We’re so used to this kind of aural experience of cinema… Its hard to imagine a time when music in film was like the sound we heard in Rose Hobart: repetitive, looping sound disconnected from the visuals. And yet, there was a time when the technology to link sound and visuals hadn’t yet been developed – Rose Hobart looks back to this earlier period with its soundtracking. (The problem that filmmakers had in initially trying to link the two was quite a lovely conundrum in applied physics: while moving images can be stretched and compressed, sound exists in time and cannot be resized without changing its quality. See James Monaco’s ‘How To Read a Film’ 2000: 124-5). In this blog, I just want to have a look at how soundtrack has been manipulated to great effect in two very different films – King Kong and Rose Hobart.
King Kong makes the most of the audio technology available at the time. Although not the first film to showcase a soundtrack that moved with the film’s action, Max Steiner’s score certainly made an impact as a groundbreaker in this technology. In King Kong, the cinematic experience is enhanced by music which swells and falls in line with the film’s action. Sharp, angular orchestration is attached to battle scenes, while Ann Darrow has her own pretty musical motif – “Stolen Love”. King Kong‘s soundtrack confused critics on its release – it was referred to as part as the sound effects (rather than as a musical score) and described as comical and out of place: “How can there be a symphony orchestra in the heart of Africa? There should only be tom-toms”. (from http://www.scorereviews.com/reviews/review.aspx?id=450). However King Kong’s influence on the film industry cannot be denied, and its ‘comical’ attempt to match the music of an orchestra to a jungle setting paved the way for modern soundtracking standards.
It would have been an amazing experience, entering a cinema and for the first time experiencing a really multidimensional film, where the soundtrack itself prompts an emotional response, rather than being just background noise. The soundtrack in King Kong adds another layer to the experience and encourages that fantastic sense of escapism that the cinema experience is really all about. And, in the height of the Depression, escapism would have been a welcome occurrence.
In stark contrast to King Kong’s orchestration, the soundtrack of Rose Hobart comes across as an oddity to a 21st century audience. It’s interesting that Rose Hobart too was made in a period when the technology WAS available to link imagery to music, but has been purposefully stripped of East of Borneo’s original soundtrack. The powerful directorial choice to disconnect the soundtrack from the visuals is as effective in creating atmosphere as the very different King Kong soundtrack. The looping music serves to highlight the sense we get from the visuals that Hobart is held in a kind of bubble, shuffling backwards and forwards within the frame of the camera’s vision, looking out of the visible scene and, from a different angle looking back in upon herself.
Which makes me wonder, what would film buffs in the period have thought of Rose Hobart’s soundtrack? Would the experience have been as strange and dislocating for them as it was for me? Or would it have been a familiar echo from a not so distant filmic past?
2 comments:
I definitely think viewers of Rose Hobart back in the 30s would have felt the same we did. As you said, they were already getting used to decent music with film- and this was a complete throwaway to that idea. Well maybe "the same" is a bit of an exaggeration, but at the very least, they would have found it random and/or sloppy: which was no doubt the intention.
Yes, I agree! I thought the music for Rose Hobart was terrible! Instead of adding to the experience it took something away from it...On the otherhand it definitely contributed to the feeling of the surreal when watching it!
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