Soundtrack, The - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2010

L'eclisse is one of Michelangelo Antonioni's most important works, but it is also representative of this remarkable epoch in the history of cinema and the world. In a sense, the three films known as the Trilogy (this one and the two preceding it) are miraculously in tune with their times, and especially the cinema of their times. They have a common subject or horizon, which is the end of the world an end of the world perceived as abstract and atomic. The sound in L'eclisse, even when it is predictable and normal and from a clearly visible cause, overflows the reassuring and known image of its source and materializes the invisible.

Michelangelo Antonioni is usually extolled as a director essentially concerned with the visual image. However, Antonioni was as interested in the aural as he was in the visual aspect of his films, and this article addresses this neglected area of discussion by considering what we may call Antonioni's acoustic turn of the early 1960s. With L'avventura (1960), in fact, the soundtrack of Antonioni's films changes quite radically, as extra-diegetic music is drastically decreased and his films become ostensibly more silent. La notte (1961) deserves particular attention in this respect. This film articulates a manifesto of the director's evolving thoughts on sound and silence, while, at the same time, helping to reveal how contemporaneous innovations in the field of sound recording above all, the introduction of magnetic tape and experimentations in the field of music, particularly those of the musique concrte movement and John Cage, contributed to the shaping of such thoughts.

Although Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 film Blackmail was released in both sound and silent versions, it is the sound version that is most familiar to modern audiences. Composer Neil Brand was commissioned to provide a score for the silent version and in this essay he reflects on the problems and the pleasures of creating a score that can reach modern audiences and enhance the intensity and the ambiguity of Hitchcock's masterpiece.

In this interview with the Oscar-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch, composer, academic and critic Gustavo Costantini explores Murch's ways of working with sound and image and some of his conceptual theories on film-making.

Made on a tiny budget of 24,000, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's 1975 film Winstanley is a unique achievement in British cinema. Richard Combs considers Kevin Brownlow's frank account of the making of the film, Winstanley, Warts and All, and looks back on Winstanley itself, finding in it both a beautiful reassertion of the purity of silent cinema and a radicalization of film form.

Since its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has entered the consciousness of our culture as have few other films. Its striking imagery, combined with its universally recognized score, has prompted a wealth of scholarly output. New understanding in the areas of emotion and cognition now affords us the opportunity to re-examine this film from a less familiar vantage point. This article places Psycho within the context of American television drama of the 1950s and explores the effect of Bernard Herrmann's music on the emotional responses of the viewer, as well as the possible consequences of this effect on the literal reading of the film.

Making Visual Music Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema, Robert Robertson (2009) London: I B Tauris/Tauris Academic Studies ISBN 978-1-84511-839-6, Hardback, 54.50

Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, Jamie Sexton (Ed.) (2007) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp., ISBN: 9780748625345, Hardback, 55