Berberian Sound Studio

saw this the other day and wasn't totally convinced. were the pressures applied to gilderoy really enough to send him over the edge? i dunno, i could have used a bit more explicit trauma there, but i'm mean like that. i did like the two voice artists though, and the bored secretary. also funny to see the bohman brothers popping up in the box hill documentary as a couple of walkers

The soundtrack is amazing.

amazingly bad review in the wire

abt how banal "some hauntology" is, like okay we're using that just as a genre descriptor now are we? yes of course it was by mark fisher

sounds like a really good imitation of italian horror soundtracks to me

Hauntology has been used as a genre descriptor for years. Surprised that MF would give this a bad review, though.

Finally, looks like this will be making the rounds in the US, or at least in my neck of the woods (SF Bay Area) come mid-February. I'm really trying not to spoil too much about this film for myself, as the keywords I know thus far being cheeky homage, Broadcast, sound design, and giallo are my equivalent to sugar-frosted crack, so I'm kinda relieved at the hype deflaters keeping me level headed, so I may traipse into the theatre with semi-low expectations and possibly emerge a happy man.

i don't think i got this

― Number None

felt this was bit of a let-down ... a collection of signifiers designed to please and flatter the genre-savvy, without doing any of the very precise character and narrative work that would make it more satisfying as a story.

― Ward Fowler

i am not entirely convinced it's not me though, wonder if a second watching or someone explaining what was happening in the last third would help my appreciation of the film

loved the photography and set design but it eventually got quite repetitive - how many times do we need to see meters and dials?

I'm with you. All feel, little substance.

and i am a big fan of everything mentioned on thread: broadcast, giallo, lynch, boogie nights, etc

Hauntology has been used as a genre descriptor for years. Surprised that MF would give this a bad review, though.

― emil.y, Tuesday, 15 January 2013 11:32 (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? i mean i've seen the term bandied about for, right, the better part of a decade, it feels like, but this is the first time i'd seen it used in a sentence where syntactically you could have slotted in 'post-punk' or something

also i really want to see this movie. i don't know if i want to hear the record, or at least not until i've seen this movie.

Would've thought a 30 min blast of a sdtrack be better than this.

Like Dancer in the Dark, great soundscapes blah in an otherwise bad film.

This was amazing! Although I found the end a bit sudden/unfulfilling on first viewing. I can't wait to see it again.

would have been great if this ended with about ten minutes of the rural england film, when they burned thru to that.

Yes, my only prob with this is that it peaked about 30 mins too early and then just kind of continued doing what it had always done. Toby was excellently cast, I thought. It just didn't quite resolve itself in a satisfactory way.

I watched it over the weekend and really enjoyed it, but felt a bit unfulfilled too. Like some people upthread I feel that I maybe on some level just didn't ~get it~, which I'm always happy to attribute to my own stupidity rather than any fault in the film.

Anyone want to advance their theory as to what happened?

why do i write "advance" when i simply mean "share"

i'm really going to have to watch it again soon to come up with a theory. were there parallels between the horror film and the actual film?

you mean plotwise? not that i can remember

his deep immersion in an intense and alien aesthetic experience - with its comparatively violent cultural logic - dislocated him from his own sense of place and identity - and he became hauntology.

^^ SPOILERS

yeah, plotwise.

it took me a while to realise he actually resided in the studio. when toby walks out of his room and starts walking on the twigs, i thought he'd either left the house and was walking outside or he was dreaming, which i guess is the intention maybe?

I'm pretty sure that scene was meant to resemble a giallo scene, like the genre/aesthetic he was working on daily and his life were beginning to blend into each other

it took me a while to realise he actually resided in the studio

yeah, that was a big oh duh! moment for me too. i like the idea of the studio itself being some sort of actively malevolent entity, somewhere between a haunted house and HAL, but i'd probably have to go at the movie like an axe to a melon to make it fit that theory

you might not have to stretch that theory that far (although not as a literal reading of course). note that at every recording session the guy pulling the switch - whose face you never see - was always wearing black leather gloves (and the pull resembling a giallo knife slash). I guess the studio could be read as a site of a psychological violence (going on strictly in Toby's head)

btw, and this may reveal some of my hilarious dumbness wrt not getting it, but was i right in assuming that the 'standard setting' (i.e. cinema presentation) is that the italian was unsubtitled?

In a way I'm kind of glad there was no big reveal or a big scare. The whole plot was rather understated, and really the only actual "horror" ultimately comes from Jones's feelings of alienation and the bullying nature of his employers. I think everyone's been there - feeling helpless in a new job or other environment can feel a little like going temporarily mad, and this reflected it.

I watched it with subtitles

The splitting of the screen/splitting of the protaganist's mind + personality seemed to be riffing on PERSONA to some extent

There were some really great shots in this film. I appreciated watching it on my mate's massive HD screen.

There were subtitles when I saw it at the cinema.

i fell asleep

so watching this without realising subtitles were an option was interesting

oops, ha, i feel slightly dumb for also assuming no subtitles. but it seemed to work!

yeah, for the first hour it doesn't seem odd at all. and the first time toby's dubbed into italian it's something really straightforward - "chi e? chi e? .... polizei!" - that you've just heard him say, so you get accustomed to the idea, and so then it just seems like a deliberate decision. especially since there's only about two minutes of continuous speech in the following 20 minutes.

this was great and the metafilm endgame was excellent. The persona nod was greatly appreciated.
I don't know if anyone's talked about it but where you could see the "haunted studio" corrupting the soundguy's mind and driving him mad, there's also a fun philosophical question at play that might obviate that interp: is sound inherently moral? Can sounds, divested of context, be neutral? Can they be evil?
Soundtrack is wonderful btw.

this went to midnights only p fast here

Been watching this again - definitely one of my favourite films of recent years (maybe not just of recent years).

with regard to forks' point - i think it is in the nature of sound in this film that it is projected on to space or objects, so as well as that memorable image of Gilderoy amidst the self-created cats-cradle of magnetic tape, or the oscilloscope, on-screen violence is seen via smashed vegetables, liquidised tomato juice etc. There's a bit where one of the Italian actresses looks at a smashed marrow on the floor and says 'I had hoped for a more dignified end than this', and Francesco says 'What are you complaining about? You can take it home and cook it.' For one, the vegetable has projected into it that which the sound represents on the film (the idea the sound is trying to convey - that of a splattered body or skull), for the other the object is separable from that notion. Is sound evil or neutral? It depends what you do with its source and its projection - to a certain extent, appropriately enough, a matter of faith, like transubstantiation.

Gilderoy is continually trying to reconfigure the spaces of the sound (from the relatively innocuous comment about trying to give an actress's scream more space by changing the mic, to the technical sound sheet, to the deranged magnetic tape), sources, projection, objects etc completely lose their original points of reference - any notion of 'truth' (the original source of a sound, in itself a vexed notion) is lost.

That said, of course, there are still plenty of suggestions that Gilderoy is existing in a certain mental state, of which the studio is only a projected fantasy. (The languages question is strange, sometimes Italians communicate with each other in English, sometimes in Italian - another example of fluctuating comprehension on the part of Gilderoy, but perhaps also fitting into notions of dubbing and the international casts of giallo film - yet another example of how the source of sound and its intended projection is played with).

the transubstantiation of sound... i like it.

i think this is probably 'my favourite film of recent years' tbh, even having watched it with the subtitles off

mb if i watch it with them on i will feel otherwise

That said, of course, there are still plenty of suggestions that Gilderoy is existing in a certain mental state, of which the studio is only a projected fantasy.

i came away from BSS somewhat confused about what, if anything, we were to take as "really real". the line between gilderoy's living space and the recording studio is very fuzzy, and we're given reason to connect both to the small shack that figures in his memories and the letters he periodically receives from his mother. meanwhile, the mutilated birds (ahem) she mentions having found on the ground clearly echo the women butchered in the film gilderoy watches and works on.

one way to read all this might be to suppose that gilderoy never leaves his garden shed. in it, he murders women, his fractured psyche constructing a safe "reality" in which the things he sees are merely a grisly exploitation film made by someone else. the decision-making parts of his mind become the film's overbearing producer & director. the silent soundmen are his hands, doing the dirty work. the sight and smell of the corpses around him are transformed into a tub of rotting refuse that no one ever takes out (note the weird intensity with which the camera stares into that pulpy abyss). and the soundbooth girls, of course, are his victims, trapped and screaming. the innocent, harmless gilderoy we see onscreen is only responsible for the resulting sounds, and even then only indirectly, in their recording and the treatment that attempts to turn them into something less horrible.

this interpretation would provide a somewhat satisfying (if predictable) "answer" to the film's puzzles, but is hard to definitively support. it's where i suspected things would go for the first hour or so, but rather than resolve itself, the film eventually dissolves into almost pure abstraction. suppose i need to watch it again.

Yeah, that's a fun reading too! It's a good sign that this is watchable through multiple lenses and still viable.

my recent short is playing in front of this when it opens in toronto next week.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiffbelllightbox/2013/2330002029

i didnt dig this. i was expecting chills and creepiness and it fell well short of the mark.

I was with this for a while, but then it started to seem more and more like a labored attempt at Polanski or Lynch. Liked hearing "The Lark Ascending" (as incongruous as it was), and the receptionist, wow. Didn't get the ending at all, which I'll put down to inattentiveness rather than stupidity. In fairness, I haven't seen a single Bava or Argento film, though I still felt like I understood the atmospherics. But I'm sure someone well versed in the genre would get more out of this than me.

(xxpost) Me when they started up a short beforehand: "Jesus, I don't want to see a short." Quite liked it, though--something to think about--and then when the credits came up, it was "Hey!"

:D

thanks dude!

Thanks for reminding me that I missed my chance to see "Goodbye to Language" in Chicago, apparently. How does Herzog get a 3D documentary about a cave into theatres, and Wenders gets a 3D doc about a dance into theaters, but Godard's lauded latest barely sneaks in for a couple of weeks? And alas because this is meant for 3D, I have a sad feeling that means I will never get to see it.

I was quite taken with Duke of Burgundy.

The psych/soft folk soundtrack by Cat's Eye sounded good as well.

i missed this at ifc, sadface
josh, tbf, both herzog and wenders' films are narrative and about subjects people can easily grasp and are in focus

Hope I manage to see this next week.

I seen it. Very lovely and cosy, I wish I lived there. It is a lot like Morgiana minus the crime and identical twin stuff. At the beginning I thought the plot was going to be totally unimportant but it gradually becomes more interesting.
I think it's too long but I liked it a lot.