound design heightens the tension and is so important to this pivotal scene that I told all of my friends they needed to see it in the theater or they would be doing the film a huge disservice.

Which I think is something that people don’t talk about enough — the experience of not just seeing a film in a theater but hearing it in a theater.

---

Okay, so much for a “quick little extra post.” I’ve now been stuck at the Philly airport for 7 hours, on and off the tarmac. My flight home to LA keeps getting delayed — first because of the AC, then the weather, now the crew’s work hour limits. The airport scene is a madhouse. One of the bathrooms had no toilet paper. In any of the stalls.

Is it me or should the sad face be on the left?

So in an attempt to preserve my sanity, here are a couple of films with amazing soundtracks and scores!

Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting.

I mean, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Eno?! So good.

And the placements are great too. The juxtaposition of Lou Reed’s ballad “Perfect Day” with Renton OD’ing is ironic and poignant and honestly…beautiful and perfect.

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.

Jarmusch’s own band SQÜRL did the score for this film and it’s great. The opening scene with their rendition of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love” with Madeline Follin on vocals sets up the vibe for the entire film — hypnotic, melancholic, and impossibly cool. It’s the perfect sonic gateway into Jarmusch’s vampire world.

As I’m looking at these last two back to back, I’m realizing something about what I want when it comes to a film — I want to be entranced. I want to be transported on a hallucinogenic journey that doesn’t just keep me from wanting to look at my phone, it makes me forget phones exist.

---

---

And as I’m about to leave this airport — not on a plane, but in a Lyft back to my mom’s house — I’m realizing what I want when it comes to an airline — I want to be transported to the destination for which I bought the ticket. I’m looking at you, American Airlines.

My flight was cancelled and they rebooked me on some crazy 2 stop journey tomorrow. Fingers crossed I make it out. Send some good vibes my way.

Until next time,

Tara