Director's cut versions (in a few cases, rather different than what ran) of blurbs for Pitchfork's lists of the best movie soundtracks and best film scores, from February 2019
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Performance (Jack Nitzsche, Mick Jagger, Merry Clayton, et
al)
In Donald Cammell’s
and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, Mick
Jagger serves as a cultural readymade, pre-loaded with associations as singer
in the Sixties’s most dangerous and Dionysian rock band. Fittingly, the soundtrack resembles a
parallel-world Rolling Stones album. Veteran
of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, producer Jack Nitzsche had also played keyboards
on four of the Stones peak-period LPs. Merry Clayton, the show-stealing elemental force on “Gimme
Shelter,” dominates here with her unique brand of psychedelic / psychotic gospel:
jousting with Bernie Krause’s sinister Moog whispers and buzzes on the title track and “Poor White Hound Dog”,
humming and moaning with hair-raising intensity on the climactic “Turner’s
Murder.” Randy Newman’s rasp and Ry Cooder’s slide fully align with the Stones sound
circa “Honky Tonk Woman.” Nitzsche’s own
compositions are somewhat slight but he did come up with a supremely late Sixties
decadence title in “Rolls Royce and Acid” . There’s also a terrific turn from
Jagger himself on “Memo From Turner”, where he fuses his own insolent
white-blues persona with the psyche of an East London gangster. Roeg would try
the pop star as readymade gambit once more with Bowie on The Man Who Fell To Earth, but while it vies with Performance for Greatest
Rock Movie Ever, the film’s OST pales next to its Jagger-infused predecessor.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Leonard Cohen)
Leonard Cohen is sometimes described as the invisible
narrator of Robert Altman’s radically reinvented Western. But given that his lyrics
are even more oblique than the storyline, Cohen doesn’t emotionally elucidate
the action so much as glaze it with a layer of symbolism and parable, lending a
mythic gravity to the travails of these flawed and ornery characters. Only three Cohen songs appear: “The Stranger Song,” Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady”. All are from the first side of
his 1968 debut (a record Altman played so often that he replaced the worn-out
vinyl repeatedly). But they recur,
weaving in and out of the action, staining it with rich mood-tones of
tenderness, regret, gratitude, and unbridgeable apartness. They also work as aural
markers for the main characters. “The
Stranger Song”, first heard over the credits, is McCabe, the restless surge of its
tremolo acoustic chords suggesting a man doomed to drift, uncertain behind his
bravado, his existential foundations shaky. Although the title comes from an
Catholic organization of nuns, “Sisters of Mercy” is about a different kind of succor: it
accompanies the arrival of the prostitutes, with the psychedelic band
Kaleidoscope adding tinkly turn-of-century textures in the expanded movie
version of the song. “Winter Lady” is Mrs. Miller’s theme but also the
heartsick voice of McCabe’s thwarted longing for her. Although lines like “I’m just a station on your
way / I know I’m not your lover” speaks what the characters cannot articulate,
Cohen’s songs work not so much as commenting text as complementary texture. His
music sounds just like the misty-memory
look that cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond achieved by “flash”-treating the film
negative. Cohen becomes an inseparable formal element of the film, as unexpected and thrillingly innovatory as
Altman’s overlapping dialogue and low-key naturalistic direction.
Solaris (Eduard Artemiev)
Not so much a masterwork as a mysterywork, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1971
movie is far less explicit as a narrative than its source, the brilliant sci-fi
novel by Stanislav Lem. Solaris is a remote planet that human explorers
have circled for centuries, hoping in vain to make contact with the evidently
sentient but inscrutable ocean that covers its entire surface. Suddenly,
persons from the deep recesses of each astronaut’s memory materialize, flesh-and-blood
ghosts that the crew call “guests” and that appear to be the planet’s attempts
to communicate. The story behind the
score is almost as fantastical as this scenario. Entrusted not just with
scoring the movie but creating “an overall conceptual idea for all the sound
used,” Eduard Artemiev turned to a Soviet synthesizer called the ANS that
generated sound by a unique photo-electronic method. Composers “draw” sound-waves which are turned
into audio vibrations via a sophisticated system of rotating glass discs and
light-beams. The ANS supplied a panoply of microtonal intervals and dense polyphonic
chords unachievable on other synths at that time. This palette of subtle shades and shimmering
drones enabled Artemiev to depict the unsettled atmosphere on the space
station, where the guests are driving their hosts out of their wits. But
the queasy sound-vapors suggest also thought-waves
from Solaris itself penetrating the minds of the astronauts, blindly striving
to understand consciousness unfathomably different from its own vast self.
Walkabout (John Barry)
In Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film, two British children stranded in the outback are rescued and guided back to “civilization” by an indigenous Australian boy. Scare quotes around the C-word, for Walkabout is a rhapsodic elegy for Nature and our lost innocence. Because there’s only sporadic dialogue (Roeg described the script as “a fourteen-page prose poem”) and the 6-year-old brother and his teenage sister have been brought up in typically post-imperial stiff-upper-lip fashion, nearly all the emotional eloquence in the movie is supplied by the score. Waltjinju Bandilil’s eerie didgeridoo and Stockhausen’s disorienting tape-piece Hymnen conjure the unknowable majesty of the arid landscape and its scorching extremes of weather. But it’s veteran film composer John Barry who establishes the prevailing mood with his piercingly poignant orchestrations. A stirring choral theme redolent of a school song, “The Children” evokes the simple-hearted hope and accepting obedience with which kids face the world. The horn fanfares of “The Journey” conjure a storybook adventure air, mirroring the way that the youngest child in particular processes their predicament. Above all, there’s the recurring main theme, a patient pulse of plinky harpsichord over which wistful woodwinds pipe and tender violins soar and swoop, like a kite whose strings are tugging at your heart not your hands.
Blade Runner (Vangelis)
It’s shocking to consider that Blade Runner – one of the 20th Century’s greatest works
of popular art – did not even get nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award
(or any of the other major Oscars).
Equally bewildering is the fact that Vangelis won Best Original Score
for 1981’s conventionally pretty Chariots
of Fire, but wasn’t even honorably mentioned for his far richer
contributions to Blade Runner. It’s
impossible to imagine this film without its music, so intertwined are the
sounds and the visuals. Vangelis composed the score live, improvising as
video-taped scenes from the film unfurled on a screen in his London recording
studio. “Nothing was pre-composed, everything was composed with the images,” he
told me in 2007, adding that “the reason I wrote the score is that I was very impressed with this film”. A sense of awe does tremble through each
glistening trail of notes and gauzy swathe of texture coaxed by Vangelis out of
his beloved Yamaha CS-80 synthesiser. But perhaps also detectable is the
subliminal spur of the true creator’s rivalrous instinct: a drive to match the
majesty reeling before his eyes, maybe even surpass it.
Before Blade Runner,
electronic soundtracks for science fiction movies (think Forbidden Planet, The
Andromeda Strain, THX 1138) sonically pictured the future as cold,
sterile, emotionless, as hostile to humanity as Saturn’s liquid hydrogen
surface and diamond rainstorms. Vangelis
broke with these accumulated clichés, draping Blade Runner’s scenery with droopy pitch-bent synth-tones of
unexpected warmth and wetness. Although
the movie takes place in a 21st Century LA teeming with flying cars
and huge animated billboards advertising a fresh start in the off-world
colonies, the musical tenor is as much about aching nostalgia as disorienting
futurity. And that’s just right for a film that, for all its stunning special
effects and storyline about androids gone AWOL,
is rooted in 1940s film noir and the character typology of hard-boiled
detective fiction: Deckard as the tough-exterior but easily-melted cop, Rachel
equal parts vamp and broken-winged angel. Older styles subsist within the
Eighties electronic palette, from jazz and blues to the crooned 1920s pastiche
“One More Kiss, Dear.” There are also
pungent aromas of ersatz exoticism, like the keening quasi-Arabic wails that
transfix “Tales of the Future” and the vaguely Asian calvacade rhythm of
“Animoid Row”. We don’t know quite where
or when we are with Vangelis’s score,
which mingles ancient and modern, East and West, in a fashion that again
perfectly fits the future LA imagined by director Ridley Scott and his genius
technicians - a Pacific Rim hybrid of Shanghai and Santiago.
From the colossal thudding pillars of percussion that open
the film, through the misty-mystic maiden of “Rachel’s Song”, to the climactic
twinkles of “Tears In Rain”, everything is drenched
in reverb – an effect as contrivedly atmospheric and infallibly seductive as
Scott’s over-reliance on shadow and drizzle.
Vangelis’s ever-present echo conspires with the cinematography to create
a sense of immense expanse – space that isn’t empty but as filled with feeling
as it is with droplets of moisture. Blade
Runner is a movie that you see-hear – an audiovision for the ages.
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