(spoiler free)
Score composers possess a greater understanding of picture and theme than most other creatives I’ve studied. I would go as far to say that should they become film critics, I would sadly become an obsolete artifact. Their ability to internalize theme is simply remarkable. I could endlessly listen to their thoughts on scenes, tones and narratives or whatever – so much so that it’s a shame they’re relegated to only an hour and a half. ‘Score: A Film Music Documentary’ is an invitation to their world and history, and is a chance to witness the birth of a pure kind of cinema. These are the masters who harmonize between the visuals and the silence and merge style into substance. Their creations are an extension of art within an entirely different medium – making it an almost impossible kind of magic – and the technical word for this is Ekphrasis. This is a film where everyone involved is bursting with excitement to greet you at the door and to guide you through their exhibitions since it is so rare that they get a visitor such as yourself – in fact, this is the first documentary made on the matter.
Given a composer’s almost subconscious presence in the movie watching experience, their work is often assumed as being simply reactive or supplementary to the visuals on the foreground of our conscious experience. This is wrong, and now there’s a whole doc to prove it. For starters, theirs is not a comfortable position – not easy per se but I assumed that by learning the skill set one would always have dependable work just stringing along melodies. Composer Trapanese once awed at how Hans Zimmer turned the orchestra into a rock band, at how he re-imagined the orchestra to fit his more emotionally tonal and not so melodic style. Despite this, Zimmer is quite humble about his talents. So much so that he worries that the tap may someday turn off. Think about that: one of the most renowned contemporary film composers is unsure of where the music actually comes from. And when you listen to a Zimmer score you feel this unpredictability because every film is a constant practice to keep his unreliable tap flowing. It’s what got us a rock theme out of violins for Pirates of the Caribbean’s theme and Inception’s dramatic sci-fi terrain collapsing music, made only out of five different instruments playing the same one note (a French horn, a Bassoon, a Trombone, a Tuba and a Timpani) (a.k.a. the BWAAAM noise).
On ‘The Hateful Eight’ Quentin Tarantino would brief Ennio Morricone to write a mood piece, giving him only the theme of snow and nothing more. Here, Morricone was free to invent the music but felt burdened with the undefined expectations he imagined Tarantino to have. Ultimately Tarantino was pleased with the piece and Morricone only had one thing to say, “I just want to see how he has applied my music because I haven’t seen the film yet. That’s the only thing”[1]. Tarantino is famous for his needle drop style of music utilization but for the first time in his career he opted for an original score, one that would reverse his method of applying music to a scene and instead apply the scene to the music and its mood/theme – making for some of his most atmospheric and cohesive work yet. Morricone’s career is littered with the best examples of films with visuals influenced by the sound and emotion. Though, this doesn’t just go for Morricone – all great composers go beyond simply reacting to the images; they create new reactions; they change, develop, compliment and enhance the image. That said, nobody was better than Morricone for creating that rare, raw emotion with which the director could build from like a foundation.
Vangelis also played a big part in influencing the shooting of ‘Blade Runner’. Both he and Morricone, for the Dollars Trilogy, were masters of environmental world building. Bringing sounds from their world’s unseen places, they subliminally deepen our understanding of the environment, almost like auditory exposition in each scene and sequence they appear in. They are filmmakers working in places the director cannot reach. Morricone built a ramping pace from the pounding of a horse’s gallop in the desert west, while the jazz vibe in ‘Blade Runner’ builds a world full of colliding instruments and chaotic order, bringing with it an unpredictable brilliance where archaic tools conflict with newer models. The angelic, womanly sounds in The Ecstasy of Gold plays beautifully in the graveyard scene, and I think writer Andrew Carroll has a brilliant passage about how Morricone goes further with this idea:
“Ennio Morricone’s main theme often comes in like a screaming wind through a canyon. Designed to sound like the corpses in the cemetery are laughing in the final shoot out the iconic screeching of human voices, flutes and ocarinas mimic coyote howls. …A screaming choir marks Tuco as unpredictable while a flute assures audiences of Blondie’s natural calm while ocarinas mark out Angel Eyes as the most sinister of the trio.”[2]
Every instrument used is a lexicon, a branch of language with unique fields and its own syntax. Done well, they seem effortless – but it’s only accomplished if you know the language thoroughly, like poets do.
This idea also extends to a score’s production in the real world. Within the first few minutes of ‘Score: A Film Music Documentary’, you’ll be introduced to Marco Beltrami, composer of ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘The Homesman’. He’ll show you a piano apparatus on some desert rocks. This construction captures the sound of wind, fusing it into their score. Recorded at a distance, the hammers strike telephone wires so when the microphone captures the vibrations, they’ve traveled through wind and steel to get there. And when you hear the music, you can tangibly feel it. This is experimental art. More than a pianist, they’re mini-adventurers. Cinema has the power to capture a physical moment and freeze it for a literal replay; a score captures something more abstract, melding the real world noise with the world of film. It’s impossible to touch, the unreal is made real. Seeing this is like lifting the veil on a magic trick to then see a magician pulling off an even greater magic trick.
Even the most uninspired blockbusters have passion teeming in the score development. ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ composer Steve Jablonsky will out-passion the most cynical critic in proving that the magic of cinema can be found in the Transformers franchise (with the caveat of it being somewhat shadowed by the larger ugly chaos of its production). Somehow, there’s a wide eyed sense of joy in witnessing the culmination of elements that give us a moody mega robot death villain CGI sequence. It may not be a complex or deep subject but the process of getting there is still inspiring. To appreciate sound on this level gives me the motivation to reflect on previously bad movie experiences with a new light. I even began to re-evaluate and appreciate ‘E.T.: Extra Terrestrial’, a movie I have long loathed and disregarded since childhood. If there was ever a case to see the best in all movies, this documentary is the incendiary starting point.
My advice is to see this in a cinema – if you can – a great, thunderous, volume cranked to level 11, Dolby Atmos, “I can hear the sweat bounce of a cello string” theatre. This is a platter of the greatest moments in film music history. You can imagine the grandeur. Therefore, you must feast upon it ravenously with voracious, attentive ears. Personally, I experienced ‘Score: A Film Music Documentary’ through a pair of high quality headphones and each experience was far more tremendous than on a TV with mediocre audio. If you have a 5.1 Surround Sound system then this just made your top 5 test list – perhaps just below ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Dunkirk’. The subject matter is experience enough. The documentary doesn’t do much else beside giving you the key to experience its scenes to their fullest potential in one compendious sitting (which is a pretty valid excuse for a doc really).
I found that there’s no better way to truly appreciate the weight of a motif than by feeling it interactively. I shall keep the particular movie a secret and let you discover the moment for yourself, but I fell in love with the triumph of one particular example as I experienced its progression to crescendo in one rushing swoop. The screen displays the notes played as they rise and fall, painting a picture of our emotions moving with the rising scale of the music.
A motif is a powerful tool since the effect given is both an artistic and technical/theoretical accomplishment – a statement that would sum up most discoveries or achievements for anything in the film industry. And everything about a score is one part artistic and an equal part technical, especially as we progress deeper into the digital age.
Recently, Hans Zimmer put theory into practice by utilizing something called a Shepard Tone effect for the ‘Dunkirk’ soundtrack. He created the illusion that a music loop was continually escalating in volume and pitch by manipulating a pattern in the octaves. He separated the loop into three octaves (these are like pitch): a lower one, a middle one and a higher one. Then, by always having the bottom two octaves ascend in volume while the higher one descends, which in turn becomes the bottom octave in the new loop, he has created a loop where two thirds of the sound are perpetually rising in a coil of anxiety and tension unlike anything we’ve witnessed before. Once you’re in Zimmer’s loop it’s impossible to escape, like you’re perpetually falling upwards, forever fighting an uphill battle, like the boys of Dunkirk.
All of this is to tiptoe around the fact that music is still an illusion. Paradoxically, immersion and realism relies on the illusion of music. Film has an absurd realism. This is basic film stuff, but it’s important to understand the fine line a composer rides when trying to immerse you in their fabricated film worlds. Everything about this article, and the documentary itself, which better explores the timeline of scoring and the careers therein, shows how your favourite experiences are complicated affairs full of creative artists working passionately in service a greater film. ‘Score: A Film Music Documentary’ is a brilliant vignette on the composer’s everlasting devotion to the audience. It’s a history of the art and a catalyst for inspiration. It asks you to become inspired, to relive your favourite experiences and embrace their creator’s finest moments. And, better still, rest assured that they’re not even close to being done yet.
Written by Joseph McFarlane
Rating – 8.5/10
Question: What is your all time favourite film score?
(Leave your answers in the comments section below!)
Thanks for reading this review and please let us know what you thought about the movie! Leave a comment below or drop us a tweet over at @HCMovieReviews.
Thanks to Aim Publicity for screening access
‘Score: A Film Music Documentary’ comes to DVD & VoD April 2nd
[1] – http://www.thequietus.com/articles/19432-ennio-morricone-interview
[2] – https://www.headstuff.org/film/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-at-50/
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