Music From Films

Reading about Tony Scott's unfortunate suicide got me thinking. He's directed a bunch of films I like and what is both one of my favourite films ever and one that I've analysed a whole bunch for my film studies exams; True Romance. No doubt my strength when it came to film studies was sound, I preferred analysing non-diagetic (fancy film speak for dubbed over) soundtracks because thanks to these posts I was good at deconstructing tracks and applying meaning to them. I'm hoping to do a little of that now, with some of my favourite soundtrack uses and then I'm gonna follow that with a post with some that I just can't help creating imaginary scenes for in my head.

Click for big (1327px X 799px)

One of my favourite moments I found when I was searching for examples to assist in our final project was this little bit from Lost In Translation. It plays out pretty much how I'd expected from the sound, and captures that sense of bittersweet, longing melancholy perfectly. The shots in it are pretty great too, especially the transition to the neon soaked streets towards the end. Stellar stuff.



Similarly, I think Tommy B's soundtrack for Irreversible is absolutely perfect, his blend of his solo house work with the more ambient and atmosphere driven soundtrack pieces is spectacular, especially when it's combined like on Paris By Night. I referred to Irreversible a lot when building reference material, most of them refer to the conflicting nature of the soundtrack as heard when the house and ambient combine, and this track is no exception. That intro is just brilliant, swooping synths punctuated by a lone kick, until around 1:50 or so when it just effortlessly slides into a fully fledged house beat.




Bringing it back around to Daft Punk once again, their selected soundtrack for Electroma had some real gems on it, the most famous of which being Sébastien Tellier's Universe played over the bathroom scene. Now that scene is very powerful, and the song is great to boot, but Instead I'm going to put up another of my favourites from the soundtrack, a piece from the granddaddy of ambient, Brian Eno. I can see why they chose this for the soundtrack, the sound is menacing and that guitar is wonderfully haunting.



I have a thing for early 90's techno, I feel a lot of it is ripe for soundtracking and in my searches I came across the 1995 flick Hackers. And they seemed to have had the same idea. The film itself may not be all that great but that opening sequence is really something. And not just because of the tacky CGI title reveal either. Not just that but the OST is filled with prime tracks including Massive Attack's sublime Protection. The ethereal feel of the tune is great, but for me the defining moment is around 0:34 in that video, where the introduction of the beat is synced up with a cut to a shot of the cityscape.



And that brings this first part to a close, next time I'll be covering tracks that I can't help but picture on OSTs. It won't be as comprehensive as this because I won't have videos to link to and whatnot, but it should be a good one. And maybe I'll chuck in a couple pieces I chose for the actual film project I did earlier this year too!

You're So Cool,
-Claude Van Foxbat